A Geek History of Time - Episode 348 - Vampires, Opiods, Werewolves, Meth, Ghosts, and Depression Part III

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

When I think nuclear annihilation, I think la la la la la la la la la la la la I'm gonna drink a metric fuck time of coffee and hope that I stop right before I start seeing sounds that's one of my one of my favorite I don't know if you know like yeah favorite awful thing I get it I get it yeah like bitch took the ice trays meanwhile this guy is going into unicorn cave. This is better than the, what is the orientation of the chicken strapped to your head question. The essential part of democracy to me is not that I should spend a lot of time in governing myself, for I have many more amusing things to do. But I want to be quite certain that I can change the person who governs me without having to

shoot him. That is the essence of democracy. You mean heresy? Probably. Okay. Well, I mean, yeah. I don't know if that's just, you know, my drama queen. Okay, so this is really hard because you're talking about like serious important things to you. The amount of jokes that like I think they're funny as shit. 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 here in Northern California.

And my son had a soccer game. this morning and at the half the score was six to nothing we were winning which put me like on the opposite side of where we were a whole bunch of times last season and and five of those were goals we'd scored one of them was an own goal the other team had scored yeah they were having a rough day. And then at the half, our coach announced to the referee, we're going to play a man down. And we had our goalie, and then we only had five kids on the field instead of six. So they were playing five on six. And the coach at the half had told him, okay, look, we're not going to, we're not going to drive aggressively forward. We're going to work on defense. We're going to

work on passing we're going to do all this we still scored two more goals over the course of the second at the score at the end of the game was eight to zero and and the part that the the cherry on top of this the part that that actually made made me proud of my son uh number one he was playing his heart out the whole game he was doing great and then at the end of the game um after we'd you know done the little tunnel and applauded for all the kids and everything Um, he said, and I think we won. It's like, my son, you are too pure for this world. So, yeah, uh, so that was, that was, that was, that was my morning.

Um, what about you? Well, I'm Damien Harmony. I'm a U.S. history and economics teacher up here in Northern California. And, uh, I ordered some luxury goods to be delivered to my house. They arrived, um, about, um, a day or two before my kids went off to their mom and my daughter asked me specifically not to use them until after the kids left so there's a place um called if i recall it's called cantrip candles and they're soy based very often they're they're uh vegan based candles um

and they are scented um to smell like various things that you might find in d and d. So, for instance, I have one called the Greater Healing Potion, and it's a sweet citrus and rosemary smell. That's lovely. I have another one called Yee Coffee Shoppe, and it's the smell of roasted coffee, chocolate, and cream. Oh, hell yeah. It's lovely. I'm sure. Yeah, my daughter gets a headache every time she smells it.

So, like, I opened each one, had each kid smell it, and both kids were just like, Yeah. Really? So essentially, I have alternated how my house smells daily, but I haven't been home that much on a kind of life balance. Yeah. But the coffee shop smell was lovely this morning. I'm sure. Yesterday, it smelled like the spire-topped mountains and the snow that a Yeti might hang out in.

um day before it was a different type of smell and it's just it's been lovely all the way around so nice yeah heartily recommend can't trip candles uh oh also there's a metal d20 in the bottom of each one nice yeah i'm looking forward to those don't suck all right so uh when you say metal do you know what what meant like brass or like no you get to find out oh it's pretty cool you could like for more money like i think request certain types but no okay just like you know much well You know, it's cool enough on a town. Yeah, but it is, it is a black-owned business in L.A. Very cool.

Yeah, yeah. Cantrip candles, all right? Cantrip candles, yeah. I know what I'm putting on my, on my stocking stuffer wish list for Christmas. That'll be cool. Really cool smells out there. And then, like, if you're running a game. Oh, there you go, yeah, yeah.

So, anyway, all right. When last we spoke, I finished the story off about Aiden. And you remember when Sally waiting for him on the other side of the door. We thought she was gone. Yeah. And they were dead happily ever after, right? Yes. Okay.

So this time we're going to talk about Josh, the other Sam of the show. Josh is the werewolf. Right. And, and, Aden's not the only one dealing with addiction and drug abuse and his monstrosity. Josh, the werewolf, absolutely hates being a monster from the beginning of the show. and that's because he doesn't see the monster as who he is but something he must contain

whereas Aden sees it as who he is. Okay. Okay. Well, and I mean, you think about kind of the difference between vampirism and likeanthropy. Yes. And that kind of makes sense

because, you know, vamporism, the nature of the curse of vamporism is a constant, gnawing hunger thirst, however you want to describe it. Whereas tradition, if you if you are you know a werewolf if you are cursed with likeanthropy it's something that comes around on a cyclical basis and you you have to wrestle with so I mean that kind of

makes sense that it would that it would be viewed as something that he would view it as something other than himself yeah it's he loses himself to it yeah and hates that hates that lack of control no but ultimately yes It's something that he, the damage of which he must contain, right? Right. So it's still an addiction, but the difference is there's no fully stopping it either. Whereas Aden several times, despite the relapses. Yeah.

Goes cold turkey. Yeah. But there's no getting rid of it. And there's no amount of self-control that will cease the monthly torture for Josh. Josh is a werewolf. And the best he can do is to manage it in order to minimize the damage that he can do. so for Josh the best he can do is go somewhere where there's hardly any population and hope he doesn't happen across anybody he constantly at least at first goes out into the woods into rural areas and that's kind of how his condition is coded it's a rural and wild rage-filled self-hatred hollowing out on the other 29 days and it's a monstrosity that he has no control over when it overtakes him okay uh Uh, so Sam Huntington, like I said, the other Sam of the show, he plays Josh Levinson, a former med student turned orderly who now just tries to do all he can to avoid hurting anyone else.

Okay. And so it's a life of seclusion, nervousness, and self-hatred. Now, Huntington, the actor, never made any public comments that I could find that linked lycanthropy to any kind of drug use or mental illness. So this is a little bit less of a sturdy case that I'm making, more circumstantial evidence. but I have research so it's meth all of his storyline is meth addiction okay and again yeah go ahead okay sorry I just the the character the character is Josh Levinson yes is there any mention made in the series of his ethnicity or his religious background oh his Judaism is a it is like it is to his character what nipples are to us it is a secondary characteristic okay yeah so it's not

huge that i don't think there's a single scene where he uh is um there's no synagogue there's no rabbi there's no nothing like that there's none of the iconography other than the the um star of david he wears around his neck um because aiden gives it back to him after every morning after he's turned um aden is very supportive of of his friend he drives him out to the woods and then he picks him up and yeah there's

there's mention of it when he talks with his family when he talks with his sister and we'll get into that a little bit but nobody looks askance at him I don't believe it's ever treated as any kind of a negative by any other bigoted characters and it's it's not it's not really

a traditional thing that is kept to or hewn to by his character. Okay, so, so there's no, no, like, questioning his, his, you know, ritual status after the moon or, like, so the religious, religious backstory doesn't have any impact on his conflict with his condition. None that are either subtextual or textual. I would say that he is what some people would call culturally Jewish. okay um but not much else and even that it waxes in wanes no pun intended um but uh okay his

yeah his he uses the the mentions that josh has of his judaism tends to be to help explain his neuroses so it's kind of that i'm a nebish urban okay middle class upper middle class Jewish kid from Ithaca, New York. Okay. Which, so, so the, so the, the, the, I'm trying to figure out how to phrase what I'm trying to say. So it kind of sounds like when the writers made that, because I'm just, I'm thinking about why the writers would make that particular choice for this particular character.

