Stuff You Should Know - Heroin: The Drug

Episode Date: June 2, 2020

We've covered a lot of drugs in our history, and today we tackle heroin, one of the most dangerous of all. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, it's Josh and Chuck, your friends, and we are here to tell you about our upcoming book that's coming out this fall, the first ever Stuff You Should Know book, Chuck. That's right, what's the cool, super cool title

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which we're working on right now. That's right. So check it out soon coming this fall. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and it's just the two of us.

We can make it if we try. Just the two of us, Chuck and I. That's right. And we are Stuff You Should Know, the heroin edition. Yeah, I haven't covered heroin yet. No, we haven't. We have not. And Ed helped us out with this,

and I love how he just put it straight up, heroin is a demon. I'm like, she's way to be objective. You know what occurred to me, because I like to think of things through the lens of movies a lot of times. Pot movies, rarely, if ever, any good. What, have you ever seen Dazed and Confused, my friend?

I don't consider, we talked about this on Movie Crush, Noel and I, I don't consider that a weed movie, although it's featured heavily. I would call it one of the main characters. I don't call it a weed movie. I consider weed movies like Cheech and Chong movies. What about Half Baked? Half Baked, How High, like movies

where it's literally just about marijuana. Like Dazed and Confused is about a bunch of friends in the 70s on the last day's school. Fair enough, fair enough, you won me over. Other people, though, said, no, you're wrong. Dazed and Confused is a weed movie, but let's say that is a weed movie. That's one good one.

Okay. Like Cheech and Chong movies are okay, but they're really not that good. No, they're really not. Cocaine movies, are there cocaine movies? Yeah, there's like Blow was a cocaine movie, and it's always about dealing. Yeah, for sure.

Blow is about as cocaine a movie as they get. I can't think of one that's just straight up like following some cocaine users. Yeah, like that, because it's probably like, no one wants to see that. Right. But heroin movies are great. Well, I mean, you got what, Trainspotting?

Oh, Panic in Needle Park, Trainspotting. Tootsie. Tootsie. And, you know, even if it's not about heroin, stuff like Pulp Fiction, like I think heroin has been romanticized. Romanticized in film far more effectively and more often than any other drug.

Right, which is pretty messed up because if there is a drug out there where Nancy Reagan actually was right for once in her life and wasn't just lying through her teeth, it is definitely, definitely heroin. Yeah. It is a genuinely bad, bad drug. I mean, basically the last thing that should be romanticized,

but you're right. I think they've made some pretty good movies about it. And I think people are like, wow, those jazz cats are really into that, that scag man. And I don't know. I mean, I can't imagine that there aren't people out there who haven't tried heroin because it was romanticized in the movies, I hate to say.

Yeah, and I think because in the movies, it portrays it as it is, which is euphoric and relaxing. And every movie you see when someone does the heroin, what you see right afterward is a big wave of happiness wash over them. And that's why you don't see movies about people snorting cocaine is because it's just not fun to see someone snort cocaine

and then talk incessantly like a jerk for the next four hours. Right, right. Depending on how much you got. I've never done heroin, but I do know that its chemical name is diamorphine. Yeah. And we can't talk about heroin

without talking about morphine because it's kind of almost the same thing. Well, it's morphine's baby. Yeah. Basically, you can take morphine. Great band name. And run it through morphine's baby. Totally.

It is kind of, now that I think about it. Remember that band, Morphine, they were really good. I love morphine. Yeah, they were great. What kind of music would they be classified as? They're not quite grunge. They're not quite metal. Now, morphine was very chill.

Okay, but they had like a real heavy guitar sound, right? Lots of feedback and distortion. No, I think you're thinking of a different band. Morphine had the saxophone as like one of the main instruments. Unless I'm thinking of a different band. I think you're thinking of Chicago. Yeah, you're thinking of Chicago.

At any rate. No. Morphine is the parent of heroin. You take morphine and run it through a few hoops with some acids and all of a sudden you have heroin. And they apparently are so close together that the average user couldn't tell the difference between the two because your body basically takes heroin

and turns it into morphine. The biggest differences are how long the high lasts. It's much shorter with heroin, but I think it sets on faster. And then the addictiveness. Heroin is even more addictive than morphine. And morphine is awfully addictive itself. Heroin is apparently just in a whole different league

as far as addictiveness goes. Yeah, that's what I've heard. And that's certainly how they portray it in movies as well to be fair. Right. Although there are movies that show like Pulp Fiction is a good example of a functioning heroin addict, but usually that's not the case in a movie.

