The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Exploring The Tenderloin : America's Filthiest Open Air Drug Market | Ep 18

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

Johnny visits the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco to witness firsthand the affects of fentanyl on the drug trade in one of the worst slums in North America.  He interviews drug dealers and drug users to get a firsthand account of what life is really like in this infamous district. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We're in the middle of the tender line right now on the corner of Eddie and Hyde. Yeah, dude, and it's pure chaos down here. This is San Francisco, dude. It's lawless. It's hustlers everywhere, but when you come out here, if you can't come out here and make some money, something is wrong. Yeah, you do I walk through the valley and shadowed up, you know? A month ago, we traveled to Sinaloa, Mexico, to meet members of the cartel and to get a peek inside their operations, including their new billion-dollar fentanyl business. In Kulia Khan, the capital of Sinaloa state, hundreds of fentanyl kitchens operate throughout

the small city. 24 hours a day, all cooking product bound for the U.S. We wanted to see the effects that fentanyl and other Sinalone exports was halving on consumers in the United States. That's why we came to the junkie capital of America. San Francisco. San Francisco is a city of extremes, one of the wealthiest urban areas in the country with median rent prices now higher than New York City.

In fact, they say if the Bay Area were to secede tomorrow, it would be the ninth richest country in the world. And on the other end of that extreme, it is a city now infamous for having one of the worst homeless and opioid crises in the country. At the epicenter of this crisis is the tenderloin. An eight city block slum just west of downtown, home to thousands and thousands of street dwellers and junkies, virtually all of them openly using and selling drugs. It's been a nefarious place from the jump.

Built out of the ruins of the 1906 earthquake as a collection of single-room occupancy buildings, it even got its name as a reference to police corruption, as only cops on the tape could afford the tenderest cuts of meat. Hence the tender line. Today, the ELS is a neutral zone, sanctioned by the city is a decriminalized safe space for homelessness and drug activity. I'm not worried about the cops. The cops are not worried on me. I'm going to give them them they respect, everybody got a job, but at the end of the day, as long as you give them their respect and don't make them look like assholes, they don't, they know what they, they know what we do.

It's hard to believe it without seeing it for yourself. It reminded me of Hamsterdam from season three of The Wire. It's wild. It's, it's a different universe. We're surrounded by multi-million dollar apartments and in a four-block radius, it's, uh, heroin, fentanyl. crack, crystal, all of it, getting slung. Each block in the TL represents a different drug, so one corner might sell and use crack,

the other, weed or crystal meth, so on and so forth. But no drug has had an impact like the arrival of fentanyl. The amount of daily overdoses is staggering. How many times a day do you think there's an overdose just in the square? Probably five or six times a day, would you say? Five or six times a day? Maybe. You know, like, and the stats are like one person dies every day, but not out here because we keep the community saturated with

molyxone, and drug users actually save each other, you know. The locals say that Fentt is so pervasive now that it shows up in most of the heroin and crack that gets traded in the area. And one dealer told us Fentanyl is even starting to show up in the weed. People overdosing, I didn't overdose twice. On what? On Fentanyl. I don't fuck with Fentanyl. I used to snore cocaine. Somebody put it in a cocaine and I didn't know.

Why do you think people are putting fentanyl in cocaine? They're putting fendinol in anything, any everything, weed, gummies. Nearly everyone we talked to had either overdosed themselves or had witnessed an overdose. How the fuck did things end up like this? It goes all the way back. Long before it was a dushy, overpriced tech hub, San Francisco was an outlaw town. Always has been. It grew up as a port city that had a reputation as a wild west,

make your own rules up as you go kind of place. And it's always had a seedy underbelly of drugs, prostitution, and human trafficking. Home to the largest Chinatown district in the country, San Francisco was the first major market for imported Chinese opium in the mid-19th century. And one of the last places to shut down its opium dens when the feds began a nationwide crackdown years later. It's always been a forward-thinking kind of town, attracting new ideas and new blood, place where people come in search of something. or to get away from something.

After the end of the Chinese opium den era, the hippie movements of the late 60s and early 70s ushered in a new era of drug use and experimentation, with psychedelics like LSD, mescaline, and mushrooms dominating in neighborhoods like the Castro District and hate ashberry. But then came the 1980s. That's when things really started to get fucked up. San Francisco, like every other major American city,

got hit hard by the crack epidemic, Combined with President Ronald Reagan's decision to eliminate funding for psychiatric hospitals was the birth of the crisis San Francisco finds itself in today. Over the years, as more and more of the country's mental hospitals emptied, addicts from all over the country began flocking to San Francisco, and specifically, the tenderloin, to take advantage of the city's liberal drug laws, favorable policies towards homelessness, and, of course, an abundant supply of every kind of dope imaginable. We're told that black tar heroin, for decades the favored opioid of San Francisco in the West

in general, has all but disappeared since the arrival of fentanyl back in 2018. Yeah. Yeah, over the last couple of years, we could actually watch. I ran a needle exchange program at Glide for a while, and we could see that the numbers of needles we were giving out dropped and the numbers of smoking implements like glass bubbles and things like that went up. So it was a mass migration to fentanyl. In fact, it's harder.