Mm-hmm. And I, I, it kind of sounds like it's, you know, he's, he, you know, when, when he's not dealing with his, his condition. And, you know, he's this guy you wouldn't expect to be a werewolf because of his nebishness. You know, as you say, nebish, you know, neuroses kind of thing. Mm-hmm. Okay. I just, you know, that's a, that's an unconventional set of tropes to throw together.

Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah. And that was, and like when I, when I heard the name, I was like, okay, that's an interesting set of choices by the writers. Okay, so sorry. I just had to, I wanted to figure that out. So, okay, carry on. So I'm actually, I'm looking into the demographics of Ithaca, New York, and there is not a significant Jewish population, although these are just ancestries. These are not necessarily religions that are being mentioned.

So now, Ithaca is not what you'd call upstate New York. Well, it's not what I would call upstate New York, but it could well be considered upstate by the people who live on Staten Island. It's kind of right in the center. Yeah. You know? So, anyway. Kind of get the sense. I don't know.

You know, anybody who knows better than us about this can, you know, feel free to bug us on one of our social media accounts somewhere. But I kind of always got the sense from all the media I've consumed that's New York centric that New Yorkers like. city of New York people basically consider anything more than 10 miles outside the five boroughs to be like upstate so I mean when you think about the the borsch belt for instance Ithaca is further north of that yeah um you know I'm thinking about like the Catskill mountains and stuff like that and Ithaca seems to be north of that so okay yeah but now back to math Right. Meth specifically captured America's imagination in the latter half of the first decade of this century. So the 2010th. Yeah. Well, the 20 aughts and the 2010s. So through the 2010s, because of how white its users were. In fact, were we to compare pot arrests to meth arrests via the FBI's reporting. Potterests were close to demographic assumptions.

Okay. So black people made up roughly 13% of pot arrests, you know, and white people made up roughly 60-something percent of pot arrests, right? Okay, right. The 2010 census reported that 61.6% of Americans were white, and the FBI recorded that 67% of potterests were white. So it's not too far from the expectation, about 10% higher than the demographic might suggest. Okay. However, in 2010, 80% of meth arrests were white. And that's a pretty big jump.

That's about a third or more. That really is. Yeah. So if we compare to 2019 figures, and I understand that the show ended long before this, but these are the figures I have, the arrest went down, and the percentage of whiteness of pot arrests also went down to about 58% of those shrinking arrests. Okay. All right. However, meth arrests nearly doubled, and the whiteness stayed roughly 80%. Pretty static.

Really? Yeah. So it's a very white drug. It's well, okay, yeah. I mean, clearly it is. But what gets me is in the media, we haven't been hearing as much about meth. We've been hearing about oxicon, oxycodone opioids. And, you know, meth is still part of our, you know, cultural shorthand.

Right. You know, when we talk about people, you know, using. Meth kind of went out when break. bad stopped. Kind of. You know? It doesn't mean it wasn't, it doesn't mean it stopped, but again, I'm talking about of the total arrests for meth, 80% was still white folks.

So I'm not saying 80% of all drug arrests. Oh, yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, no, I understand. But you said that the number of meth arrests roughly doubled. Yeah. Which like, you know. Yeah, that's fair. That's, yeah.

We didn't, we didn't hear anything about that in the media. No, no, no. Well, there are some other things happening. Well, granted, this is true. But the, you know, do you think it could be that the relative explosiveness of the growth of opioids by compare, like, you know, meth doubled, but opioids increased by, you know, fivefold. Yeah. I think that's part of it. I think another part of it is fatigue.

Okay, I guess we're not going to do anything about this. And also the fact that you got to keep in mind, and like by 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services, we were not prepared for a pandemic for a reason, you know, and the amount of, and what we've seen in this, this period of time is that like when you require people to no longer do the reporting and the gathering of statistics, then we lose out on a whole lot of information about those things. I don't think that was as prevalent back then in 2019 as it is now, but it was headed in that direction. It was still a thing. Yes. And I have a pinpoint migraine starting. Just thinking about that, right? It's going to get worse.

Right here. Yeah. So, all right. So the show only existed in the first half of the decade, right? Right. But that means that they saw the trend as it was developing. Okay, yeah. So the whiteness and the publicity that it garnered that meth garnered, partly as a result of that whiteness, was what drew eyes to a growing epidemic.

And given the similarity in time of the opioid epidemic and its overwhelming whiteness and public rarity of that addiction pattern, this was the other side of the same coin, puppy uppers and doggy downers, right? so opioids would dull you and melt you away methamphetamines did the opposite while sanding you down from the teeth to the toenails right okay so let's talk the history of meth oh yay yay yay okay all right so you're gonna laugh because I'm better at pronouncing this shit than I am at pronouncing French well I mean you pronounce most of the letters in these things. Yeah, true. I mean, you know, French, French spelling in English is a joke. So, yeah, it's a cruel trick, really. So, uh,

Fenni lisopylamine was, Wow. I know. Okay. Uh, it's fine. Um, but anyway, that was,

uh, originally developed by a Romanian Jewish chemist named Lazar Edelnan, El, Adelaianu. Edelianu? Sure. Okay.

Working in Germany in the late 1800s. Now, this was the drug that we now know as an amphetamine. Okay, wait. You say the late 1800s? Yes. Wow. Yes. Oh, shit.

Okay. You know how I always talk about how we didn't discover that air was not a substance until 1932. 132. Yeah. Yeah. We were flying planes through it. for like 30 years by that point right and people and people were tweaking out right and and here's the thing like scientific growth happens absolutely unevenly like we were mass producing pills um and also we were putting like you know cocaine in the codeine uh for kids in the 1890s like it's so wild the the shit like I believe sorry I'm sorry as a parent of a young child see how tempting it is

the codeine yes occasionally like go the fuck to sleep but but cocaine I don't need my kid more amped that's why why would you do that well people do the same thing with Benadryl like they're like oh your child suddenly has allergies

and it's like you overdose them you give them Benadryl toxicity is what you do and Benadryl amps you up too the whole point of it is to take down swelling. Oh, yeah, all right. Right? So it amps you up, but if you give a kid enough, they hit toxic levels and it knocks

them the fuck out. Yeah. So that's, that's rad. Anyway, so Lazar, Lejar, there's a little curly above the A. So, I have no idea. Yeah. Okay. But Mr. Edelianu was working in Germany in the late 1800s, developed this drug.

Six years later, there's a Japanese doctor named Nagaynagayoshi or Nagayoshi. Okay, Nagayoshi. Yeah. Who trained at a Dutch school of medicine and who had traveled to study in Berlin, Great Britain, France, and he developed what is now known as methamphetamine from the amphetamine. Okay. All right. Yeah.

Now, fun fact. Because he added a methyl group to it? I guess. Okay. You know, there's only so much chemistry I can understand, never having taken. chemistry oh you did with chemistry what I did with math and college yeah oh no I did that with math as well I mean in high school like I did not take chemistry in high school okay yeah wow you could take geology instead and so geology was termed rocks for jocks I was not a job job but you

didn't want to take chemistry correct yeah wow so I memorized types of of rocks. Okay. They didn't offer that in my high school. I had to take, I had to take chemistry. My love of black exploitation films of the 70s helped me in my geology class because dolomitic limestone.

So. Okay. Yeah. No wait. It's taking a moment together by composer. Sure. Okay. Okay. Dolomitic.

Limestone. Okay. Limestone. Got it. It's a black limestone with white spots in it. And Dolomite would always say, that's mighty white of you. And he was doing it to make fun of white folks. Yeah, yeah. There you go.