No, it's true. And I mean, yeah, they usually do show how just kind of gross it gets for heroin addicts. It's rare that it's not that part isn't included. Like think about, what was the name of that movie? It's Jared Leto and Jennifer Connolly. Oh, good lord. Requiem for a Dream.

Yeah, that was harrowing. I always say I got pink eye from watching that movie. Who's that dirty dude? Oh man, that's a perfect way to say it. I mean, who can forget the one image of the when he injected into that festering sore? Yeah, that abscess of, I think I came across something

that I think is what it was. It's called wound botulism. And that's a side effect, a risk of heroin, which I mean, if you think heroin's glamorous, just look up wound botulism or gangrene or an abscess from an injection site. Or don't. And you might change your mind.

And also, if you're thinking about doing heroin, do look that up. Requiem for a Dream is also a good example of why they don't make movies about cocaine and speed because probably the most unsettling aspect of that movie is the subplot with, or the plot line with. Ellen Burstin. With Ellen Burstin, man, that was hard to watch.

It was very hard to watch. Although some parts of it were pretty funny, like when the TV's just straight up talking to her. Yeah, it was hysterical. That movie was nuts. Okay, so back to heroin. There's apparently, there is a very pure form of heroin, which makes sense.

I mean, in any kind of processed drug, like cocaine or something like that, there's going to be a purest form of it. But far and away, the vast majority of people who use that drug are never going to encounter that purest form. It gets cut and there's impurities that are introduced to make it less pure so you can sell more.

And so the heroin goes from like this off-white, kind of slightly grayish color to everything from like orange and brown to black. Like black tar heroin, like one of the most famous heroin varieties ever from what I've heard is, comes from Mexico and it's just really bottom of the barrel stuff. Like imagine that the purest form is a almost white powder

and you're shooting black tar. That kind of gives you an idea of how far from purity black tar heroin is. Yeah, I saw that that black tar heroin is usually cut with either burned cornstarch or lactose. Great. There's also, there's cheese heroin too, which is supposedly pretty rough

as well as far as impurities go. But it also just sounds gross, like cheese heroin. Yeah, why did, why take a word that's great like cheese? And screw it up. And attach it to heroin. That's right. The other ways it can be sold, which I didn't know, it can be sold as a salt,

which you know how in movies, if they're injecting it, they always cook it up in the spoon. And I think partially why movies glamorize it is because just cinematically to shoot, to film someone cooking something in the spoon and the whole process is just, you know, it's interesting looking. It looks good on screen.

Looks so glamorous. It does in a little, in a weird way. But when you sell it as a salt, it does not need to be heated and dissolved. It's just, I guess you can just dissolve it like salt will dissolve in water. Right, right. You can smoke it.

You can snort it. You can put it in your butt. You sound like Chris Farley in Black Sheep. Never saw it. There's this part where he's like shooting, snorting, smoking, dropping. I've just, I've seen too much Chris Farley in my life. He's constantly in my head.

Or you can eat heroin apparently. Yeah, especially cheese heroin. Oh really? Or is that a joke? I don't know, it's okay. So that's, there's like a bunch of different kinds of heroin you can get depending on where you are. It's gonna come from different places in the world,

which we'll talk about. And there's just no denying it gets you super duper high when you do heroin. The problem is, is that within a few hours of that, you start to enter heroin withdrawals. And we'll talk about exactly what goes on in the brain a little more. But basically your brain is saying,

oh, I need more of what you just gave me because I adjusted to life with that, with that level of dopamine release that it triggered. And now everything's just horrid and black. And again, this can start in just a few hours depending on how many times you've shot heroin, how much of a dependence you've developed, how much tolerance you've developed,

and all these factors come together to determine just how bad your withdrawal symptoms are. Yes. You know, most movies, the glamorized heroin for a little while, but then we'll also show the dark side, like you said, and usually we'll include a kicking heroin scene. Yeah, eat your soup.

Very famously, very famously in Trainspotting when he rattles off that list, when he locks himself in his apartment, the U.M. McGregor enlists out all the things that he needs to successfully kick. Mm-hmm. What does he like? It's very funny.

I just pulled it up here, music, tomato soup, tint, indigo, mushroom soup, eight tins, of a consumption, cold ice cream, vanilla, one large tub of, magnesium milk, one bottle of Pharma Paracetamol mouthwash, vitamins, mineral water, Lucas-Aid pornography, one mattress, one bucket for urine, one for feces, and one for vomitus.

