A Geek History of Time - Episode 346 - Vampires, Opiods, Werewolves, Meth, Ghosts, and Depression Part I

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

you know the thing is you have you have reached farther for less good to be blunt the money in tabletop games isn't great we have to wind up with the church of England because obvi I'll start I mean you're you're here to be the expert but um that doesn't stop that one oddly doesn't make me angry because you know who's the boss you know what I'm going to keep my head down and be as inoffensive as I can to everybody possible. And that's it. You want to fight? I'm going to dry hump your leg until we're friends.

Of course, reminded me of that one woman that I went on a single date with who said, you know, the downside about my job is that we don't show kids drowning anymore. I don't know. This is a geek history of time Where we connect nerdery to the real world. My name is Ed Blaylock. I'm a world history teacher at the middle school level here in Northern California. And recently, because of stuff that was going on with our family, we had to go without my wife's car for a day or two

and so she was driving my car and this meant that she got into my car and immediately needed to clean it out I drive my son to and from school in the morning and otherwise besides, besides, from that and me, you know, running errands and going to work in it, any other driving we do as a family is in my wife's car because she has sensitivity to motion sickness. And if she's the one driving, it alleviates that. Also, she admits she has control issues. So there's that too. So when I got my car

back. She had almost fully detailed the interior. She notified our son that if he leaves another lollipop stick in the backseat of my car, she will take away his lollipop privileges because my car, my car was a mess. Um, now it's, it's better now than it was five years ago. Um, I, I drove a convertible, uh, back then. And my trunk was not usable, um, because I had so much shit in it. But yeah, so she, she cleaned out the car because she just could not handle, uh, the, the mess that, that I had in it. And, uh, she even bought me a steering wheel cover because of the, gunk that that you know the stuff that builds up on your steering wheel yeah that flesh yeah that that icked her out and so she she bought me a steering wheel cover so and at first i really didn't like it but i've gotten used to it since she did it and like i kind of almost don't want to admit it to

her so yeah that's that's what's been going on with me how about you well i am damien harmony I'm a U.S. history and economics teacher up here in Northern California at the high school level. And sorry, I got so lost in your damn story and like biting back on my reactions to these things that I've darn near forgotten what I was going to tell you. okay but then it came back to me um i was sitting in a uh a training at work um i will say recently so that so much fun they are oh god you know not not at all waste my time but uh this was the one where like you train people on how to use an epi pen right okay yeah useful and helpful uh my buddy next to me um who has been on my pun show a few times who was on my pun show uh when we were on the shutdown.

Right. And you know the drill. You've been on it once yourself. If you come on, you have a nickname. You know, so Damien, I put the pun in your daddy harmony, you know, that kind of thing. Right, right. So, uh, whatever, you know, Ed, the Wolfsbane Blaylock, you know, whatever. So I asked him on that show, I said, hey, what do you want your nickname to be?

He's like, I'll just give me one. I'm like, okay. Yeah. So I introduced him as his name, the ostrich fucker, his last name. Allegedly. Allegedly. And so the person handed him the dummy EpiPen. She's like, I'm going to call on you.

So like I see that you've got it. So you're going to be my person. And he said, oh, okay, cool. And he handed it to me. And I absolutely took it. He's like, now you're the dummy. And I was like, oh, fuck, man. Why are you giving me this?

He's like, because you called me ostrich fucker. And I told you I'd get you back. and we laughed for like four minutes on that so so here's the question how long ago did you call him an ostrich fucker is during the lockdown so like 2020 2021 I don't know oh my god yeah oh that is that is that is that is cling on level revenge right there that is that is that is not that is fucking vulcan level that's true that's a good point that is that is deeply cold holy cow it was great if you called me an ostrich fucker

I told you to get even and and and the part that I want to know what I want to ask him is so okay when when the person leading the training held up the EpiPen was that when the idea occurred to you or was it after you had it or was it after you

you know pumped Damien by handing it to him and you had to come up with an answer right when right I mean, I had it coming either way. Yeah, and either way, absolutely. Wow, perfect. But, like, I want to know, I want to know the etymology of that. Like, how did that develop?

Sure, sure. All right. So tonight, I'll start with this. Can you name a city besides Los Angeles that is figured into the background fabric of most of the episodes of our podcast? City other than Los Angeles. That came up a lot But there's one that's come up more Well

Anytime we talk about Marvel Comics New York New York shows up A lot when talking about wrestling The other one that immediately comes to mind Is because they fucking threw batteries At Santa Claus Philadelphia Philly Yeah

Yeah I don't know And you're going to say it And I'm going to be absolutely gobsmacked that I didn't think of it because it's, you know, wallpaper. But yeah, it is going to be the wallpaper of many episodes. Like, it is not a heavily featured thing. Like, Philly was heavily featured, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a, it was its own character, you know. Stanford, Connecticut. Say it again. Stanford, Connecticut. Stanford, Connecticut. Stanford with an M. Stanford.

Yeah, I had to look this up because I thought it was fictional for Stanford. No, it's Stamford, yeah. Connecticut. Yeah. Stan Ford. Really? Yeah. Okay. So here I did the looking. Okay. It was in the speedball episodes. So episodes 176 to 179. Okay. It was in the John Cena and the Pope episodes, 166 to 169.

Okay. It was in our 90s wrestling episodes, 106 to 112. It was in the NWO episodes, episodes 58 to 60. Civil War episodes, 34 and 35, because that's where it fucking happened. Yeah, yeah. The Lost Cause episodes of 6 through 10. And I stopped, yeah, I stopped looking. there because it was probably in about half a dozen more.

But that's at least 25 episodes. Wow. It was the headquarters of the WWE. Like I said, in the background. Right, right. Okay. Okay. And tonight it's showing up again.

Stanford, Connecticut is the second most populated city in Connecticut right behind Bridgeport. Okay. Technically it counts as being part of the New York metropolitan area. Yeah. And it's also part of what's known. known as the Tri-State area. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. Really, it's only got about 135,000 people in it. It's a pretty low crime area, which is funny considering what we're going to be talking about here tonight. Okay. It's currently home to eight Fortune 500 companies among the major corporations that make their home in Stanford are Blue Triton Inc. Or Blue Triton Brands Inc. Formerly known as Nestle Water, North America. These are the ones who starved a whole bunch of babies by their efforts to make baby formula

of Monopolis. Yeah. Pitney Bowes. Okay. This is the Postage Meeters Company, among other things. Yeah. Conair. Okay.

Sorry, you said Conair, and I immediately thought of Nick Cage. And I think for a second, like, oh, yeah, right, right. Okay. Welcome to Conair. Yeah. United Rentals. Chartered communications. Okay.

And most importantly to this episode, Purdue Pharma. Oh. Okay. The private company owned by the Sackler family that made more than $35 billion in revenues from its development of Oxycontin as a painkiller narcotic. Right. Now more on that in a bit, but I want to just give you some context. I started writing this episode more than three years ago, and I had to stop.

Mm-hmm. I remember. Yeah. Yeah. So, and remember, I did an episode, I did like four or five episodes on the eugenics movement and didn't stop. I napped, but I didn't stop. Yeah. Like, so on July 17th, 2011, a new supernatural horror comedy drama hit the air. The sci-fi network, which had rebanded itself sci-fi, S-Y-F-Y, in July of 2009, it was undergoing

a few changes. Now, by this point, the sci-fi channel had come away from its original charter, and was showing all sorts of non-science fiction-related shows. That's why changing it to sci-fi, right? Including SmackDown and the WWE brand version of ECW, which was a much more tempered. There were no kayaks in this one. And nobody jumped off a balcony. No.

Nobody, I had to think. I had to think for a second, but yeah, all right. And there were all kinds of crime dramas and so on. Some of it was still sci-fi base, that's SCI-F-I, but a significant enough of it, a significant amount of it wasn't, which made the sci-fi, S-Y-F-Y, a worrisome harbinger to the die-hard fans of the sci-fi network. You have to remember, this was in the Halcyon Times before Shark Nato. Right. Okay. God.

Yeah. Yeah. Now, okay, so we're talking about this is in the series that you're about to talk about starts in when? 2011. 2011. Yes. Okay. So, this is post Dune miniseries. This is post.

Because there was a lot of stuff on the sci-fi channel that I watched. So I'm trying to remember what all. Oh, okay. Um, and, um, I'm forgetting, uh, Farscape was off the air by, I want to say, oh, seven. Okay. That sounds about right. So I'm looking it up right now just to be sure. Let's see.

The Hatfield and McCoy's mini series? Oh, yeah, no, 2000. Yeah, it was actually even, even earlier than that. Uh, Farscape, uh, dropped off the, off the station. 2003. Okay. And then the follow-up movie to tie up all the loose ends was like 0-4 or 05. Wow, that kind of was the thing, wasn't it?