I mean, you know, a gram of heroin in San Francisco right now is 80 bucks, and a gram of fentanyl is like 10, 20 bucks, right? So it's like economically people are forced to kind of use it that way? It's strong. San Francisco has a legacy of high-level drug trafficking, much of it facilitated by the Chinese gangs who populated the Chinatown district starting in the mid-19th century. First it was opium.

Then in the 1970s, powder heroin from a far east. Decades later, everything has changed, especially in the tenderloid. Crack, meth, heroin, and weed, all of it has been eclipsed by the destructive power of fentanyl. While much of the drug trade of the TL operates on a bartering system, many of the corner boys running the open-air drug spots are comprised of Central American immigrants, especially Honduras and El Salvador.

But as we later found out, everyone is working for Sinaloa. I mean, the drug trade here is a trip, man. Like a lot of those kids, when you actually talk to them, they tell you that they're paying off the coyotes that got them across the border. They're like indentured servants, bro. They come across the border and they owe the gangs that got them across the border, money and the way to pay them off is to come out here and sling for a while, right? And like when you see mass police action that sweeps up and arrests everybody, the next day,

bam, there's more people out here. You know what I mean? And there, because there's tons of people that came across the border that owe the money. My producer and I spent the afternoon walking the tenderloin in U.N. Plaza, talking to local residents. And that's how we met Jacozy, a recent transplant from the Midwest. He worked as a long-haul trucker before getting laid off and ending up here in the heart of the TL. It's always tender in the tender garden.

Now in his mid-40s, he's been using drugs since he was a teenager. He agreed to speak to us, but not in the street, as he was worried about reprisals from local dealers. The place, you know, brought me back to life, so I, you know, this shit like, man, I live, you guys are going to leave, but I'm still be there. He brought us up to where he was staying, a single-room studio inside the Jefferson, a recently converted hotel to house the homeless population of the city. SROs like this one dot the Tenderloin. And while Jocosey wouldn't admit it, it is city programs like these which attract homeless people

to San Francisco from all over the country. His story is tragic, but not unique to the people of the tenderloin, where lifetimes of pain and hardship often underlie drug use and addiction. I grew up without a family too much, you know, foster care system here in America. But I overcame that shit. So it wasn't like, some people get molesting and become molesters, you know? I didn't become none of that shit. I just kept me moving and kept the fact and struggled and made it, man.

Fuck it, you got to do what you had to do to survive and did that shit. You grew up in the foster system? Mm-hmm. Yeah, Wisconsin. You never knew your real mother or father? I met him later on when I was older, you know. But yeah, I knew him. I still know my dad's pretty cool.

used to be a junkie or a motherfucker dope fiend wherever the fuck you want to call it and uh he overcame that shit i saw his story so i knew i couldn't be it i could get off anything if that nigg can do it anybody can you know what i mean he was a goddamn chunky to the third power god damn i mean like come through your window and take your tv while you're laying in the room this old school shit oh my god this one name is shooting and, you know, in vehicles and shit. You know? It was calamity, man.

It was fucking calamity, bro. Yeah. That brought me here, man. I lost my wife. I'm divorced. And I have to keep working. I have to support the family. And myself, shit.

You know? I don't, you know. I wasn't feeling of going back to prison and shit. It wasn't that desperate time for me to do no shit that I got with the jail for it. You know what I'm saying? I've been around the world, man. I always kept it real. I need some people and I never had any problems wherever I go.

I was a trucker I needed to talk to somebody. So it was my wife, my family, and shit, you know. And shit was for real, man. It was, we had, we stayed in the super suburbs. I came from the hood and did time, like I said. How did you lose your job? The company I worked for went under. They didn't tell me shit.

They tricked me to come here to give them their truck and not pay me. But I just was homeless, man, and shit. I left all my shit in Milwaukee and left her have all that shit and left and dip the fuck out. And went to work. Yeah, man, this shit is not, you know.

It's just, I had to do it, man. And I did. And here I am. A motherfucker just said, fucking, you know, I'm going to stay here, you know. And it's the way to get my money. That's the reason I stay here for it. Initially was to get my change

from these motherfuckers. at Don't fuck with these people Express What's the name of it? Accord Express Trucking Company And I'm in

Sue and they ask as we speak Good Yeah They're the reason See this calamity And then they're self-inflicted All the shit that I went through Was I was doing the right thing

I changed my life You know I smoke drugs sometimes So fucking what I mean Corona and all this other shit It was a lot of pressure. Motherfuckers ain't working, they need to decompress.

You know, and I don't know. And I can't do that shit, you know? It's not like I was smoking dope, and I fucked up my job and my check and shit like that. No, that's not my story, man. I mean, just because we're in the same gang, I mean, we're all the same, you know? When you got to San Francisco, did you know about the tenderloin? Did you stumble car? Nope, I found this shit accidentally going to sue them motherfuckers who fired.