Yeah, supposedly after a while, the withdrawal gets so bad that you just can't get out of bed to poop or pee or vomit, but you're still going to vomit and poop. Withdrawal symptoms kick in terrible diarrhea, terrible vomiting. And the thing is, the withdrawal is almost never fatal, but it can be fatal.

And it's not from the withdrawal symptoms themselves, it's secondary to it. Like you're vomiting and peeing and pooping so much that you can become dehydrated, your electrolyte balances can go off, and you can die of heart failure because the electrical impulses in your heart are no longer functioning correctly.

But if you know what you're doing, and you especially do it under medical supervision, you can have a far easier and much less life-threatening experience of kicking heroin. The good news is this, even if you are the person who is most addicted to heroin in the world right now, if you decided to kick it,

you have four to five or six really bad days ahead of you before you're free of your heroin addiction. It's that simple. Any heroin, I wanna keep saying heroin addict, we definitely don't say that anymore, but any person addicted to heroin, walking around today, Chuck, is just a week away from being free of heroin.

It's just that that would be the worst week of their entire lives, but they can do it. Every single one of them can do it. And entire physicians' practices and convalescent centers and rehabs have been set up to medically assist in making the withdrawal process easier and safer, so that it does increase the chance that they're not gonna be like, forget this,

I just need some heroin, everything will be fine again. Yeah, and you're probably gonna get, if you're under medical supervision, some sort of sedative or a drug that mimics heroin, most commonly, I think methadone, unless that's changed. Yeah, it's like suboxone now, which is- Oh, really? Yeah, it really binds tightly to your opioid receptor,

so it blocks heroin when you're doing it, so you become less and less dependent on heroin, and then the suboxone is just much less addictive or habit-forming, because it's just much less potent, so that you can get off of the suboxone after you're off of the heroin. So why heroin makes you feel so good? People, you know, we don't fully understand

the brain chemistry of exactly how that works, but we do know that the chemicals, you know, once it gets in your brain, the brain breaks it down into other chemicals, and those chemicals sort of just close down the things that normally regulate your dopamine, and so your brain makes a bunch of dopamine. Right, right, so you've got a bunch of dopamine going,

but it also affects other parts of your brain, too, to where, say, basically imagine your brain chemistry normally is in this nice kind of harmony, and then heroin comes in and just totally overwhelms it with the tidal wave of dopamine. Well, your brain says, oh, geez, well, I need to up all of the production of all of these other neurochemicals

so that I reach homeostasis again, so that jacks all the levels up, and then when the heroin dies back because your dose is wearing off, your dopamine levels drop, but then all these other levels are still up, and all of a sudden it's like your brain is screaming in a crowded room where everybody just stops talking,

and it's just your brain screaming now, right? Or like the music cuts off, and your brain was trying to talk loud over the music. It's very much like that, and so some of these other chemicals can produce some really unpleasant sensations, and the upshot of it is that dopamine, the one thing that's making you feel really, really good,

is the one thing that's truly lacking then because your brain isn't making it naturally. It's making all this other stuff that makes you feel quite uncomfortable in much higher amounts, and that's when you say, I need some more heroin, and the other thing is this, as your brain starts making more and more

and more of these other neurochemicals, you need more and more and more heroin to release increasingly larger amounts of dopamine just to get to normal. That's what they mean when they say, just to get to normal, I have to do this much heroin, and then I have to do even more to get high,

and that is what's called tolerance, and the more tolerance you have, the worse your withdrawal symptoms are gonna be because that means when you stop with the heroin, the levels of everything else are really, really high, and the dopamine is way back down in the basement, and that's basically heroin in a nutshell. Yeah, and tolerance,

there's tolerance for every drug in the world, cigarettes, alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, everything, but it feels like heroin's, it's just such a dangerous game you're playing there with the tolerance levels, and then getting off and getting back on a little probably more so than other drugs even. And then the other thing that makes it dangerous too

is again, withdrawal itself is very rarely fatal, especially when it's assisted medically, but heroin itself is extraordinarily dangerous too because one of the big effects that it has on your body is lowered respiration. So you aren't taking very deep breaths any longer, and you can actually die of carbon monoxide poisoning because you're not exhaling enough carbon monoxide,

or you're not getting in enough oxygen, and you basically just stop breathing, or you die of hypoxia because the heroin overwhelms your ability to breathe basically, when you've done too much, when you've done a fatal dose. Wow. Yeah.