Yeah. We saw that with Serenity. Yeah. Yeah, kind of around the same time period, yeah. I hadn't thought of that, but yes. So, yeah, by 2009, yeah, I know as a fan of, of, the channel and of a lot of the stuff that they had done, I was

concerned because they they had gone from doing some really original and really great stuff to you know, not. Right. And this is before damn it, I'm forgetting the series, but

more recently they've kind of gotten back into the, they've regained a certain amount of goodwill amongst fans with one of their actual science fiction series that I am completely blanking on and it's a really important one but anyway so anyway you're back to what you're talking about yeah so in in 2011 a new series debuted called being human and it attracted an audience that was comprised of 52% women 48% men okay now that turned some heads because sci-fi was clearly aiming itself

at mostly male audiences. It was trying to gobble up a little bit of that spike overrun. Now, there had been a British series of the same name and plot that was over on BBC 3 starting in 2009. And as often happens, American producers thought they could do similarly well to the British show if they kept cost low by filming in Canada, which they did and it was hugely successful. The show ran for four years, for four seasons, rather.

It got to finish and it was actually overall a really solid. show um now uh the premise i have to admit is utterly ridiculous it's a ghost a vampire and a werewolf all living together in an affordable rental house in boston setting up kind of a halfway house for themselves as monsters who are trying to hold on to their humanity yeah the most ridiculous part was how affordable it was uh that's the real fiction um being able to pay rent right in 2011 so this is yeah after the crash um now I'm solely going to talk about the American version because there was the British version

that was really good too and I genuinely mean it was really good. I watched it but to be perfectly honest I actually found this one to be a better show not just because of my weirdness about frame rates but first the cast was made up of three gorgeous people and that's just really fun

for me to watch. Right. Secondly though it's not about a ghost of vampire and a werewolf figuring out how to live together in a post twilight Pope Benedict kind of way it's that's what the British version was this was actually about drugs at the time that multiple drug issues were hitting the country in ways that we all felt but didn't have the public address of it yet the characters were written fine the directing the

cinematography were quite honestly often genius like the the most beautiful scene I have ever seen on television was the reunion of Bernard and Rose in Lost early in season two. Right. It's gorgeous. The very close second to that is the scene where Sally reaches out to Danny and just the way that the shot is set up. It is just, oh, it's gorgeous. Okay. So the acting was top notch, absolutely top notch.

Sam Whitwer of Battlestar Galactica and he was crashed down and he was also in the Walking Dead. He was a tank soldier in episode like one or two but also if you remember him from being the voice of Darth Maul, the voice of Palpatine and also being the

the Vader's apprentice in Jedi Unleashed Or the Force Unleashed Yeah, I was going to say I find it remarkable that you're listing all these other credits Before you mention that like he is a genuine Like important mover and shaker actor in Star Wars fandom Again, I saved the best for last Okay

Sam Huntington who Played Jimmy Olson in the Man of Steel Oh, okay And also was in the movie Sully. If you saw that, it's okay if you didn't. He was part of an uncle, a father, and a cousin. Like, there's a trio guys going on a golf trip. Okay.

And he was one of those guys. All right. And Megan Rath, who later would go on to do Hawaii 50 most famously. Right. And they were tremendous. And they had just this dynamite chemistry. there were other people who were also on the show quite a bit which I don't want to take away too much from them but this was the trio

this was the the tent stakes of it and they were just oh they're phenomenal and very beautiful all of them but like really good fucking actors too truly inhabited their roles I will say that the writing was a little tough at times not because the unbelievably of a series about a ghost of vampire and a werewolf but because the scenes were often and driven by people not listening to each other

and not letting each other finish a point and then reacting and retreating. It was like, honestly, it was like a really unhealthy version of a French farce, lots of doors slamming, people storming off, but like, none of the humor of it. So it would be like, you know, why would you drink that in front of me? You know that I don't like the, you know, the sight of whiskey.

And then you're like, but it was beer, and I'm already leaving. And it's like, and then we have to come back and address the fact that you drank whiskey in front of me and it's like what the fuck um right it became so ubiquitous that you could almost set your watch to it in multiple seasons um and just like you know like in in the uh drama tv shows pre answering machines or sitcom movies sitcoms missing a phone call was like 35 percent of the plot points right yeah yeah um this series leaned way too hard on the misunderstandings that occur when someone doesn't listen, assumes, and then acts on an assumption, and then needs to come back and make right what they didn't do correctly

the first time is sad Gothic farce at times. Okay. But at its core, being human, which lasted from 2011 to 2014, was actually about three really important things. And so being human, which originally was meant to be episode 181, being human is about depression heroin and meth oh okay specifically yes and I'm actually going to address them completely out of order the way I did it so it'll be heroin meth and then depression or no heroin slash opioids meth and then depression all right I'm here for it so we're going to start

with Aiden, okay? Sam Whitwer plays a vampire name Aden Waite. He straight up said that in a few different interviews at the outset of the series that his character was absolutely a cutout for sex edition and heroin addiction and that they blended the two. And he's not wrong. It is, as TV often does, a blend of addictions

that he embodies, but we're going to mostly focus on the heroin addiction. Okay. There was nothing I found in interviews by Megan Rath and Sam Huntington to discuss the things that their characters were like and nothing matched up, at least. They talked about how much fun they had playing the characters, how interesting the characters were. But they didn't seem to see them as, or they didn't advertise them as avatars of, you know, the things that I found it to be. Right. So I'm mostly going to be connecting dots through those things.

But in this one, yeah. So let's go to 2010. Mortimer Sackler died. Mortimer was the second of three brothers. He was the second of those brothers to die as his older brother Arthur had died in 1987. Mortimer had come on board with his brother Raymond and Arthur to become co-chairs of the pharmaceutical company

that their brother Arthur had financed. It was originally named the Purdue Frederick Company and would later become known as just Purdue Pharma based out of Stanford, Connecticut. Okay. Now, for a long time, for a very long while, it was a very small performing pharmaceutical company. No big deal. Now, all three of these brothers were doctors, by the way, until 1996, when they developed a new opioid called OxyContin.

And within five years, more than 80% of Purdue Pharma's income was derived from OxyContin. OxyContin was hailed as almost a miracle drug, and it was a long-lasting narcotic that helped with moderate to severe. pain. Okay. Now, of course, this is likely because it's kissing cousins with heroin, so it's, and it's also twice as powerful as morphine. Oh, wow. Yeah.

Now, this means that it's got, now, now, real quick, well, actually, I will explain in a second. So this means that it's got some of the same problems with it that opioids do, namely being highly addictive. Right. But Purdue, when it first started putting oxycontin out there, sought to combat, this well-founded hesitance in the medical community about opioids in the same way that we've come to expect and love from big companies. Marketing. I was almost going to say moichendizing,

but it is the merchandise. Yeah. Not marketing about how awesome oxycontin was. That would come in a bit, but first they had to soften people's beliefs about the addictive nature of opioids in general. So first, they funded research and paid physicians to make the case that all this concern about opioid addiction was really just overblown hype and then they started making the case that oxycontin was as safe as it gets broadly helping with way more maladies than morphine ever could so they had to overcome people's well-funded well-founded biases with uh you know against opioids with a well-funded campaign to just kind of again let's lower it let's take about 23% off the top there uh and then by the way

We have something that, you know, now that you know that it's been overblown, it's been a panic, now here you go. Right. Sales reps actually called it the drug you could, quote, start and stay with, end quote, which is exactly what addiction is. Uh, yeah. Hmm. Okay. So I'm going to briefly explain how opioids work. And this is the bare bones, Damien level understanding of it.

Yeah, because neither one of us is a science teacher, so, like, that's going to have to be. I should have run this by my science teacher, friend. Yeah, well, all right, so essentially opioids act on receptors in the brain that are important in regulating pain and emotion. Okay. We've done this as a species for centuries. That's what opium was. that's what a number of medicines derived from it was okay so you got the poppy you got the sap you boil it down

yeah you heat it up you smoke it etc right and I'm not saying that humanity did this safely or in a regulated way oh hell no in fact heroin got its name from an advertising agency bullshit yeah no it's heroin because you know she's a hero because your child will sleep now Oh shit Yeah I mean

I suppose it'd work But what the fuck man So and you know Women and men both drink laudanum Both smoke opium Right right yeah And eventually people People figured out how to refine

And extract the natural opioids Which are sometimes referred to as opiates Right or opiates and opiates, obviously opiates, but and develop things such as morphine. Right. Now, morphine is derived still from the opium poppy plant, but it's incidentally more measured out.

Now, that doesn't mean they figured out the measuring, of course, but in the early 1800s, in the early 1800s, there's an alkaloid chemist, which I didn't know that was a thing, and a physician named Frederick Sertuner. Sertrterner, he figured out how to extract the agent in opium into a liquid form. Okay. And then he immediately tested it out on himself, a couple rats, a dog, and a kid.

All of whom nearly died. And this is why modernly we have ethics panels. Yeah. And like, you know, strict regulations about these things. And I'm not saying that those are enacted in inappropriate ways all the time, but at least they're there. But still. Yeah. But did you die?