Okay. Not to be confused with the lines that he had in the Avenging Disco Godfather, which was the third in the Dolomite series. Or Dolomite to Human Tornado, which was the second. I'm just talking about a dolomite. Yeah. Wow. All right.

So. Okay. So, so Nagyos, She developed Methamphetamine. Developed the methamphetamine. Yes.

Okay. All right. Now, what's interesting, actually, fun fact, his wife was a German woman and she was a professor of German at a Japanese private university. Okay.

And the two of them hosted Einstein when he came to visit Japan. Some circles are really small. Wow. Yeah, they really are. They really are. Okay. I don't know if she took his name or if he took her name,

but I kind of hope that their friends just called them the axes. I mean, you know. Honey, the axes are coming over. I hate you for making me laugh at that. So, but anyway, he synthesized methamphetamine from ephedrine. And ephedrin is one of those drugs that's medically really awesome. It helps stimulate patients. and avoids the risk of low blood pressure

when under anesthesia. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So obviously we're talking about stimulants here, right? Yeah. All of which have similar side effects. Euphoria, increased sweating,

mania, insomnia, hostility, paranoia, loss of appetite, increased heart rate, twitchiness, and a feeling of your skin crawling and increased itching. Okay. Okay. Now, in high doses, yes.

Yeah. In 1919, Akira Ogata, another Japanese chemist who also ended up learning chemistry in Berlin, interestingly enough, synthesized methamphetamine into a crystalline form. Okay, so had Nagayoshi developed it in liquid form? I think it was a liquid suspension, yes. Okay, all right. And so what's this other guy's name? Ogata is his last name, Akira Ogata. Okay.

So Ogata figured out how to. how to crystallize it so that it could be you know formulated into pills or more easily synthesized too okay all right simpler process so then he sold that to a british pharmaceutical company which i think was called the burroughs welcome and company welcome has two ls in it based in london that company had actually been started in 1880 by the american turned brit silas burroughs and the american turned brit henry welcome okay now Interesting. Silas B. Burroughs was the son of a sometimes New York State Assemblyman and two-time federal representative of his district, Silas M. Burroughs.

And Silas B. Burroughs had been a traveling pharmacology salesman at a time when snake oil was giving way to laudanum, cocaine and everything else, and odd powders. All right. Sorry. Yeah. Um, friend of the show, uh, uh, uh, Dr. Gabriel careers. Yes. Talks about progress being, you know, a series of sometimes problematic steps forward. Yes.

And now we know we're saying it. Yeah. But that was the first thing I thought of when you said, you know, uh, snake oil was giving way to laudanum. Yes. Like this is, this is, this is a form of this is a form of progress. It is in a way an improvement, I suppose. We'll know what killed him. Oh, shit.

Yeah. Wow. Would you like to hazard a guess as to how much of all the over-the-counter drug market was cocaine-based in 1910? Is it a complete circle and a Venn diagram? No, no, no. Okay. 75%.

You are so fucking close. It was 72%. Jesus You are legitimate Fun on on, Jennifer You got ghosts in your blood You need to do cocaine Pretty much, yeah

And to miller you out Have two marinas Yeah No, we got heroin Heroin Heroin was marketed With the name heroin For a reason

Fuck Now Now this is not me generalizing So Henry Welcome was born To a traveling minister in Wisconsin and seemed to stick to the strict upbringing with which he'd been raised, but he also showed an early interest in chemistry as well.

Burroughs and Welcome met some time in the late 1870s in London, both having traveled there and trying to establish businesses for themselves. Okay. Burroughs convinced Welcome to team up and create their company together. Okay. The two of them were groundbreakers in developing new delivery methods for drugs. The tablet, which they'd called the tabloid, was their invention or their innovation.

Really? Yes. Wow. Okay. And they also directly marketed to doctors, which was a new thing. Previously had it been marketed directly to patients or? Yeah,

because you're out there selling your shit. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah, patent medicine shows and all that. Exactly. All right. All right. Okay.

So, yeah, you're seeing some similarities here? like yeah a little bit yeah so yeah it turns out opioids and and meth have very similar histories now the two of them seemed to love this the lifestyle of a traveling gentleman and there are a bunch of pictures that i found of welcome dressed in the clothing of other cultures as well as portable laboratories on both land and on the river um he seems to have stuck largely you remember this is at the time of like the gentleman explorer right yeah yeah yeah so he seems to to have stuck largely to northern Africa, and Burroughs seems to have traveled goddammed everywhere in the Pacific from 1881 to 1884.

Really? Because he's trying to expand their business into other parts of the British Empire. Okay, yeah, fair. So they began to disagree over how to best expand their business back in England, and they specifically disagreed over the purchase of a building in Kent, and they likely could have dissolved their partnership, but for the early death of Burroughs in 1895. He had gotten the flu on a cycling trip, and he refused to rest, so he died of pneumonia in January of 1895. Oh, wow.

All right. Now, Burroughs, for all his willing dealing, seemed the more progressive of the two. He supported Irish home rule, union rights to eight-hour workdays, and Christian socialism. Once he died, however, welcome exercised his right to buy the company interest and renamed it to the Welcome Foundation. And Welcome, for his part, did a ton of public charity, so much so that he got a knighthood conferred on him in 1932 by King George V. Wow. Okay. So 40 years later.

Yeah. So Ogata sold to the Burroughs and Welcome Company, who began marketing crystal methamphetamines as they solve for depression, congestion, and importantly, asthma. Okay, hold on. Yep. depression I get because euphoric. Right. Congestion actually this is why pseudafed works.

Yes, yeah. Yeah. 100%. You know, pseudoephedrine. Yeah. But asthma? Yeah. And actually, this is kind of the

really important part. German-based pharmaceutical company, Temler Pharmaceutical, then used this version of methamphetamines to create something called pervetin.

Okay. Now I'm going to come back to them in a minute, but first I want to talk about famed American chemist, the guy who literally invented MDMA, who did very important research on insulin for diabetes treatments, Gordon Ales. Okay. Ails. Yeah. He is credited with recording the physiological impact of methamphetamines, specifically in granting the user, quote, dry nasal passages, bronchial relaxation, end quote, in 1927. Oh, okay. I didn't realize it had that effect on the bronch yet.

Uh-huh. All right. Okay. Now again, this is still five years before they discovered air wasn't a substance, but six years later, Smith, Klein, and French, known as SKF, marketed benzodrine strips for asthma inhalers. What would happen is the crystals would stay inside the inhaler and you essentially aerosolize them by crushing them. a little by little, and inhaling them. Okay.

Now, Temler turned this into pills in 1938. But from 33 to 38, people realized that if you just took the strips out of their inhalers and you soak them in liquid, you could get a bigger kick or you could smoke them. Because we as monkeys are always looking for a way to get high. Here's where it gets really fun. Oh, no. A certain corporal turned mediocre watercolist, turned spy for the army on the right wing groups,

turned leader of those right wing groups who had been gassed badly during World War I and injured a number of times and who had uncontrollable flatulants and a number of other gut-based maladies from the gas used this alternative of benzodrine to help stop those unplanned toots in the hopes that the constipation

that such use might bring out. He also consumed massive amounts of barbiturial, opiates and cocaine. So he's like 90% Irish coffee on steroids. Hitler had a meth addiction early on, and it came from these inhalers, and it came from crushing the crystals in the inhalers. Yeah, okay.

I mean, that tracks with everything else I knew, but, you know, and I knew about the barbiturate use, and I knew about, you know, I knew about each part of it, When you lump it all together all at once like that. Yeah, wow, that kind of explains some shit. It does. It really, really does. Like, why was this guy such a maniac?