All right, let's take a break, and we will talk about the super interesting history of heroin right after this. ["The Heroine"] On the podcast, we have Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

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Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okie dokie. So, you know, we've, I think everyone sort of knows that heroin, two sort of big facts about heroin that are super interesting that everyone always says is that heroin is a brand name or a trade name

and that heroin used to be readily prescribed, kind of like cocaine was. Yeah. Uh, in this case for, for pain is a pain medication. And we're talking about the, the opium poppy plant, the pepabur somniferon. And since ancient Egypt is like 1500 BCE at least, people have been using this to treat pain, this narcotic,

to treat pain. Yeah. Well, so if we just held with opium, I mean, it's, you know, being addicted to opium is bad enough, but the world would definitely be a much different place if we just stayed with opium, just kept it natural, you know what I'm saying? But no, no, that's how we do.

We figure out ways to make things even more robust and more amazing. And so, I think in, oh, I'm not sure exactly when, but in the 1800s, definitely before the 1860s, the German chemical company, Merck, isolated morphine from opium. So you didn't need all the other stuff anymore. You just had straight up morphine.

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

anywhere near like we do today. And so a lot of those people who got morphine when their leg was amputated, came back from the war, like where can I get some more morphine? I could really use some right now. And morphine addiction became really pronounced by, you know, the 1870s, 1880s in the United States. Yeah, and there were a couple of big years after this.

Big events happened in 1874 and 1898. In 1874, there was a chemist named C.R. Alder Wright. And he wanted to transform morphine into something that wasn't as addictive. So he tried this process where he, it was called acetylation, where he basically tried to cause it to react with an acid to change the composition of it to make it less addictive.

He created diacetylmorphine, which is heroin. And he gave some to his dog, as you do. And his dog did not fare too well, did not die, but almost did. He stole a stereo later. And he said, you know what, this stuff is dangerous. I'm gonna put it away. I'm gonna publish this paper.

No one really paid much attention to this paper until a man named Heinrich Dresser in 1898 for the Bayer Company picked up this paper and said, let me pick up where he leapt off. Yeah, and he did. And he basically recreated that diamorphine concoction and heroin was born. He gave it to some test subjects.

One of them said that it made him feel heroish. Is that how you would say it? Yeah, heroish, H-E-R-O-I, almost there. S-C-H. Yeah, these are Germans we're talking about here. So they love the S-C-H sound for sure. But because I think one thing we left off is not only does heroin get you high,

it also boosts your confidence tremendously as well. And that's what that guy was describing. He felt high, he felt confident, and he described it as heroic. And so that's where the trade name heroin came from was from a dresser basically saying, that's a great name for this. So I'm gonna call it heroin.

And we will cure the world's morphine addicts of their morphine addiction. And funny enough, they did, because everybody was like heroin's a great way to treat morphine addiction. The problem is, is once they kicked morphine, they were super duper addicted to heroin and they were even worse off than they had been before.

Yeah, it's funny, the word heroin, it's so commonplace now, you don't really think about it being a trade name, but it totally sounds like a trade name when you think about other drugs at the time. Right. It sounds like a modern sort of pharmaceutical, well, actually these days those names are just terrible.

Like Dr. Pinkle White's Feel Good Oil was next to it on the shelf, you know? Yeah, but now like pharmaceutical drug names or they all try and work in, well, I guess they did that with heroin because it makes you feel heroic, but they try and work in how great it makes you feel into the name itself.

Like, well, I don't know if I should name check any, but I can think of a few on the top of my head. Yeah, and like they all have to work the letter X in. If X isn't in there, it's not gonna sell. That's like the mantra of the pharmaceutical industry. Yeah, it's really manipulative when you think about it. That's a tad. Do they teach you how to pronounce it to your doctor?

So they did these human trials of heroin, which were about four weeks long of getting heroin as a patient. If you had a cough or a sore throat, you felt pretty great, obviously. Can you imagine just going and getting like some heroin lozenges for a sore throat? Yeah, I wonder if those still exist anywhere.

No, probably not. I'm sure everybody took them. I bet you there's like, buried in some attic drawer somewhere. Somebody's got some heroin lozenges from back then. So Bayer said the drug is safe. It's non habit forming. We'll even put that on the label.