School of medicine. Yeah. So, and again, we come back to the line, all of your regulations are written in blood. Yes. but this shouldn't be surprising because it was the same thing with ether right and i'm not talking about the thing we thought air was the substance yeah i don't i know the actual like uh the actual substance ether yeah um like you know uh they held parties with that shit right wow um so this was 18 when the early 1800s

that he nearly committed infanticide with rat aside. Rat aside. Yeah, yeah. And suicide. And, yeah. Yeah. So the question is, I want to know what order did he do that in? Was it like he started with the rat and was like,

I hope he went up and body weight, basically. Yeah, like the rat pulled through. So we'll try it with a dog, right? I think he might have hit him all at the same time just to see like the kick-in effect and the lasting effect, you know? Anyway, they all nearly done Through this experiment in finger quotes He found that

This thing that he had just created Right essentially liquid opium Distilled Yeah, so morphine essentially Six times stronger than opium And he's like, cool There's opium attics all over the fucking place.

So this had to be the 18, yeah, 1830s. Yeah. Yeah. And he figured, okay, this is going to mean lower doses because it's more potent. Right. And therefore, less addiction. Which on a chalkboard makes sense. Yeah.

Even by that time did we not have an understood did people? not we did did medical I mean clearly they didn't but I feel like they should have by that time kind of understood that you know bigger dose does not mean more addictive no no honestly like knowing that addiction existed I'd say is a step in the right direction for him so yeah okay fair anyway he got to work selling it right away despite realizing he was himself addicted um so interestingly it was used morphine was used as a cure for opium addiction early on. So instead of being hooked on opium, you'd be hooked on morphine. Hey, you ever had a cold and like the doctor can't fix it so he tells you to get your hair really wet and go out in the snow? You're like, but then I get pneumonia. Yes, but I can cure that.

But I can fix that. Yeah. So that's treatable. Yeah. Yeah. So also it was used as a poison. um so that's dope that literally yeah um wow yeah now the following is a rumor i was not able to substantiate but i want to share it with you history is not proven it um they used it a lot during the american

civil war and the addition to morphine hit so many veterans about 400 000 of them that it was called the soldier's disease being addicted to morphine now this is rumor i couldn't change chase it down because the problem is is that the first time soldiers disease was actually mentioned that I could find was 1915 during World War I so okay so yeah yeah it may may not have actually been applied to right civil war soldiers but it was applied to soldiers in World War one or yeah or it was talking about like you remember that uncle of yours that had soldiers disease we're seeing it again it might have been like that but yeah that was not the first reference you know like so right and by the way murk was the first big company to make money off

of mass production of morphine oh all right yeah now in 1874 we're going to back up a little bit bayer got in on the action and found yes that bear and found a way to refine morphine yet again making the result in product about double the potency of morphine oh jesus that's heroin so bear made heroin in 1870s And if we're doing the math, you only need one-twelfth as much of the heroin as you would need of the opium. Right. Better for your lungs. By volume.

Yeah. Better for where you're hanging out. You could do this in your own house. Lovely. Okay. Yeah. Now, because addiction was such an issue, cocoa products and opium products were regulated on mass by the Harrison Narcotics and Tax Act of 1914.

Right. Now, this was as a reaction to the rise in addiction found after the Spanish-American and Philippine wars in America. Yeah. And, of course, this law couldn't come about without a bunch of racism. And so the cases were made that opium was so attractive to white women that they started living as common law wives with Chinese men and that cocaine was an active ingredient in almost every sexual assault imagined in the South, which was justifiable lynching. Okay. So, but I digress. I will point out that heroin got linked with jazz very early on as well, as did a pot.

It was called Reifer. And then when they're like, well, it's not scaring white kids off of it enough. We'll call it marijuana because then they don't want to be around Mexicans. Yeah. So our drug history is just, I mean, it's cut with the baby laxative of racism. Yeah. Yeah. Jazz cabbage.

Exactly. So I digress. Synthetic opioids differ from their natural cousins. It's probably why synthetic and natural are different words. Synthetics are things like methadone and fentanyl, and they're entirely lab produced and based. Now, there's another type called semi-synthetic opioids. These do include heroin since it was initially synthesized from heroin and many prescription pain or from, from, Morphine.

The poppy. Yeah, from morphine. So morphine is natural. Heroin is considered semi-synthetic. Okay. So you go from opium to morphine, morphine to heroin. Okay. Now, heroin is semi-synthetic because it was originally synthesized from morphine.

And many prescription pain medications such as oxycodone, which ends up being the active ingredient, oxycontin, and hydrocodone. Those are synthesized from the naturally occurring opium products, such as morphine and codeine. Right. The good shit that you get when you go to the dentist. Right. The, I do not want to be awake for the next 10 hours, please. Right. Yeah.

Now, the problem with opioids is that they cross what's known as the blood brain barrier very effectively. And I watched all the seasons of house in the last year. So I know all about the blood brain barrier. That showed up in, like, as many episodes of. House as Stanford, Connecticut has shown up in our episodes. Right. So anyway, but they cross it very effectively, leading to addiction. And also, they have the added charm of reducing respiration, which can lead to suffocation.

Right. Anyhow, millions of patients found success with this new wonder drug. Okay. But also, many got so addicted to it. This new wonder drug being OxyContin. But also, many got so addicted to it that the withdrawal was debilitating. Now, from 1999 to 2010, prescription opioid sales in the United States quadrupled. And that's due largely to OxyContin.

Yeah. And at the same time, opioid misuse and overdose deaths also doubled. This is referred to as the first wave, which is directly what precisely precedes my favorite haughty vampire ghost werewolf drama. Right. Now, interestingly, I did, I'm on so many lists now, I'm sure. Around 2010, heroin retail prices, which is dealers on the street, were dropping at the same time. Now, what could account for such a drop? A basic 12th grade economics, which I teach, would tell you that a drop in price is an attempt to move either a surplus of stock or to recapture some of your customer.

who left for less expensive products elsewhere. Okay. Like prescriptions. Ah, okay. So heroin use goes down, oxycontin use goes up. These are essentially when butter use goes down, margarine use goes up. Right. Right.

One way to be able to lower those prices is to move your manufacturer to a country with lower labor costs. And in 2010, the shift from South American production to Mexican production did just that and shorten the supply chain for said heroin. So we were getting heroin from South America to lower the cost, one of those being transport, right? Yeah. But also being like, you know, who could you exploit? Let's move it up to Mexico. So from 2010 to 2016, so the entire time that being human was made and then some on either end, heroin and heroin in. involved deaths quintupled, and this would be considered the second wave of the opioid crisis.

Wow. Okay. I can't only talk about oxy. I have to talk about heroin, too, because they are kissing cousins. Yeah, they're interlinked. Yes. I mean, they're genuinely, like, you, you, yeah, they have basically the same grandpa. Yeah, well, yeah.

They have, they have the same grandpa, and like, on a chemical level, they're very similar. just one's stronger than the other like yeah you know so these two things are occurring at either end of the show like I said but back to the first wave because I want to really get into that now because the comparative costs of maintaining a prescription in a country that doesn't guarantee the basic right of health care a person desperately addicted to opioids brought in or bought try this again the kind of people who are getting prescribed oxycontin right are people who are dealing with chronic pain they've been injured on the job etc etc these are typically jobs that involve like hard manual labor machining all kinds of things right you don't see that much in the way of pain management needed by the C suite at like you know the corporation that runs Denny's right you might amongst the bus boys but they don't have prescriptions, so they're S-O-L. So we're talking about the managers at the Denny's.

We're talking about the people who are working and have health care. They're the ones who can maintain a prescription. Right. But because we live in a place where not everybody can maintain a prescription, a person who starts with their initial prescription, but then loses their job because of their addiction, may well then have to take. turn to the cheaper alternative, which then is heroin.

Right. Okay. So you see a lot of lateral shifting here. Yeah. Now, as such, by the time of a New York Times feature on the opioid crisis that I got a lot of information on Sackler family for, by that time, which I think was like 2017, 2015, by the time of that feature on the opioid crisis, four out of five people who use heroin had started with prescription painkillers. Jesus. So I'm just going to point out that if we had universal health care, you wouldn't have people running around getting addicted to heroin. Right.

They'd be addicted to their prescriptions, which I'm not going to say is, you know, leagues better. But it's less socially destructive. Yeah. Yeah. And it's casualable. Yeah, it's measurable. It's you could get somebody to ratchet down. You could keep them within the system.

Yeah. Now, Purdue Pharma specifically set this up, and allegedly, I'm going to say allegedly ahead of a lot of this. As soon as all, even though I got this straight from like the newspapers, as soon as Purdue had OxyContin ready to go, they really push doctors to prescribe OxyContin and to destigmatize the connection between opioids and addiction. Right. Okay, marketing, like you had said. Okay. Now, Andrew Kalladne, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative at Brandeis University, said, quote, if you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, it's in 1996 that prescribing really takes off.

It's not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks. End quote. So don't come for me, come for him. Right, the guy at Brandeis. Go after. Yeah. Yeah.