Well, let's take a look at his prescription list. So, and again, he had a legitimate issue. Yeah, well, just, yeah. So did Elvis. Yeah. so yeah not not all of them were physical issues very true but i mean hitler had been gassed right so like he does have gut issues and science was not so good back then so if this gives you relief of symptoms who cares how you got it there you go yeah but Jesus yeah yeah now when temler turned

these crystals into tablet forms called pervetin they were widely abused by fascist dictators, military personnel, and German civilians alike. Okay. Every branch of the armed forces used them in Germany, and they even colloquially called them Hermann Gehring pills. Jeez. Of course they did. Yeah.

Well, I mean, okay, so you haven't even gotten into mentioning the chocolate bars. No. Yet. Because, I mean, we haven't gotten to 1939, but, you know, the Vermacht. ran on methamphetamine. Like they had chocolate bars that were laced with the shit. I mean, I assume that's in this somewhere.

Honestly, I kind of skipped over that because I just wanted to get to in 41, the military actually realized what a problem it was. Because it turns out withdrawal really sucks for your ability to fight. And even though the soldiers stayed awake and marched really far

and really fast, presumably talking all about their plans to develop a chicken rental business, once the war was over or create edible shoes for farmers they sucked at combat sorry chicken rental business that's that's

I mean yeah I could see it but you know the thing is I didn't make that up I found that somewhere like it was a a meth dreamed planned business

that I found somewhere And I don't remember where and I'm mad at myself for not citing it. Well, when you are indeed, no kidding, manic. Yes. That's the kind of shit that occurs to you. Same with the edible shoes. These were not Damien creations. These were things that I found in my research.

So according to his, Oh, my God. I think his name is just Lucas, but it's an L with a slash through it, Kaminyensky, and there's an accent on the N. He's an historian, and he said, quote, a soldier going to battle on Perveton usually found himself unable to perform effectively for the next day or two. Suffering from a drug hangover and looking more like a zombie than a great warrior, he had to recover from the side effects. So by the end of 41, the German army really restricted the hell out of meth for its soldiers. Not so much for their leader, but... Well, I mean, how are you going to tell him no?

Right. But, yeah. Wow. Now, by the way, our own military used it quite a bit, too, as did the French and the British. Pilots especially, and I found this article discussing World War II's specific history with methamphetamine. Quote, on testing, no army. found an advantage of speed over caffeine in any area save one. Moral. 10 milligrams snapped men to attention, made them order-friendly and more willing to kill. The military had discovered the

perfect soldier drug. Controversy raged within Axis and Allied commands, but the mood-altering effects of speed won over its dark side, and amphetamines won the Battle of Britain. 72 million pills swirled in the bloodstream of the RAF, and as many as 500 million pills in the U.S. military. The Japanese were up front about speed, naming it Senrioku Zoko Zoko, drug to inspire the fighting spirits. And kamikaze pilots were cranked out of their Hachimaried skulls before smashing same into battleship steel plating. Post-war Japan surveyed nuclear devastation, then distributed free 20 million ampules of meth to crank up an economic miracle, with thousands of psychiatr. With thousands of psychotic casualties and acceptable cost.

Elsewhere, riders, truckers, pilots, soldiers, bikers, any group needing concentrated attention had a percentage of hyped-up devotees. Former airmen, above all in SoCal, fought the drudge of human or of citizen life with new thrills, wingless flight, and escaped from sprawling suburban boredom on a cheap surplus motorcycles. Their bike clubs became gangs with militaristic hierarchy and bikers with leftover military habits loved speed. Yeah, okay.

So I'm aware of part of that history. Yeah. Okay. Now, by 1945, 750 million tablets a year were being produced in the U.S. alone. Enough to provide a million people with a daily supply, and from the 1950s through the 1960s, it continued to grow, and it wasn't just inhalers. After World War II ended, there was an uptick and prescribed pep pills, especially amongst housewives

whose new slash old role was impossible to keep up with. Yeah. Remember, you worked, then you came home, you took care of the kids, you worked, you came home,

you took care of the kids, husbands back, everybody's husband's back, everybody's brother's back, everybody's father's back, they need their jobs back, which I think that's a fair claim to make, but the next pressure was get back into the house,

magazines that used to say here's how to make a 10 minute meal suddenly we're creating one hour long meals here is how to keep a clean house here are more machines to keep the house clean it is abusive to your children to not be around them whereas 10 years earlier it was abusive to your children to not have them in preschool all of this cultural pressure on women to keep up and also because the baby boom meant more babies women were now having the number of three babies per family tripled and the number of four babies per family quadrupled, especially

specifically in white houses. Yeah. But this was true kind of across the line and the white middle class aesthetic and urge was what was marketed toward everybody. In order to keep up with that,

women needed pep pills. And same thing was true with long haul truckers. It was largely a black market necessity for our new highway system of delivering goods to the market. And it was an underpinning of why workers continued to be forced to work longer hours for less pay. Were it not for meth, we might have actually had better working conditions. So meth was a net negative for labor. And it was a net negative for households. And it was a net negative. I mean, meth is bad, folks.

Hey. Yeah. But this brand new highway system, all this change in the 50s was under girded by meth. And it was also marketed as a weight loss pill for many women, too, because it does initially burn the brown fats for many, which leads to early use weight loss. Right.

So I'm going to pause here. Now that I found the document that I saved for myself in a special space, I put it into the chat. Please let our audience know what you're looking at. An advertisement

Can't tell out of what magazine, but it definitely looks like it's a glossy magazine kind of ad from late 40s. I'm guessing, guessing by eyebrows and hairstyle, clearly targeted toward women, especially middle class, white women. It's specifically 1940, actually. Oh, 40? All right, I can see that. And the large text that I can see without having to zoom in on it says, stay fit and slim by taking amphetamine. And there is a, so it's interesting, the page appears to have yellowed with age.

Like the color of the page behind the text and the photo is kind of yellowed and sepia tone, but the image of the woman has stayed in a comparatively, you know, whiteish kind of gray scale. I have to say, the expression on her face, she looks

like she's kind of cranked. Yep. It's got that tired, but still awake. Yeah. Like one eyebrow looks like it's just ever so slightly raised. And that, yeah.

Now, the small text it says every woman wants to look better to feel better in the year ahead slenderness is the way to health beauty and fitness a couple of grams of amphetamine um um sulphate taken daily enables you to slim while you do the housework surely and safely this magic powder does more than does digestive uh something or then uh yeah does more than disperse unwanted fat uh it for purifiers and enriches uh it it purifies and enriches the blood it tones up the engine system and it makes you feel better in health in every way it even gives you the energy to carry on working throughout the night.

So start taking methamphetamines today and make sure of looking and feeling your best in 1940. Wow. Wow. I think, you know, it feels, like um like like a parody like it it feels like something that was on would be on a paul verhoven movie yeah yeah very verhoven it it looks like um the kind of thing that would that would have been an sc tv skit yeah you know um but no uh huh you know and we and we say that satire is dead in

our own time um like i guess i guess maybe they they had the they had the the advantage of or not the advantage the excuse of ignorance yeah but like wow yeah um i i cannot imagine growing up in a household where my mother was actually on amphetamines do you have the kind of relationship where you could ask because didn't you famously say that she she she She vacuumed in pearls? No, my grandmother. Your grandmother. My grandmother vacuumed in her pearls.

That was my dad's mom. Who may, who may have read an ad like this. And, and I mean, I know for a fact that my grandfather was taking some kind of benz-o for years. Which is why he'd, you know, fall asleep randomly at 2 o'clock in the afternoon for, you know, an hour and a half. He's just resting his eyes. Yeah. Wasn't sleeping. He, no, he was out.