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

And before you know it, you're addicted to heroin. Right. I mean, there's probably no drug in the world where you do it just once and you're automatically physically addicted or dependent on it, right? Is that, do people claim that to be true? Oh yeah, they claim that about acid for goodness sake.

Like, yes, they say that about every single drug, which is the problem because if you are a brave soul and you say, well, it probably won't happen to me and I'll see what it's like. And then you try it and you find you're not addicted. You're like, oh, well, they were lying. I'll just go do some more. But if you say something like

you're probably not going to get addicted the first time but with a drug like heroin in particular, you're really playing with fire every time you do it because you come that much closer to being likely to be addicted to it. Right. I think it would make somebody maybe think twice before trying it even that first time

rather than just trying to scare them off. Like, you know, no, you're gonna be addicted immediately and you're going to kill your parents kind of thing, you know? Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally, don't lie to people. So the next decade kind of comes and goes. Heroin, it becomes more obvious that it was dangerous and that it was addictive.

Bayer continued selling it until about 1913. But as early as 1906, there was something called the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association. And there were warnings saying like, hey, heroin can get really addictive. In 1909, and this is a full seven years before Bayer quit selling it, 1906.

And then in 1909, there were people, the lawmakers met in Shanghai with some doctors for the International Opium Commission, which I'm sure was quite a party. Oh, it was a rager. And they said that, you know what, opium and all these drugs related to opium are really dangerous.

They're prone to abuse. And it's up to all of you countries to regulate this via the International Opium Convention at The Hague in 1912. But it's up to you how you wanna do this in your country. Yeah, it was opium and cocoa leaves and their derivatives and salts, I think is how they put it. And they basically said, yeah,

there's some real problems coming from these and we need to do something about it. Go figure out how to do it. And so the United States said, oh, we've got this covered. We're gonna pass the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, which is now these days just called the Harrison Act. And it basically established the war on drugs as we understand it today, way back in 1914.

Do you remember our CIA dosing LSD, unsuspecting Americans with LSD episode? Boy, do I, one of the best. Do you remember George White, like the guy who was actually running like the experiments? He was one of those early drug agents, narcotics agents who was beating up addicts because of the Harrison Act to basically gave them permission to.

And one of the things about the Harrison Act that was so insidious, aside from the fact that it kind of promoted this whole, this air of propaganda, like lying to people, like telling people that if your wife tries heroin, she's gonna run off with a black guy or something like that. Like that kind of, that level of propaganda, of associating certain groups with certain drugs

to scare other people from taking those drugs. It's just horrific stuff. That it also, it said almost explicitly, addiction is not a disease. So you can no longer use these drugs to help somebody kick these drugs. So doctors started going to prison, like trying to help people kick heroin

by giving them like a heroin regimen to help them ease off of it. You would land in prison for that kind of thing. And doctors did get thrown in prison for it. Yeah, and Ed made a really good point here, one that I'd never considered. Something else about the Harrison Act is you tend to think of like the old days

as being super conservative about things like drug use. But before they were made illegal, the drugs were still there and drug people that were addicted to these drugs were still there. But there wasn't the same stigma. They were sort of, I mean, they were outcasts of society, but they weren't criminals yet.

They were people that still needed help and that you could rehabilitate. And there was I think some more compassion even, but the Harrison Act comes along and all of a sudden you're a criminal. And the only way to get these drugs is and keep doing these drugs that you're addicted to is by being a criminal.

And that created almost, it almost created the system that we're with today, this war on drugs, which has shown to not work. Right, it definitely did. And there are some reasons why heroin in particular will always be really hard to eradicate and why the Harrison Act was kind of wrong headed.

It set everything out on the wrong foot was this idea that if you can just punish people into not using heroin any longer. Yeah, you can't do that. You can't and there's some reasons why you can't do that because as long as heroin is around, there are going to be people who become addicted to heroin and who are addicted to heroin.

And then if you couple that with the idea that addiction is not a disease, so you should not get any kind of medical treatment for it and we're actually gonna arrest doctors who try, then all you've just done is create like a huge legal and moral quagmire for your society. But that's what it did. But there are some reasons why heroin

will probably always stick around. And that is, first of all, it's very easy to make, right? Yeah, I mean, you're sort of in a, I mean, it's like with most drugs, you're in a lose, lose situation if you're trying to eradicate it because you can't start at the user end. That has shown to not work, like you said.

And in the case of most drugs, you can't start at the processing end either because like you said, it's easy to make. It's just a chemical process at work. It doesn't require super expensive equipment. That's why if you get busted, you can either just ditch your equipment or pack it up pretty quickly and take it with you.