Right. And one of the main facets of this campaign was the brother Sackler putting ads in medical journals appealing directly to the doctors. If they could get the doctors on board, well, patients listen to their doctors. And patients in pain listen a lot to their doctors. I mean, honestly, how different, well, okay, I know how different this is because we're talking about opioid addiction compared to curriculum stupidity, stupid. But you don't convince the teachers that we need to switch the book and that we need to run this curriculum. You convince the people above the principles, and then the principles will be having to deliver it. And then everybody assumes that we simply must be technicians who deliver the proficiencies based on this new book.

Yeah. You sidestep all of the people who became teachers because they wanted to raise thinkers. and, you know, you just bully them and group thought them into it. Now everybody's like, well, I guess this is what we have to do. So you do the same thing here when it comes to opioid addiction. Oh, it's not really that serious, Dr. Jeff. I mean, how many have you really seen? Exactly.

And the ones that you have seen, it's been obnoxious use and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, I mean, you know, now that you know that it's not that serious and these, you know, this is just, you know, pain management through, you know, the use of, you know, after the surgery and once they're done with it then they can be off of it and since it's not that addictive and we keep them out of pain and blah-bo-do don't you want them to not feel that etc right yeah yeah yeah yeah wow yeah but uh you know yeah we're not even that far into all of this no and i don't like that tall that scares me yeah um but we're not even that far into this and I'm already having to say, you know, the teaching of the Catholic Church is that we cannot know who's in hell or who's going to hell.

We don't know that. We believe as Catholics that we know for certain some people are in heaven and those are people we call saints. but um you know uh i'm i i i am going to be a little bit of a heretic here and i'm going to say i'm pretty sure i can think of a couple of people who are who are in the bad place or are headed there sure sure uh because that's evil may their damnation may their damnation be a blessing for you I got nothing Here's rich people who have avoided All of the consequences of their actions

And they'll die comfortable Fucking man Bastards Yeah Yeah Um Yeah I have to say

I genuinely hope What I what I hope for For everybody who is that way Who has Who has gotten where they've gotten by you know uh causing misery for other people what i envision part of hell being is having a moment in the presence of the divine in which you actually experience empathy for literally every single person you hurt oh kind of like at the end of the crow kind of i have something i don't need

in anymore. He shoves his eyes into top dollar's eyes or his thumbs into top dollar's eyes and he yeah, all the pain that he'd caused everybody, but all at once. Yeah. Yeah. Ghost Rider does this to people too. Yeah, the pen and stare. Yeah. Yeah, which oddly enough winds up being wharf affected so much by supervillains who were like, oh yeah, no, I know I did all that. I don't care. It doesn't really work with psychopaths. Yeah, you know, unfortunately, yeah. So it won't work on the C-suite. Okay. Well, but the thing is, yeah, I, I, being a believer, I like to think that in the presence of, you know, God, that that the, the conditions of our physical, you know, brain chemistry that make one a sociopath would be eliminated and thus nobody's immune. That's, that's the comforting thing I like, I like to believe. And in this case, I really, really, really hope for something like that, for these people.

Because, gee, me. Yeah. That sounds lovely. I would like that a great deal. Yeah. So, yeah, and I know we're just getting warmed up, but I'm already there. Oh, yeah. We're only at the top of page 4 of 42.

Fuck me. Okay. Mm-hmm. Get some beer. All right. So the Already drinking it I'm going to need more

The brothers Sackler learned from their oldest brother, Arthur, who They learned basically to To get doctors on board Because then the doctors will be your pushers, right? Right Arthur Sackler when he was in high school convinced Chesterfield

The Cigarette Company To buy an ad in their school paper In a high school paper okay now like contextually what year is this in the 1940s 40s yeah i mean i mean Reagan was like you know i buy chesterfields for all my friends for christmas yeah yeah um so okay i mean that's awful yes it was the 40s and also yes should we be surprised it's still i'm sorry outraged i'm not I'm not saying, a print advertisement of a cigarette company in a high school newspaper. Now the best part, here's the best part, he got a commission for this.

He got a kickback? Yes, as a high schooler. So wait, he got them to put the ad in his paper. Yeah. And what, based on the sales of the school, he got a commission? Well, based on the fact that Chesterfield knew that they put their ad in front of the eyes of all the high schoolers. They're like, that's money well spent. Let's get this kid a commission.

Like, because he just opened up a whole new market to them. Yeah. He, he was, so what you're saying is, what you're saying is, if, if his circumstances had been different, he would have wound up being an illegal drug pusher. Yes. But instead, he figured out from a young age, to be a legal drug pusher.

Yeah. Use the rules of capitalism to your advantage. Fuck that guy. Mm-hmm. Now, in the 1950s, Arthur Sackler advertised the shit out of an antibiotic by using a whole bunch of doctors' business cards,

claiming that they all preferred Sigma Miacin. Now, an investigative reporter in 1959 called some of the doctors on those business cards. As it turns out, those were fake names. so this is an ad that was in a medical journal in the 1960s Arthur called some of the doctors on or I'm sorry Arthur Sackler promoted Librium and Valium in medical journals he's advertising drugs he realizes that that's where the money is

who wants to see patients when you can make money putting the drugs now now you could make an argument here that he's doing a good thing he's making money putting drugs into the hands of doctors that will help people with pain management when back then it was rubbed some dirt on it and walk it off yeah i mean you know there is there's something there yeah there is there is something there but he's falling over backwards into that that virtuous part of the entire yeah uh equation yeah and and that's he he didn't give a shit that was not he no no he actually my favorite was where he published an ad in the journal

of psychosomatics encouraging doctors to prescribe Valium to people with no psychiatric symptoms at all. Here's a quote. For this kind of patient with no demonstrable pathology, consider the usefulness of Valium.

They don't have a diagnosis of any kind. So just, you know, give them essentially a downer that's what I'm looking for yeah give them a downer um I'm trying to remember the the barbiturate I don't know my drugs well enough to know if Valium is a barbiturate or not yeah but yeah it's a downer either way it's it's related to benzodiazepines that's what I was thinking of yeah they got no they got no symptoms give him a Benzo yeah the fuck now this was at a time where there were no studies to determine the addictive

nature of volume. So, yeah, well, no harm, no foul. By 1973, by 1973, more than a hundred million tranquilizer prescriptions were written by doctors. And Ted Kennedy, of all people, called it out as a, quote, nightmare of dependence and addiction. Member of the Kennedy family. Yeah.

I mean, who was no better, but. Yeah, I mean. I mean, well, one, and two, like, his older brother, you know, JFK famously was, I think Valium was part of the cocktail of stuff. I mean, he was suffering from massive back injury and Addison's. Yeah. So there is a layer of like, okay, you, you know, just like Andre the Giant was suffering from massive injuries and, you know, agro-gigantism. I can't remember how to pronounce agro-lomenalemental. or something like that.

That sounds like the magic art of making things big. But either way. Yeah. You know, Andre the Giant would famously drink giant pitchers filled with like spirits and wine mixed together so he could get through the day. Yeah, because the pain was just that bad. And he was just that big that like, you know, a bottle of wine wasn't going to cut it. No, no, no.

Like, fully 100% understand. But like, you know, the point kind of. still stands in in terms of you know absolutely thing about it if ever there was a family that knew about addiction gee many Christmas so wow yeah so I'm sorry I'm still getting over the you know for somebody who doesn't have a defined pathology just you know have you tried Valium yeah have you tried have you tried Valium so you mean to say they're if they're not showing any any signs of any real medical problem yeah give him a shot of

Odenham. Yeah. What? Yeah. That's not helping anything. Like, it's literally not helping anything. Like, there's nothing there that needs to be helped. I mean, there's a lot of talk about the ethics of prescribing placebos to people, but we know that placebo's actually also work sometimes. Yeah. And, like, you can make the case of, like, I didn't harm them. They don't have a pathology. I gave them a placebo like there's no harm there yeah i gave them i gave them a tool to get over what they were worried about you remember during the the shutdown when we had actual vaccinations and people were deciding to take ivermectin instead i floated the idea of making fake ivermectin to give to people right because that would actually do them less harm yeah i remember you know and like

there were some ethical issues there too but like you know i was like well Bentham would say, but you know, let's let's not get started talking about. Sure. No, totally fair. That's a dangerous path. Take his head right off. But like here this isn't even as good as my

hambrained idea. Right. No, it's not. It's like this will do harm. It is significantly worse. Yeah. Mine was tricking people into not hurting themselves. Yeah. Like, yeah.

Like, speaking as somebody who in the past has, for a short period of time, utilized, you know, a benzodiazepine or relative of Valium. Like, there are times when, like, you, there is an issue that you need help with. But I remember being afraid of getting addicted. Sure. and the damage that those drugs can cause. Valium, not quite so much as some of its cousins, but still, you know, long-term use can lead to, you know, Dane Bramage. So, yeah, let's just give him a Valium. Like, fuck you, man.