Like, what of my, one of my, one of my memory, I was 11 or 12, and we were visiting my grandparents. And my folks had gone out to do something somewhere. And I was, I was there with, with my grandmother, my grandfather. And I was literally having a conversation with my grandpa. And I wasn't looking at him, but we were talking. And literally, he fell asleep between. well I was saying something like grandpa this might be a family trade I've seen you do this on our podcast yeah well there is that but but yeah um so so so based on based on that

sure they were the generation where it was you know there's a pill for that yeah I mean remember uh Ant Man and the Wasp started with pills this is true uh I know I know that my grandmother was prescribed amphetamines and she didn't like how it made her heart feel so she stopped that's that's wisdom right there yeah i suppose yeah you know i i would be i will say i would be unsurprised to find out that my grandmother at some point took pep pills pet pills right i never got the sense that she she her personality wasn't wasn't the the kind that i don't think she would like the way they made her feel long term. Sure.

But I can totally believe that in a very June Cleaver kind of way, you know, she probably at some point did. Yeah. But yeah. Wow. Yeah. That advertisement is. And again, the expression on that woman's face will haunt me.

It's so blank. It's so, you know, yeah. there's there's something about the the combination of her kind of not fully open I don't want to say half lit it but right not fully open eyes and in the nature of her smile yep that is like oh honey you were you are not all there and that's the photo that made it in that's yeah right yeah there's that but also like I I'm sorry but like the advertisement is like tri amphetamines like i i cannot overstate how blatant it was yeah because they didn't see anything wrong with it well because well and and it was it was at the time a new modern scientific thing right every every mention you and i have ever had of methamphetamine comes from a later era when it had become associated

with those biker gangs and other underworld lower class kind of groups. And so to us, we hear meth and we're like, oh, man, well, that's bad shit. That set of valuations

had not been attached to it yet. Yeah, I mean, you tell somebody in the 40s is like, oh yeah, Doris does that down the street. I don't like them. They make me feel kind of itchy. I use this instead. Yeah.

Like, yeah. Yeah. Now, speaking of that dark underworld, because of the black market aspect of methamphetamine and its use amongst truckers, it was a very popular source of illicit income amongst biker gangs. And, of course, when you have illicit sources of income amongst biker gangs, you're going to have crime over those illicit sources of income, right?

Think about it. Meth is easy. They're pills. They're easy to transport in large quantities. And if you have a connection to someone who can manufacture them or the wherewith all the manufacturer yourself, it's found money. The federal government took multiple steps through the 60s and 70s to classify methamphetamine as more and more dangerous. But all that really did was that it was more valuable. Yeah. And with the combination of, yeah, in the combination of biker gangs who rode up and down California. highways, brand new highways, long-haul truckers who drove through the rural areas of the country and increased the use in urban areas as cocaine was on the wane after 1985. This meant that by the 1980s, Mexican drug manufacturers were a bigger and bigger component to the meth trade in the U.S. And because of the way that we ran our borders back then, it was kind of a wink and a nod, and yes, they were closed, but you could bribe.

the person to reopen it, you know, and let folks through or not search this or not search that. And there's so much money to be made. And what's interesting is that just as cocaine was coming down in use, arrests that involved suspects testing positive for cocaine continued to soar until 1988 when it finally started leveling off. Do you remember how laced our childhood was with cocaine and crack being on the news and on the TV? Oh, all the time. Yeah. Like in our our early adolescence. I'm trying to remember when it was. Yours, sure, but I was still a child.

Fuck you. I'm trying to remember what year it was that President Bush had had the address to the nation where, you know, there was a, he said, you know, this is a bag of crack cocaine that was, you know,

bought just across the street from the White House. I believe that was 90? Okay, yeah, that sounds about right. Yeah, but this is one of those instances where the increased reporting isn't increased incidents, right? The increased reporting happened as it was coming down. Reagan's 10 years president was marked by a huge uptick in criminalizing and prosecuting drugs in the United States, probably because he didn't like us looking bad for being involved in using drugs to fund right-wing death squads in Central America. But as early as 1982, the CIA was working both sides of the street, involving themselves in very public interdiction efforts, while at the same time continuing to help the drug cartels sell drugs to poor black neighborhoods in the United States.

George Bush, so many things. Anyway, meth continued to fly under the radar because crack and cocaine, two drugs in the 80s that were largely associated with black, brown, and queer communities. took the lion's share of the press coverage since meth was largely blue collar truck drivers construction workers and others and it was largely white and rural and suburban with rates per 100,000 more than double amongst white Americans than every other group except for one indigenous Americans and native Alaskans were triple the almost triple the rate of whites Oh, wow. But you don't really report on things happening in those communities.

Gee, any Christmas. They're these like rural off ghettos ultimately in people's minds. And so it didn't make much, meth didn't make much in the way of panicky news or cop dramas. Also, its intranasal administration meant no worries about needles. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. But once Philippine and Southeast Asian meth came in. to the U.S. via Hawaii, it started getting smoked more, and that spread to the contiguous United States by the 1990s. And during the 1990s, the manufacture and distribution of

meth shifted and expanded into methamphetamines, shifted and expanded into two important ways. Number one, cooking was a mom-and-pop shop kind of thing. So in home laboratories, This was widespread throughout California and other West Coast states and by way of the truck routes that went through Oklahoma, Missouri, and the Rocky Mountain states. But that kind of production smells terrible and neighbors will notice. So the expansion of meth production and use became concentrated in rural areas where the charm of distance also hid the smell. And at the same time, large laboratories called superlabs that produce,

much larger quantities of methamphetamine started propagating in southern California and northern Mexico. And this led to Mexican drug trafficking groups in trafficking the drug to key distribution points in the West and in the Midwest, including Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City, and Des Moines, Iowa. Okay. And it was this that led to Clinton's Attorney General, Janet Reno, starting to recognize it as a massive problem because meth doesn't happen in the... cities and yes it did um and uh she began janet rino tried started trying to address it in states

where it was happening and the expansion of meth supply by these two sources resulted widely uh resulted in wide availability at very low prices so if you can't get mexican meth that's okay there's a mom and pop shop somewhere in your area boy yeah yeah as in inexpensive meth grew throughout the western half of the United States, and the delivery was more and more cartel-ized. The shift in demographics inevitably came. Meth was no longer a white and male drug. Users expanded to include Latinos, migrant workers, Asian Pacific Islanders, Native Americans, gay and bisexual men, offender populations, women, and adolescents. Students, there was a huge movement among students.

to use meth because it helps you stay up and study. Yeah. And there were after school specials about, you know, Jimmy just wanted to get into med school kind of shit. Yeah, yeah. Now, whites were still the largest group, but the other groups were starting to catch up. Now, in the mid-1990s,

someone figured out a new way to synthesize methamphetamine and the capital of meth manufactured domestically, still strong in Mexico, moved its locust from rural and central California to the rural Midwest. So once again, Stockton and Modesto lost out to Wichita. How many times? I mean, it's something we say all the time on this show is, you know, the only time.