It's just difficult to disrupt the process of actually making the heroin. Yeah, basically, if you could set up a still for whiskey out in the woods, you could probably make a heroin processing operation. The thing is, if you're in like the smokey mountains or something like that, you might set up your heroin processing operation

and then go, well, wait, I need some opium poppies. Those are kind of hard to come by in the smokies. And you're right, it's very hard to find opium poppies in the United States. That's one thing that the United States government and law enforcement has done has basically eradicated opium producing poppy plants from the United States.

Except on the TV show, Ozark. But I haven't gotten to the point yet, so be quiet. But the point is, because I ended up going on starting Better Call Saul and now I'm super into that. Gotcha. But the problem with that is that, yes, we kept it out of the United States.

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

Poppies are going to grow. And over time, they have been eradicated from one place or another, but then they just kind of pop up somewhere else around the world. And that part of the world becomes the global supplier of opium for heroin processing. Yeah, I mean, for most of the 19th century,

China was the big leader in opium exports, along with India. And then World War II comes along, the drug trade kind of shuts down because shipping is just super restricted. Communist Party takes over in China and they said, no, no, no, we're not gonna do this anymore. And they kind of stopped.

It was really effective. And China isn't a big opium supplier ever since then. But then it moved to what's called the Golden Triangle, which is Laos, Minamar, and Thailand, as well as Golden Crescent, which is different parts of the Middle East. But mainly if we're talking opium production, we're talking about Afghanistan.

Yeah, and when the United States invaded Afghanistan, like one of the sidelines it was doing was destroying opium fields. And I guess it worked for a little while, but not really. Like we were carrying out drone strikes on heroin processing facilities and basically did nothing to disrupt the heroin trade.

And then as fewer and fewer US troops were in Afghanistan, the heroin just came back. Opium poppies came back and heroin processing came back. And even more than the United States military was effective, the Taliban had been more effective. Before the United States went into Afghanistan, when the Taliban basically ruled Afghanistan, there was very little opium production going on.

And it actually increased whether you, the United States was there. And then after the United States basically left Afghanistan, when the Taliban came back, they were, it was like Taliban free and easy. They started looking the other way on opium production and heroin processing. Yeah, because they could make money on it.

Exactly. So that's another thing that's actually used kind of frequently like where if you are buying heroin, you were probably funding a terrorist group. It sounds ridiculous and made up, but it's actually probably true depending on where you are in the world. If you're in the United States,

you're probably funding a vicious drug cartel because most of the opium that makes its way as heroin into the US comes from Mexico and Columbia, which I didn't know. Right? Yeah, and the other 90% of the global heroin supply is coming from Afghanistan right now. But like we said, you squash it in one area,

it's gonna pop up in another. It's very simple supply and demand and it's never gonna change. Ed, in fact, he should totally trademark this line. He said, a war on drugs is like a war on water when you know it's going to rain tomorrow. Did he make that up? I don't know, I've never heard it before,

so let's say he did. That's great. It really crystallizes it. Yeah, it's a good writer for sure. Should we take our final break here? You bet shark. All right, look. We'll be back with more heroin right after this.

On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing.

Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man.

And so, my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You mentioned World War II, Chuck. And that, it almost entirely shut down, because shipping was so restricted during World War II. Everybody was watching every ship, not just the United States watching stuff that was coming into the country.

People were watching it going from one place to another. It might get torpedoed. It was just really tough to smuggle things during World War II. And I read that that same thing's going on now because of the coronavirus pandemic. That's interesting. Because of things like shelter in place orders or restricted travel, that it's way, way harder to smuggle or even just go score than it was before the pandemic. And as a result, they think a heroin drought is coming on or has already started.

And so prices are going to rise. And probably more and more people who were addicted to heroin before the pandemic will come out of the pandemic, not addicted to heroin anymore, but like they gave meth a try. And now they're really into that. Have you ever heard the old Kamal Najiani bit about the heroin plus Tylenol cold medicine? Yeah, I've refreshed my memory. It's been a while. Well, I can't remember.

I think it has a name like a designer drug or whatever, which was basically heroin and Tylenol cold medicine mixed. And he just says this. It was pretty early in his comedy career when he was just doing stand up. But he just has a very funny bit about the fact that you're already doing heroin. And then his voice and everything is just so perfect. You're already doing heroin. Yeah, I love that guy.