How does it feel every day waking up in the belly? Like, it's not like a pressure. Like, I don't be worrying about it like that, you know? I worry about when I need to take care of for today. Every step of the way, when I was on the streets here, you know. I didn't do no foul shit, you know. I met some cool people, you know, neighbors, you know, and good people. God bless me.

God bless me, and man, here I am. It's a comeback story, you know. It ain't about what I've been through. It's about where I'm going. You know what I mean? Yeah. Spring weekends are all about family, sunshine, and evenings on the patio. Before everyone arrives, I stop by my local total wine and more to grab a great bottle to share.

With such a wide selection and the lowest prices, it's easy to find something amazing for everyone to enjoy. If you're not sure what to pick, their friendly guides. can help. Find what you love and love what you find only at Total Wine and More. Shop total wine and more in store or online. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina. Drink responsibly. B-21. I don't sell anything. I'm a fucking attic, you know. I'm going through a lot of shit right now. I'm dealing with it. How long were you smoking crap for? Shit, since I was, what, 17? Yeah. 46 years old. Now. The first time I saw Fentano was when I was in Phoenix, Arizona.

It's an addiction to shit. That, you know, everything is. But can you overcome it? Can you evolve and adapt? Like I said, man, this... I've seen some people that I know be addicted to the shit that I've been here. You know?

I don't judge them. They don't judge me, you know? I don't judge my folks because they smoke crack or whatever the fuck they do. Everybody's trying to cope this fucking hard times in this kind of shit. I'm a human, I make mistakes,

I'm a Christian, and you know, I still want to forgive me and he does, and I keep it moving because I ain't doing no fun of shit, but I'm gonna be okay, man, because I'm evolving in the depth

every day. You know, it's just like, it's a way of life, man, you know? Come here, like I said, I can't work right now. It's like, Psychiatrist's shit, man. She told me to decompress.

I mean, through a lot these last few years. What changed you? And that's what I went through. And that's when I went through seven stages of grief. It was 23 years that I did this shit, man. I never stopped to think about it like, fuck, it's all over now. Because I kept going. But then, God set my ass down.

And, man, I had to feel those emotions and feelings. and feelings and shit. And man, fuck. To deal with it. You have to deal with it. But I'm just letting you guys know, this is serious, man. This lifestyle is not a joke here. You know, people get hurt every day down here.

People are dying. People are overdosing. Man, that shit's not a gang. I see people die here, too. Wow. Yeah. How does that affect you? Mentally.

Mentally. It's sad as hell. that is happening. But what can I do? It's not my business. I mean, I want to eat, I want to sleep, and I want to work. I'm an American citizen.

I work my own fucking life, man. And I just went through a hell of the time, a hell of a calamity, losing everything, and coming back. I mean, you guys might think that was so incredible. I don't know. Swoking weed, too, shit. So you don't worry that the fentanyl that might make it into crystal

will cause you to overdose? I don't do it like that, bro. I mean, I do it if I got it. But can't a little bit? Isn't that enough? That's sick you kill you. That's what I hurt, you know? So you don't worry about that, though?

No. Why not? It's not a thought. If it's my time to fly, it's my time to fly. You know? Are you worried that your kids could start using drugs? They're already using drugs. Drugs are everywhere in this country.

And if you got kids and they're going to be teenagers and you stay in the hood, they're going to probably use drugs. What kind of drugs are they using? Whatever the fuck the teenagers use now, I don't know. I didn't say it. My kids smoke marijuana. I don't know if they're doing the pills and all that other shit. I hope not.

How do you pass the time? I read. I start, you know, read books and just try to think back to better environments that I lived in and stay positive and never be fake, man. You know? That's it, you know? Do you get lonely? I'm a truck driver.

I get lonely all the time. But I'm happy with being by myself and Jesus. Where would you like to go after this? I'm staying here in San Francisco. I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to be in the tenderloin or somewhere close around it, working here, probably going across the bridge to work, either one in the bay or the go to.

It don't matter. And I'm going to get a better place eventually off making more money and shit. You know what I'm saying? I'm out, man. It's been a great experience, man. want to be so close to the tenderloin? What's, what's attractive to you about it? Is it the rent? I like the architecture. The archer, and the

people. I love the people. I could talk to anybody here, you know. Like, I'm talking to you guys. I don't know if you guys, I don't give a fuck. I hope my future is going to be bright. I mean, if I would say no, what kind of person will I be? Like, damn,

I ain't got no hope. I'm just getting getting high and shit. Just, no. It's not my life, man. I mean, I do, but fuck it. San Francisco might be the most stratified city in North America, an embodiment of our society as a whole, the unimaginably rich pressed up against the poorest of the poor.

And everywhere the drugs flow. And the money, well, that goes back to these guys. The most powerful cartel in the history of the narcotics trade, where billions are collected off the streets every year from people like Jacozy. Out of sight and out of mind.