Yeah, it's a trope. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And because rural areas are rural and with that geographic lack of population density, comes the charm of isolation where nobody would see you cook. And you could easily bury the chemical toxic.

in an area that no one's going to notice. And around about's 2000, cocaine was supplanted by meth as the go-to stimulant hard drug because of its relative obscurity in the public imagination. And because of its nearly four times as potent as cocaine qualities. Yeah. So that brings us to the early 2000s. Meth was such a problem that many states were trying to individually regulate and address that when it came time to renew the Patriot Act in 2005, the Combat Methamphetamine

Epidemic Act of 2005, known as CMEA, was passed as an amendment to the Patriot Act. In its own words, quote, the CMEA requires record keeping and identification of all sales and reports to law enforcement of any suspicious transactions. Purchasers are limited to 3.6 grams, of pseudoephedrine base per day and nine grams per month buying more than that is a federal misdemeanor end quote okay so do you remember when pseudafed and other such drugs were no longer on the shelves and you had to show ID to get it yeah this was why now I'm going to borrow from someone else's summary on what this did uh it essentially required merchants as as a part of the Patriot Act to maintain a retrievable record of all purchases identifying the name and address of

each party to be kept for two years. This act now required verification of proof of identity of all purchasers, and it also required protection and disclosure methods in the collection of personal information. The act also mandated that reporters to the attorney general, that reports to the attorney general of any suspicious payment or disappearances of the regulated products to be submitted. Further, the CMEA required the training of employees with regard to the requirements of the CMEA, and the retailer must self-certify as to the training and compliance, which is super rad when you think of what some of the largest pharmacies in suburbia are and how anti-union they are. You can only imagine the oopsies that could have happened in a place that

completely missed the target. Yeah. Now, also, any non-liquid dose form of regulated product could now only be sold in unit dose blister packs. Right. Okay. Now, because these products were now heavily regulated and even more so than we saw in the 1990s at the state level, or when the federal government advised and pressured certain

states to come to heal, the regulated products were now to be sold behind the counter or in a locked cabinet in such a way as to restrict public access. Daily sales of regulated products not to exceed 3.6 grams without regard to the number of transactions, as I'd said above. 30 day, not monthly, but 30 day. 30-day sales limits were not to exceed 7.5 grams if sold by mail order or by mobile retail vendor. And this is in response to the growing internet market.

Right. 30-day purchase limit would not exceed 9 grams of pseudoephedrine base and regulated products. However, prescriptions would be exempt from the logbook requirement. So all you needed was to do was to find a doctor with questionable ethics, and you could continue to reduce these products back down to the crystalline form and sell it that way. Right. So by the mid-2000s, the only area still relatively untouched by this epidemic of meth was actually the northeastern. corridor. Really? Yeah, because they still had heroin and cocaine. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Now, it is getting really hard for me to find information about meth usage in my research because there's paywalls everywhere. There's a lack of clear presentation of data. There's a notable downturn in federal employees who can collect this stuff or collate it. So I decided to look for the thing by looking at its reliable shadow. I looked at the arrest numbers involving meth over time. okay in 2000 yeah in 2009 there were nearly 243,000 arrests that involved meth possession specifically now it doesn't mean that was the only thing but that was one of the things right okay any arrests that included that those roughly uh roughly quarter million okay um now that's 2009 that's 2009 okay um we already

know that about 80% of those were white right okay and that was on the rise by 2011 when the show that I'm supposed to be discussing came out the number was just north of 275,000 arrests involving possession of meth oh wow

in two years yeah wow by 2012 it was over 300,000 wow yeah now obviously the show ended in in 2014 right but um but by 29 or it ended in 11 12 13 yeah 14 uh but by 2019 meth possession was involved in more than 483,000 arrests now these are not convictions these are arrests but you remember the the photo essay that came out showing people remember the pictures of people arrested the first time and then like the 40th time yeah so yeah this is this is around that time um

So, yeah, that's 483,000 arrests by 2019. And what's wild is that pop possession was only a few thousand more than that. Wow. So meth had in such a short time developed into a very close second. And remember, meth was already in the public consciousness by the start of being human, if only because of Walter White. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So we'll come back to Josh. am I linking meth with the nice quiet Jewish boy from Ithaca, New York, who was on his way to becoming a doctor when he got scratched by a werewolf who killed his best friend while camping? He's out in the wilderness, and he has a pretty traumatic and violent event happen. Okay. In 2010, upwards of 73% of state and local law enforcement agencies in the western half the United States, that's west of the Mississippi, identified methamphetamine as the drug

that most contributes to violence and crime in their areas. And the correlation with domestic abuse is also higher than the baseline, although alcohol abuse still runs away with the metal there. In a study of prison parolees found, prison parolees, it found that methamphetamine use was significantly predictive of self-reported violent criminal behavior and general recidivism. In a 2009 study,

even after adjusting for demographic characteristics, and use of other substances, including alcohol, heroin, and crack cocaine. The odds of committing a homicide are nearly nine times greater for anybody who uses methamphetamine compared to those who do not. Nine times? Yes. Wow. Yeah.

Now the quantitative... Holy moly. Yeah. And the quantitative data is actually a lot to impact, and there's a lot more to it than just like meth leads to violence. It's more along the lines of the person who's self-mobile. medicates with multiple illicit substances also lacks the resources to self-regulate, which often coincides with violence similarly to how those other substances do.

Okay. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Yeah, correlation is not causation. Exactly, and yet, but of course they do. Wow. I mean, just, yeah, there is some level of significance to a link that's strong. exactly you know whether it's whether it's causative or not there is just the fact that the correlation is that much higher is itself a meaningful data point it is it is and again

there are plenty of experts who have unpacked it way better than i can but i'm doing a podcast about a show about wherewolves vampires and ghosts so yeah so on the quantitative side it is harder to pin down, but statistics aren't what cultures pay attention to anyway. And given the increase in arrests, and given the way that people code trauma, several qualitative studies at least get at the perception that people have around meth use and violence. And I'm going to quote an article from the NIH about those studies. Quote, one of the themes that emerged from these reports was the feeling of apathy about everything and everyone except methamphetamine. So I'm just going to Break back for a second.

Remember what being a werewolf is. Right. That one day takes up so much brain space, whether it's traumatic or something you look forward to. And by the way, Josh met plenty of people who looked forward to it who were trying to figure out ways to turn naturally quicker and more often. Okay, so back to this. Respondents indicated that this lack of caring leads to a lack of self-control and often resulting in violence. One respondent said I lose a sense of feeling and caring

about everybody and it's like I really don't give a damn. I could care less if I chopped off your leg. I wouldn't feel no remorse about it. And another respondent stated you know people weren't important. Family wasn't important. I was out chasing her, his girlfriend,

in my brother's car somewhere and my daughter was in the car with me. I ran a red light and was hit and flipped the car upside down. My daughter went to the emergency room. And you know I could couldn't even think about what was going on with my daughter. All I could think about was chasing down my girlfriend. Wow.

So when the wolf takes over. Yeah. Right? There's no. Yeah. Yeah. Interviewees also reported being the victims or witnesses of violence when using methamphetamine. One of them said, quote,

we seen a murder out in the middle of the desert and I stayed up for 21 days. And I remember the last day I was just sitting in front of my door of my apartment with a gun on my lap. Another stated, I was just tired of having to wear long-sleeved shirts in the middle of summer. He was in a, you know, dodge ball. He had been in a game called Dodge Furniture. Others remarked, now my boyfriend's starting to hit me. I couldn't go through that again. I hit him back and I called the cops on him and he went to jail. And another said, I see a lot of people want to kill people for it. All of this seems to point out the common experience of violent feelings as well as witnessing violence when involved in the culture of using methamphetamine.

Right. Okay. So given the flaws of human reporting and human memory and doubly those, doubly so with those who've used chemicals to alter their brains recreationally or medicinally, it is worth looking at the qualitative studies as well, especially when we're looking at a TV show and what the writers used as their lenses. Yeah. So real fast before we do that, though.

I want to go back to the guy talking about not sleeping for 21 days 21 days yeah um that's that's like speaking of of unreliability and and you know changing brain states that's long enough to permanently induce psychosis like oh yeah that the the fact that you know we witnessed a murder out in the desert, that's shocking. But knowing what I know about neurobiology, you know, which isn't a whole lot, but, you know, enough, 21 days without sleeping.

Right. And again, reliability of report. Well, yeah. But there still has to be something there. 21 days with severe sleep deprivation. yeah like eight days on half a day off eight days on that kind of thing you yeah yeah okay sorry I just I no no absolutely yeah like the the the the level to which that would completely fuck you up mm-hmm absolutely and a level to which you'd have to be fucked up to do

that yes all right anyway so I did find a summary of multiple Australian studies on the same thing, domestic violence and meth use. And among their prevalence studies, they found anywhere from 24 to 38 percent of methamphetamine users committed, committed violence against their domestic partners. And there was an uptick in overall violence, and the majority of that violence, sometimes only a slim majority, but a majority nonetheless was still domestic violence. And in case control studies, and oh man, is that shit just above my ability to comprehend full And believe me, I tried.

But in those studies, domestic violence was six and a half times more likely if meth was being used by one or more of the members in the couple. And the control group still had alcohol and weed. And we know that alcohol use increases, what do you call it, domestic violence? Domestic violence, yeah. Another study, quote, found that patients with a methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder and no alcohol or other illicit drug use in the past year, in the past year, were significant. significantly more likely than groups of psychiatric patients and healthy participants with no alcohol or illicit drug use in the past year to have been physically violent toward a partner in the year prior, 90% versus 27% and 13% respectively. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yeah. 90%. Yes. So you got groups that have, they use alcohol and weed. You got groups that don't use alcohol and weed. And then you got groups of meth users who didn't use alcohol. alcohol or weed. Just the meth. Just methamphetamine. So 90% domestic violence with people who just

use meth. Uh, 27% with people who used alcohol and weed. 13% with folks who used none of the above. Wow. Yeah. Because, you know, it's not drugs that cause the domestic abuse, but it's, it's the behavior that leads to people self-medicating. Yeah. It's the, it's, It's got to say something about who it is. So correlation is not causation. So the method isn't the root cause, but it says something about who it is. It's an accelerant for sure.

Yes, it is. It is. That's a really great way of phrasing it. And it says a lot about what the underlying pathology is that, that leads to meth being the drug of choice. Yeah. No, and, you know, keep in mind, I think about, you know, suicides. And I think about people who own guns are much more likely to commit suicide than people who don't own guns.

And it's not the gun ownership that causes you to do it. But it's a force multiplier. Yeah. Yeah. It's, again, it's an accelerant. Yeah. Having, having access to a firearm is more likely to lead to you acting on the impulse. And when you act on the impulse, it's more likely to be lethal.

Yes. So, yeah. She may, but 90%. Yeah. Now, I'll go back to their quote. The odds of prior physical domestic violence offending were over 10 times higher amongst those in methamphetamine-induced psychotic disorder groups than amongst healthy controls and other psychiatric patients.

So again, it's an accelerant to the point. Right, right. So the, so what that, if I'm parsing that correctly, that means that the sample population was significantly more likely to have had a prior record. No, it's saying people who had a prior record that didn't have meth were one-tenth as likely as people who had a prior record who did have meth. Okay.

Yeah. So you, you, you. Yeah, okay. So accelerant. Yeah. It again points out the, okay. Yeah. Now, another study controlled for, and again, I barely was able to understand this.

So my ability to explain it is probably just under what's needed. Luckily, you're much more capable at reading comprehensive. and listening comprehension than I am right now. Now, another study controlled for age, and it found that, quote, younger methamphetamine users were more likely than older users to be violent while under the influence of methamphetamine. It was about 35 to 27%. Okay. And were more likely to be involved in violent incidents in which the violence was directed

toward a partner as opposed to some other victim, 61%. Okay. So say that the last part again. Yeah. So if you're younger, you're more likely to be violent. Right. And by roughly 8% higher, which is actually quite a fucking chunk. That's like a third higher.

It's a jump. Yeah. And you're also more likely to direct that violence toward a partner, 61 to so again, you're roughly 20%. Yeah, 20% more like that. Greater. Yeah. Wow.

okay um now there's a couple of things going on there sure um i'd be interested like when they when they look at younger versus older where is the younger versus older dividing line because what i'm with the first thing i think of is you know everything we've heard about you know the prefrontal cortex isn't isn't actually fully formed until you're 30 right so methamphetamine being the kind of accelerant like we're talking about that it is right if you're already not exactly fully equipped yeah then it's gonna jump start your system yeah it's gonna be that much more potent in that way um you know and and then you know there's also like i i immediately start wondering about you know differences in other other aspects of neurochemistry and other aspects of neurochemistry and other

of all kinds of stuff sure um that would that would impact that yeah you know um I'd be interested in looking at a gender or sex not gender but a sex breakdown sure um because you know testosterone by itself is a hell of a drug right you know and like so what's when we if we break this down men versus women is there because I mean I don't know I'm not I'm not there's there's an assumption on my part that there is some level of difference sure because of the underlying underlying brain chemistry differences but I could be just you know completely wrong well and I also think that you know if we look at the gendering I'm going to use gender here the gendering of violence um there there have been studies that I've seen where it says that actually women hit men more frequently. than men hit women in relationships but it's like 37 to 33 it's it's yeah it's it's noticeable but statistically significant but it's not men put women in hospitals far more often and it's so it's they hit less but they hit harder kind of yeah and so you know I and and then you get into

speaking of and and what I what I mean by the gendering thing is reporting oh yeah men report that'll be a Far, yeah, far less. Yeah, yeah. So because of what it means to be a man in this society, et cetera, et cetera, and your ability to absorb damage and shit like that. Like, there's all kinds of toxicity around that. So that would prevent that kind of reporting. So I don't know because I didn't get that far into those studies.

I don't think they tackled those things, to be honest. Okay. Now, the 2018 Australian report, the conclusion of the report on meth use and domestic violence said this, quote, In most of the case control studies reviewed rates of domestic violence offending were significantly higher amongst methamphetamine users than non-users, even after controlling for the use of other substances. Domestic violence offending among methamphetamine users is as at least three times more common than among non-users. users, with a substantially higher likelihood among psychotic users. The limitations of the case control studies must be acknowledged. Specifically, they have limited ability to determine the temporal association between methamphetamine

use and violence, i.e. determining the exact order of the drug and the drug use and the violence. Like, did you hit them first and then you've self-medicated or were you taking meth and then you hit? Or whether there is a direct causal relationship between the two, and that's from Tyner in Fremow in 2008. Nevertheless, findings from smaller number of, from the smaller number of case controlled studies

focused specifically on the role of methamphetamine and domestic violence, coupled with the larger and more robust evidence based on the impact of, based on the impact of methamphetamine and violence more broadly. McKeeton at all, 2014,

Tyner and Fremow, 2008. They suggest that methamphetamine use increases the likelihood of domestic violence offending. Okay. And I have to say, again, that there's no direct evidence that the writers wrote a werewolf character

as the stand-in for meth addiction. It's just not as cut and dry as the vampire character. Right, right, right. If we look at Josh's experience through the series, there's a lot of self-loathing and a lot of inability

to escape the violence that he brings to bear on folks, even when he's not a wolf. Okay. Now, in order to approach it from a different angle, I also, just to do my due diligence, I wanted to look at what the public consciousness of meth use tended to be based on, right? So there's the reality, and then there's what we actually see it on. And I think this is a good place to stop so that I will start with the next episode

with a cultural baseline of understanding of what meth use was. okay so what if anything have you gleaned um I mean there isn't anything that you mentioned out of these studies that

was like conceptually really surprising like the the perception of you know meth use has always, in my own head, carried these connotations of, you know, violence and unpredictability and all of that. But the scale of it is something I had not, I had not known, you know, the 90% correlation.

yeah um you know and and in the history of it i had i had been aware that you know pep pills were a thing and that you know uh like you know i knew about the chocolate bars thing with the vermic all of that i and until you showed me that advertisement i had don't realize that it was just oh yeah no new meth Like, here's, here's, here's, here's, here's this wonder drug, methamphetamine. Again, it seems absurd. Feeling chubby, take meth.

You're like, what the, what, what the, no. Like, that's, that's a bad plan. You're going to lose your hat. Like, there's no, this is not going to go the way you're saying it's going to. to go. Right. You know, and and I, I wonder, you know, we have this, um, this, uh, kind of, kind of hangover image of the 50s, you know, um, the, the way that, uh, you know, fallout and other, other, you know, pieces of media have created this. Oh, yeah, you know, it was,

it was a utopia wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It was really actually, really shitty. you know um the the the the the satirical you know dark underbelly kind of view we have of the 50s i i can't help but wonder how much of that is because of the actual literal hangover that was involved amidst so much of the population who were you know stoned out of their gourds not only on meth but like talking about my father my grandfather you know and

and benzodiazepines and just the amount of the amount of hey here's here's a drug for that we'll just fix that by giving you a pill I'm wondering how much of the shitty parts of the 50s

were in part fueled by a significant proportion of the population being under the influence you know what I mean I mean we talk about the good old days but it's like dad went to the bar four nights a week and got

a little bit more hammered before he came home and then domestic violence was normalized child beatings were normalized like all those things and the kids were starting to do the drugs and mom was like there's so much going on that just sounds miserable you cannot tell me that the rest in the late 1950s and early 1960s weren't born out of a spiteful vengeance of like,

oh, okay, you're going to hit me? Fine. Everything's fucking in jello. Enjoy your cocktail weenies. Like, it's a bunt pan, you son of a bitch. Like, you know, and he doesn't have any fucking skills, so he can't cook for himself. So he's miserably eating like, you know, he has sausages in mayonnaise, uh, you know, in, in, like, chilled cool whip, uh, bungee. pans of gelatin of course he's drinking like and he's got to keep up at work because you know there's there's all kinds of pressure so maybe he is taking pet pills too or yeah or he's taking benzos after you know his is bowling league loses for the third league game in a row yeah you know there's there's there's a lot going on there like yeah no wonder the boomers are so shitty

Yeah, like, wow. Sorry for the round. Damn. Yeah, well, you know, you know, from a Gen Xer. So, yeah, hi. How you doing? Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, there's a reason that you are the teetotaler you are, right?

Yeah, you do tend to cut one way or the other. You know, I'm not saying my ways better either. It's really uptight. no but but see our generation has the self-knowledge and and the uh fuck you honesty because there's no other way for me to for me to phrase that to be like well yeah i'm i'm uptight sure like fuck you i what do you want from me of course i am you know we weren't parented what do you expect like yeah I did this shit on my own

what do you want what do you want for me I had no training I had no I had nothing you're kidding hose water I had hose water right thank God there was fluoride in it

yeah geez no kidding so okay yeah so yeah so there you go that's kind of also nostalgia is a hell of a drug like there's a reason the Greeks called it a mental illness yeah like

you know it's it's really easy to look back on like the honestly it's easy to look back on the imagery which was advertisements um it's easy to look back on the advertisements and idealize those as though they were real life but yeah yeah yeah so remember back then people only took a path which then brings me to yeah i can't even imagine that i i i since since i was a kid i if i don't If I don't bathe daily, I feel. Well, mine came about because of bedwetting, to be honest. Like, I was wetting the bed at like 10 and 11. Very, very stressful time in my life, evidently.

And so I'd have to wake up every morning and strip the bed, put away, you know, put everything in the washer and go take a shower. And I just got used to taking a shower. So, but. Yeah. No, I mean, that that that'll do it. That'll train you. fence that that would be a done yeah that'll do it for sure yeah yeah um yeah but oh my god yeah looking looking back on that particular period in american history is psychotic really

yeah yeah um it's better living through chemicals instead of showers yeah yeah pretty much So, all right, so what are you going to recommend people, imbibe, take in, read? Smoke. I, smoke, you say. I'm going to recommend that anybody who has the opportunity to do it actually take a little bit of time because it's not actually a very long book. and read through the Art of War by Sun Tzu because it is a manual for generals

but there are principles at work in it that are applicable to just about every aspect of life if you are engaging in any kind of of competition or if you are engaging in any kind of anything where

strategizing is necessary you know you can really take his ideas and boil him down into ways to approach a problem and it's also a fascinating study in the way that

Taoism permeates all different facets of classical Chinese thought. And it's a remarkably entertaining book for being a manual on strategy. So because of what I'm working on from my master's, that's the first thing that popped into my head.

So that's my recommendation for this week. How about you? I'm going to actually recommend three different things. The first one is a movie called Revolutionary Road from 2008. Leo and Kate get back together, and it's Connecticut in the 50s. and it's fucking awful. It's a really well-made movie, but oh my God, it hurts.

It hurts so bad. So anyway, go watch that. Just to get a sense of how trapped people were feeling in the 1950s. And then also the book called Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Oler. He's written a few things about Third Reich type stuff. but definitely blitzed is the one

he actually he does kind of like Nazis and drugs are kind of his thing he had one about like psychedelia and the Nazis I forget what it was though

but blitzed drugs in the Third Reich by Norman Oler I'm going to recommend that and then the last thing I'm going to recommend is oh

damn it I lost it Oh, no, no, 30-something. Go find 30-something and watch it, because these are the boomers in their 30s. Right, right. And it's actually, it's, you're not going to get into the drug stuff that much at all. Like there's, I think an episode or two about like, oh, I found some pot. I remember doing pot, you know, that kind of thing. But you get into like the utter self-involvement of boomers in their 30s.

right and i think if you pair that with the movie revolutionary road you'll kind of see because that would be those kids growing up you kind of see how a led to be so anyway all right yeah those are the things i'm recommending uh any or all of them but uh there you go uh where can we be found we collectively can be found uh at our website at woba woba woba dot geekhistory time dot com we can be found on the Apple podcast app, on the Spotify, and on the Amazon podcast app. And wherever you have found us, please take a moment to subscribe and give us the five-star review that you know we deserve. And where can you be found, sir? I'm not even going to guess it when this comes out.

So I'm going to say the first Friday of every month at the comedy spot in Sacramento, You will find me and the crew of capital punishment slinging puns at 9 p.m. First Friday of every month, 9 p.m. Bring $15 for your ticket. Better yet, go on to sackcomit spot.com and get your ticket there for our show so you don't get to the door and get turned away. That happens frequently. So bring 15 bucks for that. And then bring another 20 bucks and buy a shirt.

We've got really good shirts and we're getting close to ready for us, our third. pressing so uh but yeah definitely coming nice merch and come and enjoy the puns emily is an amazing host justine and i are just killing it and we just keep getting guests that are better and better and better every time so yeah all right well for a geek history of time i'm damian harmony and i'm ed blaylock and until next time keep rolling 20s