He's one of my favorite people on the planet. He's great. He's a big movie star now. He is a good for him. I'm glad for him. He's a good dude. He did one of our variety shows that time. He did, killed it.

Everybody killed it that night, if I remember correctly. Yeah, that was a really good show. That was a lot of fun. Josh Bierman and Nick Thune maybe? Nick Thune performed. So did Hampton Yacht, did some killer stand up. That's right. Kamal Najiani, I mean dude.

Bierman and we had Nate DeMeo did a little memory palace life too. Yep, and what was the UCB group? I want to say Rawhide, but it wasn't Rawhide. It wasn't Comanche. Oh, Convoy? Convoy. Did we have all of them on one stage? Yes, dude.

One night at Largo in LA. That was a great show. That was a great show. They didn't even need us. We were barely there. We launched a million careers that night. All right, so we were talking about supply and demand. That is always going to be a problem with the war on drugs,

because like you said, you can't arrest people into not wanting to do drugs. This just proven to not be a deterrent. When people want to do drugs, they're going to find them and they're going to do them. The supply is hard to eradicate because of all the things we mentioned. If the demand is there, then they're going to find places where the government is bribeable or weak enough to plant those poppy fields. As long as there are desperate people and poor people or people that are addicts, then there will be drug mules and people that are willing to either

willing to smuggle the drugs or a cartel who will hold your family hostage to force you to smuggle those drugs. Can you imagine that being your reality today? Like right now, you're running across a desert right now with a bunch of heroin on you because your wife is being held hostage, your wife and kid. That's happening to you right this second. That happens to people sometimes.

It's so rare and especially here in the United States, it's just such a remote worry that there's no reason to lose any sleep over it for you. But don't forget about the person that that's actually happening to right now. What they must be thinking during that run across the desert? How stressed out are they? Like what's going through their head? I can't imagine what it would be like to actually be in that situation. Like when I imagine it, I imagine it as you do experience a movie.

It's remote. It's fictitious. It's fantasy. These are characters. But when I can just get my brain just right, a little bit of it floods in and it's just overwhelming how nuts and horrific that experience would be. Yeah. And I think that's something that...

Well, I mean, I think if you have a problem with drug addiction, you're not considering a lot of things. But certainly one thing that's probably the last thing you're considering is how it got to you, how it got to your dealer. And the devastation that it has wreaked along the way, you know? Right, yeah. That's absolutely true. And I think that's an excellent point for people to remember.

So Ed wrapped up this research with something I'd never really thought about. About marijuana being a gateway drug. We've talked about that and a lot of people scoff at that notion. But he makes a case here that kind of makes sense that the system with marijuana in the 1940s and 50s especially in urban areas and with jazz clubs and jazz musicians, it kind of set up a system where heroin could find a pretty easy entry point. Yeah, because it was coming in largely from in the beginning of the 20th century up to the first... Well, I guess the 40s and 50s.

So at the beginning of the 20th century, it was interrupted by World War II and then it came back with a vengeance in the 40s and 50s. And it was being imported largely by Asian people who didn't know people outside of their community. So they figured out how to connect with the jazz musicians who already had pot friends. And the jazz musicians started turning their pot friends on to heroin. And part of the reason why heroin was able to kind of make such entree into American culture, especially through this route, was that all these people were not... They weren't drug naive. They'd used pot before. They'd smoked pot all the time.

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

Not jazz, but yeah, he counts. I remember when Philip Seymour Hoffman, when he died of a fatal overdose, I know they tried to pin it on a jazz guy as his dealer. Oh, really? Yeah. Super kind of throwback thing, but even still today, they're like, yeah, jazz people can't be trusted. They love heroin. Billy Holiday was fully addicted to heroin. It was all over the jazz community. Yeah. Because again, so this is one of those things where you try once, try twice, and all of a sudden you're doing it a lot more and you have to do more and more and more. And if it's all around you and everybody seems to be having a good time despite puking their guts out first, you might give it a try. That's just super interesting. The idea that that pot was connected as like this gateway for America to heroin, because there's just such worlds apart.