Now, Arthur also testified before a Kiefavre subcommittee. Yes, another Kifavir subcommittee. Of course. And he danced circles around them. Although I'm going to give points to Kifavar here who saw the Sackler brothers Purdue Pharma the same way that he saw the mafia. He said, quote, the Sackler Empire is a, and this is well before OxyCon, okay? So it's a small-ass thing, but he's saying, the Sackler Empire is a completely integrated operation in that it can devise a new drug in its drug development enterprise, have the drug clinically tested, have the drug clinically tested, and secure favorable reports on the drug from various hospitals with which they have connections, conceived the advertising approach

and prepare the actual advertising copy with which to promote the drug have the clinical articles as well as the advertising copy published in their own medical journals and prepare the plant articles in the newspapers and the magazines yeah

called it at every step I don't know what the fuck he was doing with comic books but this one he nailed well you know sometimes having a conspiratorial of mind is actually not a bad thing. The fire that burnt your hand also cooked your food. I know.

Yeah, like, you know, when there's actually a conspiracy, like, having the ability to spot that is useful. Right. It's helpful. Yeah. You know, but wow. He, I mean, named every part of it. Now, after Arthur died in 87, so I'm going to fast forward again from the 60s to the 80s. Right. Mortimer and Raymond, his other two brothers, aimed at buying out his descendants. Arthur's descendants from Purdue Pharma.

Okay. Now, so it was owned by the three of them, right? And your shit goes to your heirs. Right. So one third of the company was owned by however many kids he had. His kids and the grandkids or whatever is his widow. So Arthur and Raymond put the squeeze on all of them and bought them all out. Okay.

Now this is 87. Right. They were already trying to develop. Oxycontin, but it was nine years from any kind of wide release. And they didn't know exactly how many years it would be, but they're like, we got to buy them out before this hits because otherwise. Okay, all right. Oxycontin was supposed to replace MS.

Conton, which was a time release capsule of morphine, that patent, which had made them a lot of money, and this is what they had to buy them out, that patent was about to expire. Oh, because of course it was. Mm-hmm. So they were like, look, this. patent's about to expire we're going to buy you out now while it's still active and you can get the most money for it and that's how they bought out right arthur's descendants okay so raymond sackler has a son named richard sackler and richard sackler also a doctor uh was focused

on oxycodone actually i don't know if he was a doctor but i think he was um now oxycodone had been used with percocet and percadan which is big basically a Tylenol and an aspirin oxycodone mix, respectively. So percocet has Tylenol, Percodan has aspirin. Right. So essentially, Percocet will fuck with your liver, and percadan will fuck with your blood and your heart. There's no ibuprofen version, so there's nothing to fuck with your stomach.

Yeah. But, okay, so Purdue. Inc. Yeah. Purdue's studies showed that they had to overcome the worry about addiction amongst doctors. they did advance research. Like imagine being wealthy enough to do that. By the early 1990s, Purdue had enough arguments that could be used to call into question the concerns over addictions because that's how it works.

You've seen thank you for smoking, right? No, I have not. Oh, okay. There's a wonderful conversation he has with his son because he's basically a big tobacco advertising. Right. Yeah, yeah. He has a discussion with his son about how he does what he does. and he points out, I don't have to prove to you that cigarettes are healthy.

I simply have to point out to you the other unhealthy things you do so as to diffuse the blame. Right. So they basically are doing that, right? They're like, addictions, come on. Like, there's a lot of things people can get addicted to, right? And so they have enough arguments from doctors of great reputation on the Purdue payroll. The Purdue doctors used the specter.

of chronic pain to act as the tip of the spear into this argument. Look, we know that addiction is a really, that's a very important thing. I'm glad that you're focused on that. You clearly love your, your patients. We just, you know, do you want them to live in chronic pain? Like, that is debilitating. That is life changing. Like, what if we could take that pain away and not be as addictive? And after all, like, when you're really weighing addiction versus chronic pain if you can like let's first off who knows how addicted they'll be second off if they are you can help manage it you're their doctor like that kind of shit right right right so the FDA approves it in 1996 um and uh they took the FDA took an interesting liberty by approving a package

insert for oxycontin which announced that the drug was safer than rival pain killers oh okay of its patented delayed absorption mechanism. Okay. So then they're off to the races. People absolutely did the mental gymnastics necessary to go along with it. And from the New York Times article that I found in 2017, that's when it was, quote, Oxycontin should be prescribed not merely for the kind of severe short-term pain associated with surgery or cancer, but also for less acute, longer-lasting pain, arthritis, back pain,

sports injuries fibromyalgia. The number of conditions that Oxycontin could treat seemed almost unlimited. According to internal documents, Purdue officials discovered that many doctors wrongly assumed that Oxycodone was less potent than morphine, a misconception that the company exploited. So, Keith Fover was right. Yeah, if anything, Kee Favre was right. did not quite express enough outrage. Yeah.

So they knew that doctors thought, yes, erroneously. Yes. That it was less potent than morphine. Than morphine. Even though it was more. Yeah, when in fact it is more powerful. And they didn't put any literature out.

They didn't explain. They put literature out specifically the insert they put in was to say that it was safer than others because it not only, so it uses the oxycodone, which they're going to let doctors fill in the blank there. Oh, well, that's less than morphine. And we have our time release formula. Right. And so therefore, oh, it's going to be less. And it's over a longer period of time. So there's no way to get addicted to because you're not going to get a spike in it.

and they let the doctors do that. But you remember, the FDA approved that insert, by the way. Yeah. It's one of those, if you're going to swing, you swing for the offenses, I guess. Now, Purdue wanted to target the general practitioners who weren't pain specialists as well. Right. Because that's the broader market. That's where you're going to get.

Exactly. A lot more sales. Yeah. And you're going to get a lot less resistance from experts, people who are like, like, no, fuck you, get out. Right. Right. So that's 2002.

And it's exactly as you said. It broadened it hugely. The training reps, they trained sales reps, sales reps, not doctors, not pharmacologists, sales reps. Yeah, well, yeah. To overcome the objections of the doctors by using like slippery word scripts and shutting down questions from doctors and using terms like believed to and virtually non-addicting when they were discussing oxycontin with doctors at all expense paid retreats to listen to the

presentations that they paid other doctors handsomely to give on the virtues of oxycontin right so okay um even even using a weasel word like virtually yes virtually not addictive no no virtually implies that there is there is closeness right like like like no that that that is not a thing that's even using weasel words you're lying out multiple orifices at once well when the person doing the lying is a 20 something haughty with like a go get them attitude that makes you want to say mommy like and and they would hire specifically reps that look like they belonged on Fox News right so they um it should tell us something about but like they would hire women like that to specifically relate to these guys as vanity and

what a smart question oh my god I bet you everybody in your office thinks you're brilliant and it just right hit them with the hard sale right and just on and on and on and there you go and then you do it in a place where they're isolated away from other people they see the praise being heaped on other people who are their peers they're all in name a really cool place where you hope to see people in bikinis later, et cetera, et cetera, right? Yeah, yeah. After all, if you're at a retreat paid for by these folks and there's tons of doctors who are your peers who sound like experts and there's swag bags, your walls will come down.

Right. I mean, this is why people offer you a timeshare, right? You go to the seminar, you know, and you could have this weekend because they're thinking, they've already gotten you thinking like, well, you know, they did such a nice. thing for me. So as a result of these pain management seminars, Oxycontin prescriptions in 1996 doubled other prescriptions. And there's this sort of empirical circularity going involved. Purdue Pharma convinced physicians that their drug was safe by using literature that was endorsed and produced by doctors that

they paid to do so. Right. Now think about the trickle-down impact of this. Doctors are told by their peers who come back from such events, that they don't need to worry about the addictive qualities because it's safe. And you've got a patient who's in pain and you want to be a help to them. That's why you're a doctor. Right. And so there you go. And then you add to all of this, the commission that doctors, who are now acting as sales managers for Purdue Pharma,

received for selling folks on this. And you could see how Purdue Pharma ended up paying $40 million in sales bonuses alone. in 2001 wow yeah gee many Christmas it's like damn

and that's just sales bonuses and this is 10 years before we get to the show so you know this episode probably won't touch on vampires but no it already has you got me to it good job nicely done No, I would be unsurprised to find out what's what's what's the brother's last name

Sackler the Sackler. I would be unsurprised to find out that you know you know people say it's it's odd but the Sacklers never go out in broad daylight right and you know we talked to their household staff and they have some really weird eating habits and you know I don't believe the people that say that, you know, in particularly dim rooms, their eyes shine red, but I'm just saying. Has anybody ever seen a dimmer switch? I mean, his name's Mortimer, for God's sake. For God's sake, yeah.

And then there's Raymond and Arthur. Yeah. So quietly, people in rural areas were finding ways around the time release aspects of the pills. Oh, dear. Yeah. Now, there's all kinds of interesting stuff, too, also having to do with how many milligrams per pill they would prescribe.

So normally they prescribe me, I'm going to give you 20. I'm making up numbers. I'm going to give you 20 and you're going to see that pain disappear and you're going to be able to get about your life and then you're going to be able to heal because you're moving, et cetera, et cetera. Right. And it just doesn't last. But you can only take it every 12 hours and it just doesn't last.

So you're, like, taking it every 11 hours, right? And then you're going to the dock and being like, look, I need more. I can't give you more, but I can give you stronger. Now, what's interesting is I found in a movie that talked about this. And it seemed to be a movie that was, like, based on what could have been a documentary. But they talked about how you get better bonuses if you sell higher dosage pills. Because it's still two every day, right? It's still two pills a day, but apparently, like, the margin on sales and the margin on profitability increased not just arithmetically when it came to, like, 20 milligrams versus 40, but, like, it was a logarithmic jump.

Yeah, a geometric thing. Yeah. So I didn't chase that down enough because, Jesus Christ, that's a lot of math and science that I never had the balls to stay awake through. so yeah but i'm assuming that that part was was likely accurate um so people are are finding ways around the time release now this means grinding them up and snorting them oh jesus like a president might do with adderall um or dissolving them in liquid and injecting them now here's why the label warned them against doing these exact things it's like when you see on social media like you know it the the problem you know whatever you do

don't cut the valves off of you know the tires yeah yeah yeah ice vehicles especially more than one because they only have one spare and that wouldn't be nice right yeah don't do that yeah well it's it's the same as a friend of the show, Sean and I always joke. I mean, I have for years about, do you remember the movie 1942 with John Belushi? I never actually saw it. Okay. So there's a bit where an anti-aircraft gun gets, gets emplaced in this one guy's backyard

overlooking, or it's actually an anti-ship gun, gets, gets mounted in this guy's backyard. And Dan Aykroyd plays the Army officer who's, you know, telling him, hey, this is Army property, da-da-da. And then he goes through the process of operating the gun, like making eye contact with Christopher Boyd, who's the homeowner the whole time. Don't do it this exact way. Yeah. Do not under any circumstances. Open the charging handle. Ketang. Do not insert the magazine of five rounds of 75 millimeter. Ketang. And if you've managed to do that, do not. crank it this you know yeah yeah no i totally get precisely yeah yeah and then and then later in the movie when when the japanese submarine you know surfaces and the old guy the old guy spots it

he runs out and he literally goes line for line do not do this thing he's walking his way through it yeah yeah and so this has that vibe it totally has that yeah well here's what the 100% has that hot. Here's what the actual label said. Quote, taking broken, chewed, or crushed Oxycontin tablets could lead to the rapid release and absorption of a potentially toxic dose. So don't do those things.

You want to get real high? Nobody wants that. You want to go to orbit, pal? Yeah. You want to escape the pain for a long time? For a long time. Yeah. So a black market grew very quietly in the rural.

areas of our country where medicare was the majority of people's health care and as the recession hit people lost their jobs and their health care and heroin was still too expensive so pain clinics gave out the drugs fairly freely and these became pill mills so people would overprescribe and then people would pay people who were addicts to go and get their prescription and they'd give them their two a day and then they would gather them all and then you start selling them on the street and there were a plenty and osteopaths could write prescriptions remember and so they did by the thousands doctors who cared more about moving the product than tending to their patients did this.

These were called whales by Purdue, by the way, which is the same term that casinos used to describe their favorite gamblers. Yeah, big spenders. Yes. Now, Purdue's response to all this? Oh, well, recreational drug users misuse of their drug ought not get in the way of people who have real pain. I cannot, I cannot adequately describe how.

much I hate these people already. These were a few bad actors. You don't let legitimate patient needs get harmed by that. We're really sorry, but there are some people out there who are just addicts and they have an addict mentality and we can't be responsible for the misuse. We told them how not to do it. Yes, yes, you did. You literally told them how not to like. So we're in the clear. It's like, okay, here in California, we have a label on our gasoline things from Prop 65 a few cycles back, and it says, hey, this could lead to birth defects and all kinds of shitty things for pregnant women and it could give you cancer and all that. Yeah.

So you can't sue us now. We warned you. Yes, but like literally our economy runs on gasoline. So. Yeah. And the deaths were mounting. And in 2013, midway through the show, synthetic opioid involved deaths began to skyrocket. And by the end of being human, opioid overdoses accounted.

for roughly 60% of all, all drug overdoses. Not just of downers, not just of opioids. No, all. All drug deaths. All drug overdoses. Wow. That's 30,000 out of 5,000, yeah, out of 50,000 overdoses in 2014, I want to say. Cheamy.

Fucking Christmas. Now, as early as 2001, doctors were reporting withdrawal symptoms in their patients that they prescribed Oxycontin to. Now, remember, this is 2001, right? So they're like, wait, this was a miracle drug. They're acting similarly to people under withdrawal. Like, what the hell? And Purdue said, oh, yeah, yeah, they're suffering from pseudo-addictions.

These are similar to addictions, but it's not the drug. It was the fact that their pain was finally being relieved, and then it would come back. So really the reaction is to unrelieved pain, and that acts like a pseudo-addiction. I am boggled by the sheer chutzpah. Yes. Oh, it's going to get better and worse. The result means that this pseudo-addictive behavior could actually be eliminated by doing what, prescribing higher. dosage.

And of course, with an increase of dosing, that means that there's going to be a linear increase of abuse. So, okay, wait. Yeah. Okay. So, so the, the individual in question, a patient is going through withdrawal. Yes. Which I assume means like, okay, you've gotten to the point where we're, you're,

tapering you off or we're discontinued, oh no. No, we're ramping it up. We're giving you a higher dosage. Well, I mean, that's what the advice was. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what the practice was. Under normal treatment. Oh, yeah, yeah. If you were dealing with an actually

addictive drug, yes, you would Oh, okay. You would taper them off or use something lateral like methadone for heroin. Like, how it really goes to show how

susceptible we all are even the very highly educated amongst us the very highly especially yes there's a lot of

sunken cost coming yeah yeah um to to this level of suggestion because coming at this

as an outsider the moment you said the word pseudo addiction I was like that's not a fucking thing right

like that's that up that's that's that is to use a technical term horse shit yeah that's like but but they managed to get doctors mm-hmm pain specialists even yeah yeah doctors okay all right and that's the thing is like you know you you do such good work and and you work so hard you've done this for 20 years wouldn't you like the last 10 years of your life to be a little easier and you could do more good for more people you've done such a good job of prescribing to your patients and and helping them don't you want to help more people and also like I drove here in that car why don't you come out to lunch with me and I'll you know talking and that yeah I know I yeah but like pseudo addiction pseudo addiction

and again once you're in for a penny you're in for a pound right like if you are if if you have sold your soul on some level uh to get to that then it's going to be real hard to walk back from it and even if you do there's 14 other guys who will walk forward from it yeah so it just yeah okay you know you know what they name you know what they call the guy who graduated last in his uh in his medical school a doctor Exactly. Like, so as, yeah, okay, yeah, we talked about that. The FDA then sent in 2001, sent Purdue a warning letter.

So this is 2001, sent Purdue a warning letter about its ads, not its addictive drugs, but about its ads, right? So just, hey, Purdue, never mind the addictive drug that you're using. Your ads, their problem, your ads, quote, grossly overstate the safety profile. file of Oxycontin by not referring in the body of the advertisement to serious potentially fatal risks. So, hey, there's a lot of people hurting from this, and we think that you need to change your advertisements. That's all.

So is this important? Yes. Is this also ineffective? Also, yes. Now, Connecticut filed a complaint against Purdue Pharma. Remember, they're based out of Stanford. So this makes sense. The complaint was that Purdue continued to overmarket the drug.

And now that fully 20% of the prescriptions were so that patients could dose more than every 12 hours. Say that again. Yeah. So Connecticut said you are overmarketing and we're suing you for that. And also fully 20% of the prescriptions that are written for OxyContin were so that patients could dose more than every 12 hours. So you're a doctor. I'm in chronic pain.

You've prescribed me oxycontin. I come to you and I say, look, I have to take it like every eight hours now. And you're like, okay, we're going to ramp it up. But you've got to take it every 12 hours, Damon. You can't take it any less than that. It has to work this way. There are people who get paid way more than me to figure these things out. You got to stick to the 12 hour.

a plan. I'll double your dosage, but you've got to stick to it. Okay, cool, absolutely. I come back after about a month and I'm like, look, Doc, it was working great in the beginning, but now, like, I, I need, I absolutely need more. Uh, and, you know, and eventually, you know, you, you're giving me 40 or maybe 60. I don't know how high up it would go, but like, right, but now I'm coming in on the 21st day instead of the 28th day. Yeah. And so on and so on. And then again, I could still also be going to the osteopath or to the shady dealer there and stuff like that. And if I'm still not getting enough, I might go out to the street and find a guy who's selling oxies.

Yeah. Right. I come back to you. I'm like, hey, my kid, I think my kid took them and I need them. And I'm going to put them in the gun safe. I promise this won't happen again. Right. So, now, the every 12 hours was central to their advertisements to doctors and to patients.

Two a day keeps the pain away, that kind of thing, right? And as such, pseudo-addictions were necessitating more frequent dosages, not just higher dosages. So you can see the overdoses mounting. Now, if you cannot get a prescription for increased dosage or increase fronized, frequency because your doctor has a fucking conscience, this means that you might find black market oxy, like I was just saying, or you might move over to heroin in between doses. And of course, since both of these are, quote, not as recommended, Purdue was able to make a case that the increase in overdoses was not due to their drug. It was an user error in the use of heroin.

And the amount of bullshit that they found, they're like, did you check for other? drugs in the autopsy in your talk screen was it just our drug you were looking for that sounds very biased you know this person had way more caffeine in them than normally people would how do you know it wasn't caffeine overdose shit like that now because no no no because because the immediate cause of death was suffocation not cardiac arrest Well, that suffocation could have come about by any number of other factors. Did you notice that they ate a lot of hamburgers in the last week? Did you see the high amount of nitrates in that beef?

You know, I had a friend once who lost all feeling in his arm because he ate too many French fries one week and just, you know, these things happen. It's terrible. You can't definitively say it was our drug. In my head, I'm picturing, I'm picturing the coroner leaping literally over the. the corpse of the dead person to wrap their hands around this person's neck. But the thing is, this kind of dumb fuckery and bullshittery is so over the top and so egregious and so shocking that people are usually stunned into silence. Yeah.

I can't believe you just fucking said that. Yeah. Yeah. Like I can totally see that. It's just, you know, my goat. to internal response when I get that is massive, massive violence. Like, I'm not going, I'm going to shove your $500 briefcase down your fucking throat. Like, wow.

Okay. Yeah. Now, multiple suits. And when I say multiple, I mean, thousands of lawsuits have been brought against Purdue. But with them, with Purdue, making. the money that they've made, they've been able to absorb all the losses of those lawsuits, which of course makes it a service fee. In 2006, Purdue settled with a class action suit for $75 million.

In Virginia, that same year, they were ordered to pay over $635 million. This was a service fee. They, remember, paid in 2001, they paid $41 million just in sales bonuses. that's more than half of what they settled in the class action lawsuit right in 2006 so this is a service fee they've made billions and billions of dollars and their C-sweet folk have been given probation at worst that's the most that's ever happened the Sackler family has yet to be held to account now that's the first wave that's oxy remember heroin is the second wave right and part of the reason for the second wave which was a resurgence of heroin was a reformulation of the oxy pill in 2010 now

I think that this is proof that the costs were starting to get to them because of instead of being able to crush it and then snort it or crush it and liquefied it and then shoot it the new formulation turned the crushed pills into a gelatinous blob, making it a lot harder to use. Now, that tells me right there that they smelled smoke, that they knew, right? And they were like, okay, which means that

they knew they couldn't hold it off forever, right? Now, because of the poor press about Oxy, a lot of doctors started pulling back from using it as a panacea as well. So now, let's fast forward to 2010. Heroin production has moved up to Mexico from South America. The housing market has destroyed employment. Rural areas are especially slow to come back.

Entire towns have collapsed. The result is that older folks keep their prescriptions going and they settle back into the two-a-day dosage since the pill is ruined otherwise. Okay. Okay. But younger folks can't get prescriptions because they can't get any fucking job. and they don't have Social Security and Medicare. Okay.

Okay. And Medicaid is still, I mean, Obamacare came through and did all that kind of stuff, and that added 45 million people to it, but like shit was slow and hard to get on. And again, the whole not having a job thing really fucks with some people, right? Right. And so younger people can't get their prescriptions. And as a result, younger folks are turning to heroin. The older folks are having to deal with their addiction to oxy,

but now they can't get it to be more potent. They can't act more addictive. So they have to just go back to swallowing to a day. But younger folks can get heroin and perhaps you share that with grandma. So what's interesting here, though, is that Purdue and Mexican heroin dealers both use the exact same tactics to gather new customers to themselves. They both started with the first dose is a free dose. oh yeah that old chestnut yeah the next thing that mexican heroin dealers did uh which means that peru pharma was doing this too they identified the markets by looking at who was at the local

methadone clinics because methadone is is you're stepping down from heroin right right so who's there who's weak uh or who's who's struggling really really hard against their addiction hey, I got something that'll help you get to the next methadone treatment. Purdue also used its ability to look into data and look at job-related injury rates. Purdue used communities with a lack of education. They targeted communities with lots of poverty, communities with minimal mobility to get out of the area. So did the heroin dealers. Purdue also used coupons to get folks to use the coupons.

to get cheaper Oxycontinent first. And that would undercut the heroin dealers, which is measurable because over 34,000 coupons were redeemed. Heroin dealers can't give you coupons. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you're an absolute piece of shit, that would be one competitive way to do that.

Now, Purdue's claim. which were based in facts, read like a masterclass in using the truth to tell a lie. According to a New York Times article, Purdue Pharma claimed that they never had more than 2% of the market for opioids, which is true if you only look at the prescription numbers. The number of prescriptions and the duration of those prescriptions is typically short term, right? So the amount of prescriptions, right? But right after surgery, and just enough to get you through the pain and onto a rehabilitation. physical therapy, but oxy content was often for the long-term cases, and these are fewer

than the short-term cases. So yes, in pure numbers of total prescriptions, because there's so many short-terms that don't use oxy, yeah, we're only 2%. But the ones who are suffering from long-term are going to be going for oxy. They're tending toward oxy. So if there's 100 people who need opioid pain management, 98 of them will. need just short-term stuff in low dosage, and that's probably just going to be percocets. It's probably going to be volumes.

It's probably going to be things like that. It's not going to be oxy. But the ones who are suffering from long-term needs, they tend to get oxy at a much higher rate. And if you look at volume, the actual volume of narcotic dosage, oxy was much higher with estimates ranging into the high 20s and low 30s. So of all the dosage, like the volume of dosage, all the milligrams of opioids being prescribed oxy is 20 to 30% of that by itself yeah now yes that's only 2% of of the total prescriptions written yeah but the volume of that product that's going into people's bodies

which means that 2% will get you up to 30% of the opioids that are getting put in people's bodies fucking huge dosage yeah well fucking huge dosage fucking long term Yeah, like the number of pills involved in that, in that prescription. Yep. Is, you know, significantly longer. And then the amount of oxycodone that's involved in these prescriptions. Yeah. That's going into people's bodies.

Now, the U.S. is the third highest population in the world. However, numbers one and two are India and China. Right. now if we're looking at ranking okay we're third that's pretty good numbers but if we're looking at the fact that indiana china are both about 1.4 billion people and we have 340 million the numbers are vastly different yes now you take that into account with how our population consumes about one third of the global market for opioid painkillers and it's a manifold of of concerns

we are we are so desperately fucked up like as a society as an economy like yeah okay yeah so so there I've proven like

multiple things there right number one wow number two like you know yes They only had 2% of total prescriptions, but they're producing like a third almost, not quite, but 20 to 30% of the total opioids that people are taking in. And of that, we're consuming a third of it on the global market.

And while, wow, we're third in the world, we are like by a factor of four smaller than. than the most populated places. Yeah, literally a fraction of the population. Yeah. So anyway, a Toronto doctor, which I find oddly coincidental, considering that the production and filming of being human happened fewer

than 400 miles away north in Montreal, the province next door, this Toronto doctor said, quote, opioids really do afford pain relief initially, but that relief tends to diminish over time. That's in part why people increase the dose. They are chasing pain relief from a drug that has failed. I see these people who are convinced that they are one of the legitimate pain patients.

They're on a massive dose of opioids, and they're telling me they need this medication, which is clearly doing them harm. For many of them, the primary benefit of therapy at this point is not going into withdrawal. so essentially oxy cures your pain by giving you an addiction and now you're focused on your withdrawal symptoms not your pain great it's it's you know there's the phrase it's putting a hat on a hat this is putting a manhole cover on a hat yeah like so in the year that being human premiered on the in the u.s the CDC declared formally an opioid epidemic However, this is non-binding to Purdue and other groups.

It's just this is an epidemic. And as such, Purdue fought very hard to obstruct even releasing the CDC declaration, which if you have money like that, you can do that, I guess, because that's how this place works. After their guilty plea in 2007, Purdue spent the next eight years, 2007 plus eight is 2015, using $90 million to lobby and influence. politicians to make sure that no binding legislation actually came out. And actually, they started in 2006, and it lasted until 2015. $900 million. I'm sorry if I said $90 million. $900 million to lobby.

That's more than the two lawsuits that I told you of above. And that's when they had to pay those out. So they are able to shed money to do what they want. And sometimes it's hard to find data to find out how many people are misusing drugs because they're, you know, by doing exactly what the warning label says not to do. But if we look at OxyContin prescriptions before and after Purdue altered the pills to make them harder to crush, we can kind of actually get close to the number, I think. Because if people are misusing the drug in the way that they're saying, please don't do this,

and then they change how it's done so you can't do that. the gap in the numbers of prescriptions can kind of tell the tail. And because they're not going to be just, oh, well, I guess I'm not doing oxy anymore, they're going to switch over to heroin. You could also kind of get a shadow of a number based on new heroin addictions, too, or new heroin users. So we can see that there was a 40% drop-off in oxy prescriptions after they altered it to turn it to jello if you crushed it.

Right. Now, this doesn't mean that people weren't. still overusing while following the directions, but this also does line up neatly with the increase in heroin addiction. Now, that's also hard to find because, as it turns out, asking people if they are addicted to a drug is not going to yield real numbers necessarily. People do not self-report addiction nearly as much as they would self-report sneaker sales. Right. But they, you know, there's ways of asking. stuff like that.

So I'm using figures on overdoses via these drugs instead. So I'm going to look at how many people overdosed before, during, and after this kind of stuff. Because that's the starkest and often the easiest measure because autopsies very rarely lie to you. And you can be an addict and successful in your life for a long-ass time and never can come clean about it. But if you're dead, you're dead. And you add to those numbers. So in 2005, 10,000 people died of prescription opioid overdose. And the vast number of those dying was by non-synthetics.

In 2010, that number was just shy of 15,000. And the number of synthetics-based overdoses had doubled by that point. But still, it was closer to 10 to 15% of total overdoses by prescription opiate. It's not insignificant, but the lion's share is still amongst the non-synthetics. Heroin overdoses, by contrast, in 2005, were about 2,200 people in the country. So in a single year, 2,200 people died of heroin overdose, 10,000 people died of prescription opioid overdose in that same year. And again, most of those was non-synthetics. Now, in 2010, heroin, what do you call it?

Oh, the heroin overdoses, by the way, were not in combination with any synthetic opioids. So it's just straight heroin. In 2010, the number of heroin overdoses rose to 2,500. So it largely remains static. So where you see the most growth is in prescription overdose. Yeah. And still no combinations with synthetic opioids, right? And again, if your prescription doesn't give you enough pills, you're going to find other ways to augment.

and supplement what you're not getting. Now, when the pills changed so that crushing them wasn't as accessible for folks who'd become addicted, heroin overdoses rose close to 4,000 that very next year in 2011. So people are switching. And if we look at 2012, they actually went up to 6,000. Heroin was definitely on the rise, and it seems to have been a good substitute for uncrushable oxy starting in 2011. by the time being human aired its final season in 2014 heroin overdoses were over

wait 1112 yeah 14 heroin overdoses were over 15,000 and now about 10 to 15% of those were in combination with nonsethetic opioids so they're getting from wherever so that tells me that like you know the making it uncrushable reduced the prescriptive rate by a good chunk that validates that 40% yeah right yeah and and this is second wave now because this episode is focused more on what was happening at the time of the tv show i'm not going to get into what happened after 2014 so much but i will tell you that oxycontin has gone abroad and using the same playbook as did the tobacco industry its proponents have been similarly successful the big company to keep your eye on is Mundi Farma. And yes, the Sackler family, they own that one too.

Of course they do. Also, in September of 2024, Malia Politzer and Simon Bowers collaborated with eight other journalists and published an article on Finance Uncovered. I will quote them for their work in 2024. They said, quote, a collaboration of journalists from eight countries has today published an investigation into the international pharmaceutical business, businesses, ultimately owned by the Sacklers, the family behind the Oxycontin prescription pain killer that became emblematic of the early phase of the U.S. opioid crisis, which has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. It reveals how even though the Sackler's U.S. business unit Purdue Pharma declared bankruptcy in

2019, the family's broader drug empire in 120 countries has continued to see. massive quantities of pain pills raking in hundreds of million dollars in profits so super dope there literally yeah and the way they did it um the sackler's did it i'm going to quote the article again finance undercovers role in the collaboration uh was to conduct a forensic analysis of mundi Farma by gathering, where possible, profits, turnover, and dividend payments from the financial statements filed by dozens of affiliated companies in multiple jurisdictions. The result shines a light into key parts of the Sackler's privately owned and Byzantine-structured drug empire. Among the findings, the analysis showed that Mundi Farma made $531 million in profits from just nine of its

170-plus companies between 2020 and 2022. profits for the entire Mundi Farma Empire, including companies sitting in secretive tax havens, are almost certainly much higher. Yeah. Now, I'm talking about a vampire, a ghost, and a werewolf, so that's, I'll finish kind of going into, like, current times with this. The crossover point in the rising heroin deaths, where synthetics overtook non. non-synthetics in the additives to their overdose was 2017. Okay. Okay.

So incidentally, that's when heroin overdoses peaked at about 15.5,000. And currently about 90% of the 3,900 heroin overdoses. So heroin came way down after that, right? Right. And it's been synthetics. But about 90% of the 3,900 heroin overdoses are in combination with synthetic opioids. the number peaked in 2017 and then it dropped by quite a bit since then but notice that the prescription-based opioid overdoses have only dropped from about 17,000 to 13,000 from 2017 until this year and about half of them are still in combination with synthetic opioids yeah but like I said I want to largely focus on what people saw in new in 2011-2014 right because the duration of the show is

is about a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost. Right. And I think I'm going to stop there because I will finally start discussing the show. Yeah, yeah. And we've gone a fair amount. So there's your background, per the Damien usual, background, then the thing I meant to talk about.

Right. So what's your takeaway so far? Yeah. um my takeaway so far is that late stage capitalism corrupts everything it touches um like

yeah there's that's that's that's the bit that's pretty much it like the way that the sacklers managed to insinuate their way into established medical society, for lack of a better word, and manipulate, like, not just the egos of these doctors, not just the, you know, greed or whatever, but that they managed to use these doctors' well-meaningness as the way to get their foot in the door and then pivoted into the, well, you know, while you're doing good, you can do well for yourself, you know, and then corrupted that. Yeah. You know, and that is the.

most disappointing I guess part of this like all of this is inspiring of outrage all of this is infuriating and as you said the fact that you know the Sacklers haven't had to face any kind of you know punishment yeah for this is is just teeth grindingly you know frustrating but the part that makes me sad rather than just incoherently angry is the way that this debased the doctors that got sucked into it you know um yeah that's immensely immensely disappointing and really really angry making and i look forward to learning about the art that was inspired by this so yeah cool all right well uh what you what you're

what you're reading watching seeing etc um the uh recommendation that i'm going to make this week is going to be for um i'm going to go back to upon the altar of the nation which i know I have described, which I know I've referenced otherwise or previously, and I got to look up the author right now, but it has come up recently in my discussions for my master's, and it is a really, really good book by Harry Stout, Harry S. Stout. And it is, it's great for understanding how the secular religion of Americanism, which has always been with us since the founding of the country,

how it got distilled by the Civil War and turned into the thing that we have all been indoctrinated into to various degrees over the course of our lives. So yeah, upon the altar of the nation by Harry S. Stout. How about you? Well, let's see. I can't find it anywhere

streaming, but there was a documentary years ago called The Drug Years. It was a four-part series and it looked at the illicit drug use and the cultural significance of it from kind of the middle of the 20th century

forward. It was really, really good. So if you can find that streaming anywhere, it's called the drug years. And if you want to type in VH1 as well, because it was originally miniseries on VH1, who knows, maybe it's on YouTube now. Somebody put it up there. But if you can't find that, then I'm going to recommend the book, Can't Find My Way Home, actually, by Martin Torgoff.

And he was interviewed in that documentary, and that's where I found the book. But it's essentially, it's a history of drug use from 45 to 2000 in America. It's a really easy, accessible read. It absolutely gets into the intersectionality of drugs in different cultures, different ethnic groups, different subcultures, musical impact, the British invasion, like all kinds of stuff. And it goes kind of drug by drug. And it's really good. I think it's a really good companion piece to this next several episodes. Very cool.

Yeah. Cool. Where can we be found? We collectively can be found at our website at wauwbubba-wobah.gookhistorytime.com And we have been found. You're listening to us, so you have to have found us, either on the Apple podcast app, on Spotify, or on the Amazon podcast app. Wherever it is that you have found us, please take a moment to subscribe,

give us the five-star review that you know Damien deserves for his exhaustive research work. and where can you be found, sir? I'm going to go out on a limb and say you've missed the November 7th show of Capital Punishment. No worries. Come back for December 5th. If you miss that, then there's January 2nd and February 6th. All of them at 9 p.m. at the Comedy Spot in Sacramento. Go to sackcommodyspot.com and find the calendar section.

Buy your ticket to Capital Punishment, Capital with an O. and you'll see the best, longest running pun tournament show in the Northern California area, dare I say, the world. Nice. But Justine, Emily, and I are just putting on banger after banger after banger. So come on out, catch tickets early, bring some money for merch, have a seat, shout things out, spin that wheel. You know the drill. Yeah, that's about it. Well, for a geek history of time, I'm Damien Harmony.

I'm Ed Blaylock, and until next time, keep rolling 20s.