Yeah. And alcohol. I mean, if you look at the history of jazz, heroin and cirrhosis are like two of the biggest factors in killing off jazz musicians. Yeah. True, Dan. One thing we didn't really touch on, well, two things. One, the epidemic of fentanyl-laced heroin, which apparently if you're buying that on purpose, it might be sold to you as magic or butt ice. Oh, God. But fentanyl is about 25 to 50 times stronger than heroin. So the fatal dose is much, much, much lower. It takes way less to kill you. But if you don't know that you're buying fentanyl-laced heroin, you're doing your regular dose of heroin, that fentanyl can very easily kill you and that happens a lot. It's happening more and more. No idea who's doing it. They think it might be coming from China, but who knows what the deal is with that. But that's one big problem with heroin addiction is you might overdose. The likelihood of you overdosing with the introduction of fentanyl is way higher than it was before.

I think the whole thing really started to pick up steam about 2013. And then the whole reason there's a heroin epidemic right now in the United States, Chuck, is because a few pharma companies got America and the large part of the world hooked on opioid painkillers like Oxycontin. Yeah. And the government said, well, this is a real problem. We need to get everybody off of opioids. So Purdue Pharma, you need to make this Oxycontin impossible to inject or snort or whatever. And they did. They made Oxycontin so that when you crushed it, it turned into a gel that you couldn't do anything with. And nobody could get high off of Oxycontin anymore. You couldn't find it. It was too expensive. It was just impossible to get. But heroin suddenly made a huge appearance and it was cheaper. It did the trick. You could find it just about everywhere. And now all of a sudden, combined with the 2008 recession and all of the despair that that generated, there's a heroin epidemic in the United States that's still raging and going strong.

And we have a lot of those pharmaceutical companies and the agencies that are supposed to regulate them more closely to blame for that. Yeah. I remember in college, there was a one year and it was probably wouldn't even a year, but like one season where heroin kind of came through town. And in my crowd, like not my close friends, none of them did it. But I knew a person through a person who I'd known like very loosely socially that she OD'd and died from heroin during this like several month period. But I just remember it was being talked about a lot and it was just around and people were doing it and it never invaded my inner circle. But I just remember that was a kind of a scary time in college when it kind of blew through and then kind of blew back out again. It wasn't like a, I mean, I'm sure there were always people that were doing heroin at some point in Athens, but it was like a thing for a little while. Yeah. No, it was always very hard to find. It's just basically nonexistent when I was around. That's where I get the feeling, yeah.

You know, and then it started to really pick up steam in like the mid 2000s, I think. Yeah. It's weird. But yeah, heroin is a demon, Chuck. It is a demon. And this girl was, she was looking back probably 22 years old. What a waste, man. Yeah. That's sad. Well, that's heroin, everybody. Don't do it.

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

peanut butter is weird. We did hear from a few people in England and elsewhere that were like, what are you talking about, Josh? I love peanut butter. Yeah, like two people. Yeah, it felt fairly anecdotal. But this is about neither of those. So this is from Daniel Volts in Louisville. Okay. Did you say Danielson? Yeah.

Hey guys, been listening for years to all the great podcasts. Recently listened to Peanut Butter and was greatly entertained as a lifelong peanut butter lover. Jif is my brand of choice. He even convinced me to try peanut butter mayo sandwich, which was okay. Definitely to put more mayo on there next time. Yes, you do. We heard from some peanut butter mayonnaise people who tried it and were like, I didn't really like it or I didn't get it. So maybe it's just me. While listening, I couldn't help but think of the color blindness podcast you did. And how cool it was to hear something be explained to me because frankly,

nobody ever cared to do so. And as much as I love to learn, it never crossed my mind to learn about it. You may be wondering why a show about peanut butter triggered color blindness. Turns out the rest of the world thinks peanut butter is brown. I cannot imagine opening a jar of delicious green peanut butter and seeing a nasty brown substance. Resimbling something I don't want to think about eating. Somehow I thought this for 18 years for anyone knew the true color of peanut butter was green before anyone told him that. Right.

I still get teased about thinking peanut butter is green, but to me it's as green as green gets. Reality really is just perception. It's amazing to me that the world can be seen so differently through every single person's eyes. Who knows how many different colors of peanut butter there are out there. Thanks for the show, guys. You keep my days interesting and entertaining. PS Your Marathon podcast helped me know what to expect from my first marathon and scared me to death, but I did finish without the unfortunate issues that some people go through during a race.

Congratulations. And that is Daniel Volts from Louisville, Kentucky. Nice work, Daniel. I don't know about green peanut butter. I think the weird orangey brown it is normally is my preference for sure. AKA peanut colored. Right. Well, if you want to let us know how something we talked about triggered some interesting memory, that kind of thing really fascinates us. So we want to hear it. You can send it to us in an email.

Address it to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye.