The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - Fentanyl Dealer Exposes Rehab Center Fraud, Selling Drugs To Patients, & Life On Skid Row

Episode Date: June 21, 2026

Anthony Santana survived fentanyl addiction, homelessness, drug dealing, and nearly 100 overdoses — but what he saw inside the rehab industry shocked him almost as much as the streets. In this ep...isode of The Connect, Anthony exposes the dark world of rehab corruption, body brokering, and treatment centers allegedly profiting from fentanyl addicts through insurance payouts. He breaks down how addicts are recruited, paid, recycled through detox programs, and sometimes pushed back into relapse so the money keeps flowing. Anthony also opens up about selling fentanyl and Xanax in California, living homeless in Los Angeles, dealing drugs in MacArthur Park, surviving overdoses, and eventually finding real recovery after years of addiction. This is a raw look at the fentanyl crisis, the California rehab scam, and the hidden business behind addiction treatment. Go Support Anthony! Rehab and Recovery: https://www.instagram.com/losangelesoutreach/ IG: https://www.instagram.com/4nthonys4nt4na/ This Episode Is #Sponsored By The Following: Betterhelp! You don’t have to say yes to everything this summer. Find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at https://betterhelp.com/connect Cash App! Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me #CashAppPod ash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa U.S.A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discounts provided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow 00:00 Opening & Anthony's Background 03:35 Addiction, Overdose, and Hope 06:20 Growing Up, Family & Early Drug Use 11:00 Dealing, Trauma & Progression to Fentanyl 17:00 Scaling Up Drug Operations 20:33 This Episode Is Sponsored By Betterhelp 221:58 Dangers, Setups & Violence 34:27 Homelessness, Drug Dealing in LA, and the Senior Home 40:22 This Episode Is Sponsored By Cash App 41:45 Body Brokering & Rehab Industry Corruption 46:02 MacArthur Park: LA’s Open Air Drug Market 51:41 Drug Availability, Pricing & Street Hustle 53:00 Inside the Fentanyl and Xanax Supply Chains 57:00 Adapting, Staying Out of Jail, and the Online Drug Trade 01:02:56 Bay Area Drug Scene & Violence 01:09:47 Struggles with Treatment & Homelessness 01:16:00 Human Trafficking, Customers, and the Underbelly of LA 01:20:35 Getting Sober & Redemption 01:26:00 Reflections, Family & Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:48 We can all be reunited. Has it's demons. I can never have lived without you. I won't let you live without me. Evil Dead Burn. only in theaters July 10th. Most of my life I've been addicted to drugs. It was a slow count down to my own death.
Starting point is 00:01:04 How many drugs would you have for sale at a time? Anywhere from like 10 to 15. I see gun barrels, so I hop behind a van immediately and I start hearing bullets fucking flying by, whistles near my ear. The tires are popping. I literally thought at any moment I was going to die. 50 to 60% of the sober livings in treatment centers
Starting point is 00:01:22 are body brokering their clients in California. And we're talking like 100, hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, bro. It's insane. There is really hope. Like, this shit doesn't end in death every time. Anthony Santana is a recovering drug addict who used and sold large quantities of fentanyl on
Starting point is 00:01:41 the streets of downtown Los Angeles for years. Anthony reveals what life is like as a junkie in downtown L.A.'s MacArthur Park, the most infamous open-air drug market in California. He also exposes the widespread corruption. of drug rehab clinics who commit massive health insurance fraud without providing any real addiction treatment and who in some cases are outright dealing fentanyl to addicts inside of their clinics. It's a fucking mess. Anthony is now a year clean and sober and is running his own business providing marketing
Starting point is 00:02:16 services to ethical drug rehab clinics. This young man is lucky to be alive, and I'm grateful he's here sharing his story. Ladies and gentlemen, straight from the pits of hell, it's Anthony Santana, right here on The Connect with Johnny Mitchell. The reality of what drug trafficking in America looks like today is what you went through. Like, the old guard is gone. They're either dead or doing life in prison. When we talk about, like, cartel members in the United States, I look at a story like yours, like the quintessential California. who sold a bunch of drugs, but also is completely addicted himself the whole time. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:03:05 I mean, I always say, like, it felt like such success, but, I mean, honestly, it was a slow countdown to my own death. Like, I could see myself slowly dying day by day. I looked at myself in the mirror and, like, bro, I completely couldn't even recognize myself. I can't believe you're alive. Yeah. And I just met you and talk to you for 10 minutes. Like, you should be dead.
Starting point is 00:03:26 Yeah, a hundred times by now. No, for sure. I mean, I've woken up in hospitals to my mom crying to me. Me, myself, like, walking up in bed with my arm, couldn't feel my arm from sleeping on it all fucked up after trying to overdose myself. Like, there's so many times and so many things I just shouldn't be here right now. But, I mean, I know I'm here to tell people what the reality is like of addiction and that there is really hope.
Starting point is 00:03:51 Like, this shit doesn't end in death every time. So you only a year sober? Yeah. How long were you? using for? I started using when I was like 13. I found vicaran pills in my mom's cabinet. I started going hard with those and my addiction progressed until I was about pretty much I was using all the way until about a year ago off and on and I had a one one year clean in that whole spurt and uh maybe like three and two months every once in a while. But most of my life I've been addicted to drugs or
Starting point is 00:04:25 alcohol. Have you ever overdosed? Plenty of times. Probably like at least 100 times. Yeah. All from fentanyl? Fentanyl, Xanax. I was really addicted to Xanax the most. I mean, that's what gave me like the most comfort in the environment I was growing up in
Starting point is 00:04:41 and all the people I was losing around me and the traumatizing shit I was going through. Like, it just felt like a never-ending trauma. So I just continued to use over and over. Like, I never really stopped. How do you get resuscitated from an overdose? Like, were you given Narcan or...
Starting point is 00:04:57 Yeah, my last overdose, my girl actually was there. They ended in Narcan me, I think, like, nine times. Yeah. Wild. Do you think that's why overdose deaths are down? Like, there was over... Overdose deaths are way down from fentanyl. Do you think it's because there's the availability of Narcan? Probably the, yeah, probably the availability of Narcan, I would say, I didn't even... See, that's the news to me. I didn't even know it was down. Yeah, that's one of the things that... they're touting, like, you know, with the administration is like, wow, since we took over, we go so hard against these cartels, look at all these overdose deaths are down.
Starting point is 00:05:35 But I think it's hard for me to believe that's true, man, because I was homeless, like, literally a year ago. And I'd seen probably, like, at least five people overdose a day around me on the streets. Like, when I was full out homeless and we lost the U-hole and we're just out on the streets, I was seeing people overdose everywhere. So it's really hard for me to believe those statistics they put out when I really lived it. Were they dying? These are those people were dying. Yeah, dude, I saw
Starting point is 00:05:57 somebody in MacArthur Park. Well, I've seen multiple people overdose and die, but just to show you how extreme MacArthur Park is, I've seen someone get shot in the back of the head, and they literally stayed there for six hours. I went to go do some drug shit, came back, and their body was still fucking there. Like, people
Starting point is 00:06:14 don't, they don't care about these addicts whatsoever. My God. So where are you from? I'm from the Bay area originally, the East Bay. I just tell people the East Bay Area because my mom had me at 17 and we just moved all throughout there. Oakland. I lived in pretty much every city.
Starting point is 00:06:29 Grandparents lived in Oakland. My other set of grandparents lived in Polo Alto. And my mom and me lived throughout Union City, Hayward, Oakland, everywhere, really, Fremont. I lived in every single city. And your dad was not in the picture. Yeah, he left me before I was born. So my dad was, he was in the Cinello cartel and he was distributing drugs for them going up and down. the border. So he was really, he just left my life before I was even born. You didn't really,
Starting point is 00:06:59 he wasn't around ever. And you didn't meet him until years later. Yeah. I had a meeting him when I was like, I want to say like 21. I was still selling drugs in East Paul Alto. And the guy that I was selling drugs with, he was coming to gum distribute to me. And the guy that he was getting from was my father. So I come outside and my dad's fucking there. And it's crazy. Like I understood immediately why my mom kept me away from him for so long. Like, why would she ever want me to be around somebody that's selling drugs, you know, having hos around him all the time? He was with somebody that he was just, that was clearly just his hoe, not a girl that he
Starting point is 00:07:34 respected whatsoever, the way he was talking to her, at least. So. Do you get a better price, though? Oh, for sure. I got a better price. Yeah, after that, yeah, my life completely changed after that. I started to sell way more. I started to get his clients.
Starting point is 00:07:49 He started to send people to me. So I started to get favors and he was trying to make up for all the past, you know, so. That was like his alimony. Right. It was like, I give you the better ticket, give that shit to you for the low. Yeah. What were you selling for him? I'm selling for him Coke, weed.
Starting point is 00:08:05 And then, like I said, I grew my own network, so I never relied on one person. I probably had like 10 to 20 plugs for every single drug, like LSD, Xanax, like every single drug, mainly because I was addicted to all this shit. So I better never run out of it. but also I had plenty of people hitting me up all the time. If I ever ran out, it was an issue. A lot of people were giving me an issue with that. So I always made sure that I had plenty of plugs other than my dad. Hmm.
Starting point is 00:08:31 What were you the best at? What sold the most, the fastest? Probably cocaine. The first time I saw cocaine sell, I knew I was going to make a lot of fucking money with it. You know, I just had been gone fronted an ounce. And that shit sold within like three days. I was like, I had never seen something sell that fast. I thought Xanax was going crazy.
Starting point is 00:08:51 Coke was going crazy. People had like a mental addiction to it. It wasn't just a physical addiction, you know? So I feel like sometimes for me, mental addictions are a lot harder to break than physical addictions. You just have to get through that withdrawal. But for some reason, mentally people just couldn't break that cocaine habit. But I've seen a lot of people go to detox and stop buying fentanyl for a long time. But cocaine was consistent for years.
Starting point is 00:09:17 So you got started out like 50s. 15 years old? Yeah, 15. Okay. So, and then you're slang in, tell us how you grew. Yeah, so how I grew my scale was I started going on Craigslist. So, for example, like, blue jeans, men, size 30. If you seen that ad on Facebook or on Craigslist, that was probably me, especially if it
Starting point is 00:09:38 was a 510 number or if it was a, like, random ass number, it's probably me. And all these, like, ads were just all me. What does that mean? Blue jeans, size 30. What does that mean? I'm selling Blue M30s. I'm selling depressed fentanyl. Hit me up if you need that.
Starting point is 00:09:53 And I was doing all sorts of codes. I was pretty much practicing SEO before I even knew what SEO was. Right. So you're marketing, literally doing online ads for fentanyl. Yeah. Yeah. And Xanax, ladders. That's what Xanax was ladders.
Starting point is 00:10:07 Where do you put it? Where in Craigslist do you put the ads? Under what category? A lot of it would be under all sorts of different categories. Like, for example, it would be men's clothing for that. A lot of it would be miscellaneous so that it could just pull up on anybody. if they're searching something related to it. So me and my girl, I taught her that too.
Starting point is 00:10:24 That's how we took L.A. over and got a whole network ourselves out there. After getting sober, losing everything, we ended up getting right back on Craigslist. So is that the way to market? Like, was that, is that the most effective way to, like, take over a town? 100%.
Starting point is 00:10:39 Yeah. To take over a town, find connects. Like, every time somebody hit me up on there also, it gave me the inclination that they were looking on there, not just for me, they were looking at other people too. So I started going on there to see other people's ads, and that's how I found other connects.
Starting point is 00:10:56 That's wild, yeah. Yeah, bro, I've always used my survival instincts to survive in any town. Like, I always knew that wherever I go, I'd be all right. Twizzlers keep the fun going. Yeah, I know. I just stopped whatever you were listening to to tell you that Twizzlers keep the fun going.
Starting point is 00:11:15 Well, irony isn't my forte, But twisty, chewy, yummy Twizzler sure is. So think of Twizzlers as a little palette cleanser for whatever's queued up, which, by the way, should be coming very soon. Like any second now. Okay, Twizzlers, time to keep the fun going. Okay, so back up a little bit. You're 15 in the bay.
Starting point is 00:11:40 Yeah, like, tell us about all the different drugs you did, sold. Yeah, so I got first really addicted to Vicodin. That was when I was like, probably like, I'll just say 15 from my mom's, like, from my mom's respect. I got addicted to drugs at like 15, and I started getting addicted to Vicodin. It really progressed when I got pretty much put in this situation where this girl raped me when I was 15. I was working at BJ's and she took me over her house, put Xanax in my water. I woke up with her on top of me. And I don't even know if I didn't even understand that it was rape back then because it's a
Starting point is 00:12:17 girl fucking me at the time. So that's how I just looked at it. Now I look at it. Like she definitely was raping me. She was like 20 something years old. I was 15. But yeah, it got me fully addicted to Xanax. She ended up becoming my like Xanax pimp. She was pimping me out and just give me Xanax. And eventually I was like, fuck this. I'm not going to fucking just go to this girl and continue to give her dick for Xanax. So that's when I like started going out on my own trying to find other dealers. And then I started using my own smarts and getting on the internet. You know, the dark web was around at that time. They were still a Silk Road.
Starting point is 00:12:51 They were still all of that. So I had a lot of friends that were pretty fucking smart. I went to a private school for the last, like, three years of high school. And I went to a school that was sponsored by Apple. So these people were always on their laptops, doing all sorts of crazy shit. But some of these people were drug addicts, you know, so they were getting drugs for the low, getting really, really good drugs on the internet. So I started getting connected with them. So you're getting real Xanax?
Starting point is 00:13:16 Oh, yeah. People were getting real Xanax at that time still. It wasn't until my like junior year once everyone started getting hit with the fentanyl late Xanax pills. At that time it was like you better hope you're addicted to fentl so you don't overdose. I was going to say, so that was the era where Fent first got introduced and that's where you saw the crazy spike in deaths because people didn't know they were getting it. Oh yeah, I lost so many friends. One of my friends I was supposed I was selling, I see I was always a nice dealer. I never really wanted to kill anybody
Starting point is 00:13:47 I never wanted to hurt anybody I never wanted to put anybody in a position that I felt like I was in So I really like a lot of my friends I would stop selling to one of my friends Miguel I stopped selling to him Literally the next night His mother found him in his room dead
Starting point is 00:14:00 Because he went to go buy Xanax From somebody else in those fentanylaced Damn so it's like Did you wish you had sold to him Yeah looking back I wish I would have just kept him in his addiction with me Like looking back I wish I would have done that with a lot of people
Starting point is 00:14:14 that I turned away in that same situation happened. That's so crazy. That just is the luck of the draw. I could have been you because you were taking Xanax. Tough. You were addicted to it. I was taking 50 a day. I was taking 50 bars a day.
Starting point is 00:14:28 And if you don't think that is realistic, go ahead and try taking Xanax every fucking day. You'll get a tolerance like that too. That can happen to anybody. Yeah. That's insane. Yeah. That's insane.
Starting point is 00:14:39 And that that's what progressed into fentanyl? or did you take a stop on the road on the heroin or? No, dude, I just immediately graduated to fentanyl. Okay. I went from Vicodin pills to fentanyl. How old were you when you started doing just straight fent? Probably like 17. Damn.
Starting point is 00:14:59 Yeah. And that was in the Bay still? Yeah, Bay Area still. I was in the Bay all the way up until like 21, 22. Did you go to the tenderloin or did you have like a good plug? No, I had a good plug. I wasn't going to the tenderloin buying from the Haitians or any of those people over there. I had like Vietnamese people selling me pretty good fentanyl.
Starting point is 00:15:17 I had Arab people selling me like these Xanax pills laced with fentanyl. And then eventually I started finding out where all these people were getting it from. You know, so that's where I started to grow a bigger empire, my own network for myself. Where were they getting it from? They were getting it. So a lot of people were going up to humble to get their weed. So that's where I was getting the weed for the good prices. A lot of people were going to Stockton to get Xanax and fentanyl for the low.
Starting point is 00:15:40 So I started making that drive out to Stockton. started getting a lot of friends from Stockton, started getting a lot of friends from East Paul Walto. It's really like all these drugs are always in the hood. You don't have to go far. You know, you just find your local hood and you'll find somebody that's connected deeply. And you didn't know your dad at this point,
Starting point is 00:15:58 so you didn't have... Did he ever get off into fentanyl or was he just dealing with Coke? No, my dad, I don't know a whole lot about him outside of him drug dealing cocaine a whole lot. I'm pretty sure in this time and age, the Sinalo cartel. I was open with selling fentanyl now ever since the brother started taking over.
Starting point is 00:16:18 You know, it's just been all fentanyl. So I'm assuming my dad probably gotten to fentanyl. I know he had a heart attack like three years ago. This dude literally is so insane. He faked his own death. To me, sent me a picture of him on a hospital bed dead. So I thought my dad was dead for like three years. And then about a year ago, he hit me up out of nowhere saying he's alive again.
Starting point is 00:16:37 Like this dude, he's probably on so many drugs, bro. Like to tell your son and fake your death and then come back. years later, he's fucking gone, you know. That's crazy. I think most of the people that are career drug dealers are like your dad. Yeah. They're not like... Mentally unstable.
Starting point is 00:16:53 Yeah. Yeah. They're not like Mayo Zimbada with a... On a horse when they're 75. You know, talking to politicians. Yeah, yeah. Or mediating, you know, deals between politicians. You know, like old school, like godfathers.
Starting point is 00:17:07 I think most people are like your dad, your father. I mean, that's what happens. And, like, ultimately, I think the number one trend, even on your show is, like, this thing ends the same way for everybody. You either are dead in jail in a fucking facility trying to get clean or, like, that's it. It was the only roads to the end of this. So you're 17, you're doing fentanyl, you're selling LSD? Yeah, selling LSD, Mali, Shrooms. I made sure when I was a drug dealer that I was.
Starting point is 00:17:41 I had every fucking thing. I noticed and I took, I really, I took my, my business model from McDonald's, like honestly. I was seeing how they had fucking everything on the menu, that it was a one-stop shop. So I tried to mimic that with my drug dealing. I tried to make sure when somebody came to me for cocaine, I had something further come down.
Starting point is 00:18:00 I had Xanax too. I had some weed to go with that for the girls you're with. You know, I have everything. So that's really how I was able to sell it to pretty much anybody and everybody. How many drugs would you have for sale at a time? How many different drugs? Anywhere from like 10 to 15? Seriously.
Starting point is 00:18:17 There's sometimes different variations. LSD, shrooms, and by the way, different variations of both of these. Ecstasy, DMT, Xanax, fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, crack, and then a bunch of research chemicals. Yeah, this is. like definitely Bay Area smart guy kind of drug dealing. Definitely. You know what I mean? Yeah, 100%. I knew that I was selling drugs a lot better than everybody else and I knew that that's why I had a target on my fucking back all the time. I can't even tell you. The reason I shake so much when I talk about this shit is because I literally like feel like I'm living in it again. And like when I say I escaped hell, I really fucking mean that. Like I was always looking with my head turned around trying to see if somebody was fucking about to kill me.
Starting point is 00:19:09 My best friends set me up, you know, multiple times. You know, I didn't know who to trust out there. At one point, I was living in Airbnb's to Airbnb's because I didn't even want people to know where I lived. And somehow people still found out where I lived and matured up. Like, it was fucking insane. You guys shot out? Plenty at times.
Starting point is 00:19:26 Damn. Who were you selling to, though? Like, are you selling to, like, street people or were you selling just to, like, you know, hiring people? It was honestly a mixture. I didn't discriminate when it came to selling. You know, if you were coming to me to buy. $10 every fucking every day, I'm fine with that.
Starting point is 00:19:42 If you were coming to me, coming to me to buy $100, $10,000, it really didn't matter. You know, I'd make sure that I had the quantity for you. What happened when you got set up? So, I mean, there's been multiple times I got set up, but I could tell you when I was fronting my best friend, I had a friend named Mike, and I started fronting him drugs.
Starting point is 00:20:06 And I guess the number one mistake is fronting it, anyone drugs, which I learned after, but, you know, it stayed the way it was supposed to for a while. I was giving him drugs. He was selling everything. I was giving him, like I said, that, you know, I had 10 drugs to sell all the time? I was given about six so that he had pretty much a party pack, you know, that's literally what he would call it himself, a party pack. So I would give him that every couple days. And then one day after friending him, literally a couple hours later, he hits me up and says he already got it off. And I had just given him a fuck load of drugs. So I was like, there's no way this dude just got all these drugs off in my head and my heart i know that i'm about
Starting point is 00:20:43 to get set up everything in my gut told me like this dude's about to fucking rob me i was like but in my head i'm like this is my best friend bro i grew up with this dude like there's no fucking way he's gonna do this to me but of course i went against my gut he calls me telling me he's on my on his way i was living in east paul walto at the time and uh he tells me he's already driving over the bridge because i was gonna tell him like no like don't come through i'm busy right now I was going to try to stall him, you know, to try to hopefully give him some sense, because I knew what was happening. And he told me he was already coming over the bridge. I hear the knock on my fucking door, and he says he also brought his cousins.
Starting point is 00:21:21 I checked my phone last second. He said, he brought my cousins with me, too. I've never in my life seen him with any fucking cousins. So, like, that was, like, the fucking set in stone that I'm about to get fucking robbed right now. So I grabbed my gun. And I grabbed my gun, and he knocked on. the door, I let him in. I packed a bag that had probably like 10% of what was supposed to be in it because I knew what was about to happen. And I was with a girl at the time. So I let her just stay in
Starting point is 00:21:51 the room. I said, just lock the door. And I told her, I'm like, I have a feeling something bad. It's a lot of fucking happen. Just stay in the room. If you hear anything. If you hear a fucking gun shoot, just get the fuck out of here if you can. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Are you guys in therapy yet? You should be. I'm in therapy. And at this point, I could not live without it. It's one of my favorite things during my week. It's the thing I look forward to the most. It's like clearing all the toxic crap out of my head. And the therapist who I've been going to for years,
Starting point is 00:22:20 I met on BetterHelp, way before they were a sponsor of the show. BetterHelp is the world's number one online therapy platform. They've got over 30,000 therapists to choose from. They've got an average rating of 4.9 out of 5 for live sessions based on 1.7 million client reviews. Here's how it works. BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who fits your needs.
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Starting point is 00:22:56 So I absolutely cannot stress enough how important mental health is. So do me a favor. Go over to betterhelp.com slash connect and see what they're all about. Once again, that's betterhelp.com slash connect for 10% off. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer, but find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at betterhelp.com slash connect.
Starting point is 00:23:22 Once again, that's betterhelp.com slash connect. So back to where we were in this room, they're standing about right there to me. And my friend Mike comes up to me, he's like, yo, he's like, so you have the drugs with you. And I was like, yeah, I was like, they're right on the table. I was like, go ahead and get all your stuff. And he was introducing me to his cousins. And one of them I already knew. And it was one dude that did not fucking like me whatsoever.
Starting point is 00:23:48 So I already knew it was all bad. As soon as he came up to handshake me, his other friend came around and I felt the thud in the back of my head. So fucking hard. I knew it was like, it was either Zeus striking down on my fucking back of my head or he just fucking pistol at me. It felt like fucking. It was crazy. I'd never felt a shock like that before. but um i stepped forward a couple times and i started laughing like i don't know why i started laughing i
Starting point is 00:24:15 didn't know what the fuck was going on and i was like bro what are you doing right now like i was in complete shock and uh that's when his friend started to ruffle me up from the back i pulled out my gun and i shot his friend caesar right in the leg and as soon as he got shot in the head the blood squirt everywhere and they all started fucking running so now i'm in my fucking house who got shot in the head no not in the head in the leg in the leg shot him in the leg and i'm fucking tripping out now i'm in my fucking house there's blood everywhere gun just got shot we're in east paul walto one of the most dangerous hoods in fucking america at that time like i was not a good situation i closed the fucking door i ran back into my room locked every fucking door the girl was still in there i told her just go home like figure
Starting point is 00:24:59 out of the way she was like no it's okay like i'll stay with you so she called me down i sat at the sketching my bed just thinking about everything, bro. I was just thinking in my head, like, how I shouldn't be alive right now, how he could have just pulled a trigger in the back of my fucking head at any moment. And that my best friend did that to me. It was a fucking lot to take in at that time. Wild.
Starting point is 00:25:20 I think you got, like, somebody, like, sprayed at you. Yeah. No, that was even, that was even fucking, that was even fucking worse. In the Bay Area, I'll tell you one thing. It's not really gangs. It's a lot of people just trying to make money together. Like, it really isn't like L.A. It's not like everywhere else.
Starting point is 00:25:36 It's just people in groups that grew up together, trying to make money together. And if you didn't grow up in that group, just know that if you somehow mingled your way in there, you're disposable to them. Okay, so I was disposable to a lot of people because I didn't grow up with a lot of people. I always networked my way around people,
Starting point is 00:25:53 never really settled into anybody, you know, any friend group. So I always knew that I was always disposable to people. So that's how I got set up. So somebody hit me up on Snapchat. And they told me they were a referral from another girl. And so I was like, okay, I was constantly getting referrals from people. So I thought this wasn't weird at all. So she tells me that she wants an eight ball of Coke.
Starting point is 00:26:15 So that's perfectly fine. I got a new eight ball coat person. They're going to be on that every single day probably. So I was excited, walk down the street. And for some reason, I didn't bring my fucking gun. For some reason, I always brought my gun with me. And this time, I just fucking walked down with the eight ball. Like, I was fucking, nothing was wrong in the world.
Starting point is 00:26:33 And, uh, I just, I just, I just, East Palo Alto. Yeah, East Pole Alto on Purdue Street. If anyone knows where that is, it's right off of the Dunbarton Bridge, literally right off of there. So I was in like prime time to sell drugs. I was literally right off the bridge. And I'm walking down my street.
Starting point is 00:26:49 And I see an AMG Mercedes start to pull and all tinted windows. I was like, oh, fuck. Like I'm from the East Bay Area. When a carpals lets you all tinted windows and starts to slow down on you and you're expected to sell drugs, something bad is about to happen. So I immediately see them roll down their windows. I see gun barrels. So I hop behind a van immediately.
Starting point is 00:27:10 And I start hearing bullets fucking flying by, whistles near my ear. The tires are popping. This shit was fucking scary as hell. I literally thought at any moment I was going to die. And luckily, like right across from me, this old Mexican lady starts screaming in Spanish. I don't know what the fuck she said. But whatever she said, it scared them. So they all hopped out of the car, ran up to me, started pistol whipping me.
Starting point is 00:27:31 And that's where I have this big scar right here. and I don't really grow hair right here, but that's where that happened. I got pistol-lipped right there, and I got it so dazed, I didn't really know what the fuck was going on after they pistol-wit me. It, like, almost knocked me unconscious.
Starting point is 00:27:46 And I woke up to the ambulance. I was in the back of an ambulance fan, and the police were like, who did this? Like, what happened? I was like, bro, I just got fucking pistol-lipped. I don't know what the fuck happened. Did they fucking coke on you, the cops? No, no, no, no.
Starting point is 00:27:59 I threw the coke. When they got out of the fucking car, I just threw everything. because I thought they were coming for that. So I was like, bro, just take it. Rather, rather that than my life, you know. So, yeah, the Coke wasn't there.
Starting point is 00:28:12 All that was there was a hundred shells. Yeah. Why were they trying to kill you? I ended up finding up after the guy that was hitting me up on Snapchat. It ended up being a guy. It wasn't a girl. He thought I was, like, trying to get at his girl. That was literally it.
Starting point is 00:28:27 Wow. Like, my life was almost fucking taken over somebody thinking I was trying to get at their girl. At that time, I even had a girlfriend. I was like, it was beyond me why that situation even happened. I still don't even understand to this day. But there's plenty of times, like, just like that,
Starting point is 00:28:42 when I was in an Airbnb moving fucking Airbnb to Airbnb, one day I was coming outside to go buy some drugs again. And this girl that I was buying drugs off of, she was in the car and she was talking to some dudes in ski masks right next to her. And I was like, who the fuck are they? She was like, oh, they're here looking for you. They're here with you. And I was like, what?
Starting point is 00:29:02 And immediately they let off the back of the, window fucking shattered and I like look down at my feet and I see a bullet go straight through and I was on so much Xanax at this time I was so fucking just in a fucking cloud I just walk straight to my Airbnb door walk straight to it open the door even pitting in the code to fucking you know open it open it up closed it and I just sat in there like oh what the fuck has my life come to like are you serious I was like I could it was just just like so many situations like that happened and I'm like I don't even understand one thing I do have to tell you that was like probably the most turning point in my life uh I was living with my best friend
Starting point is 00:29:44 Connor and uh he wanted me to go buy weed from him and I went to go buy weed for this dude and the dude that he was buying weed from was this guy named sunny and this guy is a known doucheback in the Bay Area just always known to scam people known to fuck people over you know um so this guy is in front of me now he has a bottle of Xanax juice and he's like yo he's like do you want some of this and i'm addicted to every drag at this time i'm 17 years old so i was like hell yeah so i down it next thing you know i'm getting dragged to my car i am completely unconscious uh next thing you know i'm having just like flashes of what's going on i'm flashing it and now i'm in the car
Starting point is 00:30:26 open my eyes again we're going straight out of brick wall open my eyes again the whole entire car is Fucked. I look down on my body and there's just blood everywhere. Shards of glass all my body. And I close my eyes again and I wake up in a hospital three weeks later after being in a coma. And I ended up having like 14 drugs in my system. Fucking had to pick over 100 shards of glass out of my chest. I had my whole chest look like leopard skin for a long time. For what? Over what? That's another thing. I don't fucking know. The Bay Area is so fucked. People just fuck people.
Starting point is 00:31:02 over to fuck people over there. Like, there's no, like, loyalty to anybody out there. There's no brain thought to anything that people do when they're an addiction in the Bay Area. The drugs that they got us on there are so fucked that people are fucking each other over. They're getting deeper in their addiction. They're, it's just terrible out there, man. Yeah, it seems like it's the West Coast version of Baltimore where it's just chaos. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:31:28 There's, like, really no structured drug dealing anymore. It's, and there's so many different. kinds of the craziest drugs. Yeah, and you say that it's interesting. Like, there is absolutely no structure there in terms of the drug dealing. Like, there's no organization running at all. There's no, there's just a bunch of people making a lot of fucking money and hustling in groups. Dear Canadian exporters, our ambitions, our ideas, and our potential were never
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Starting point is 00:32:21 Are people still trapping weed in the bay? Oh, yeah. How? Yeah, people are still, dude, it's crazy. I don't even understand why people, but some people would rather go to a street dealer and buy their exotic. weed, then go to a dispensary. Because people have in their head this belief that this street dude is not spraying anything on my stuff.
Starting point is 00:32:39 They're not a corporation. They're not. Bro, that dude you're buying from the street to spraying it with all sorts of shit, putting it in mylar bags. You know, like, he's doubling up on his money. You know, they're just as scammy as the corporations. But for some reason, people still buy street weed there. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 00:32:54 Yeah. Yeah. Well, you were even selling weed. Yeah, exactly. And, bro, you know how many times I would skisking. people's weed in the same fucking scale that I just scaled cocaine and people have literally fucking flowered up cocaine weed now like bro I was not in any way regulating the shit I was doing right or people still came to me to buy weed right instead of a
Starting point is 00:33:15 dispensary that's crazy yeah that's where you hear like oh they're putting cocaine on the weed yeah it's like they're not on purpose but on purpose that economically why would they give you a bonus exactly here's some more expensive drugs that you didn't pay for right Oh, that makes sense. Do you think like a lot of Coke gets fentanyl on it from that? Yeah. From dealers like you that are just like have all the different drugs and they're just using there's no...
Starting point is 00:33:42 Yeah, it's just like, yeah, it's very tedious. It's not like five scales for five different drugs or, you know, 10 at that time. I mean, obviously you're not scaling everything like LSD. I'm not scaling, you know, certain stuff. But yeah, I think that a lot of the times, yeah, people are reckless with the way they deal drugs. Did you ever like get up to selling weight? Yeah, 100%. When we came out here, or to L.A., me and my girl,
Starting point is 00:34:06 I thought I reached, like, a level of selling drugs in the Bay Area. That was really crazy. But when I went to L.A., those people are addicted to drugs on a whole other level. Those Craigslist ads that I was talking about, they went crazy in L.A. I was having, like, 10 people hit me up a fucking day to buy fentanyl, Xanax, meth. I didn't even do meth, but I started getting meth just to fucking sell it. Like, I was selling drugs. that I had never even thought would make money before like that.
Starting point is 00:34:35 Like meth was always me a dirty fucking drug that was just cheap and didn't make money. But for some reason, if you had it with your fentanyl, you'll always make money with those two together. Pentanyl and meth? Yeah. So they're putting fentanyl in meth? No, no, no.
Starting point is 00:34:49 Selling them as a package. I got you. You get an ape all of this, ape all of this, whatever, or maybe, you know? Right. So do you have fentanyl addicts that also do meth?
Starting point is 00:34:57 Oh, yeah. So how does that work? So you have a downer? and then the craziest upper. No, I was smoking crack and fentanyl. Like, these things go together. It's like a speedball of the new generation. You know?
Starting point is 00:35:10 It's like the new generation goofball. Whatever you want to call. There's so many terms for it, but you know what I mean? So you're smoking crack. Crack and fentanyl. When I was in that senior home selling crack, I didn't even talk to you about that yet, but when I got into a senior home in L.A.,
Starting point is 00:35:25 a senior living home? Yeah, senior living home. So when I went to done L.A. selling drugs, best place to start is the beginning. So we were living first in an apartment. I had relapse after going to L.A. and staying clean for a long time, a year. It was a long time to me. I relapsed and I started getting full-fledged back into drug doing. Things were going good for a while. We were making good money, selling ounces after ounces. Like, I'm talking ounces of fentanyl every three days. Like, we weren't
Starting point is 00:35:50 just selling a couple grams here and there. You know, we were going through it quick. So at a certain point the LA fires happened and me and my landlord got into it they ended up getting fucking bed bugs in my room I don't know if you ever had bed bugs but they're fucking hell so I ended up just completely living in my car now and the LA fires were happening I ended up getting evicted and now me and my girl are living in a U-Haul and we're still selling drugs at the same level we're selling at but we end up meeting these people in a senior living home this guy named Mike he was a Vietnam veteran and he was doing meth so fucking much. And he liked fentanyl a whole lot too. So when me and my girl eventually got kicked out of that U-Haul, because eventually that happened, and they were like, get the fuck out of the U-hole, you know, we need this back. They ended up sending somebody. They had GPSs on the U-Haul, so we could only stay in them for so long, you know. But we ended up getting into this senior living home with this guy named Mike, and that's where our drug dealing took off. There was about 80 to 100 people in the senior living home that I was selling to.
Starting point is 00:36:56 And they were all doing meth, crack, fentanyl. I didn't have to leave. I just literally had to walk down the fucking hallways and give everybody their fucking shit. It's like living in the projects. Literally, bro. But it was such a nice senior home. That was the best part.
Starting point is 00:37:11 It was in Seamy Valley. If anybody knows where that is in, uh, you know, or Sun Valley, sorry, Sun Valley. Yeah, so out in the, yeah. Sun Valley's kind of ghetto, but it's whatever. It's just a suburb. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy.
Starting point is 00:37:24 So you know how like boomers, They used to always say, like, people used to always say, yeah, when I turn 80, I'm doing heroin. Fuck it, dude. No, they really were. They really are, too. Yeah, they really were, bro. It was crazy. And these people were, like, established veterans, like, you know, decorated.
Starting point is 00:37:41 Like, it was crazy, bro. Oh, so most of them were vets. It was a veteran serum. Okay. That makes more sets. So these are all, like, Vietnam era guys that have super PTSD. Ridiculous PTSD. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:37:54 And they're smoking fucking. fentanyl, whatever on the meth and crack, yeah. In their like little hall, like a little apartment? They really got into PCP hard. Once I introduced that to them, oh, it was game over. They fucking loved that shit. People were drinking
Starting point is 00:38:10 milk, doing weird shit in the hallways. Like, it was a weird fucking senior home, bro. Drinking milk? That was the way, for some reason when they were overdosing on PCP, that was what would give them to fucking calm down. And their money's good. Money's great. They're getting it every month. So,
Starting point is 00:38:27 why are you still homeless or living in a... At this point, I'm still homeless because I'm so deep into my addiction. I don't have the sense to put my money together to get new an apartment. I just have my sense to put enough money together to get the next load and then to get the next load because I'm living in this dude Mike's house.
Starting point is 00:38:45 Why not just stay in here and trap it out? That makes sense. So you make a bunch of money, but then you just spend it again to get high. Exactly. I was so deep in my addiction, and really looking back, I definitely could have just set a couple thousand aside
Starting point is 00:38:57 get an apartment, but I'd much rather just buy a couple more ounces and get that off. How much do you think you were doing yourself? Like what a day? Like a day. Anywhere from like three to five grams of fentanyl. And then when it came to the Xanax, I was like during these past years, it was like 20 to 30 Xanaxes a day. And then when it came to the crack, like me and my girl were sharing an eight ball and going through that so half of an eight ball each and you would do heroin or you do the fence excuse me first
Starting point is 00:39:32 i would do them together bro i like putting them together i would get a dab rig and i would put both rocks together i'd get a fentanyl rock and a crack rock and put them both together and just go down on it and bro i would get super fucking high but at one point i realized that none of the shit was going to overdose me i had reached a point where like every batch of fentanyl that i used was not enough like I had reached a point where I knew I was just going to watch people die around me. So it was the opposite problem. Yeah. Like you weren't worried about OD and you were worried about just getting enough to get well.
Starting point is 00:40:05 Yeah. Like making sure it was strong enough. Exactly. And that was the problem, bro. I couldn't find a bat strong enough. That's really like what started to get me to a point where I was just miserable all the time. I was just always in withdrawal. I was always feeling shitty.
Starting point is 00:40:19 Me and my girl, the worst time that I had in my addiction was me and her had just got arrested, just got let out of jail for possession. We were sleeping in our car. That's when we lost our car and how we ended up in a U-hole. They arrested us and I'm outside of Burbank.
Starting point is 00:40:35 We got arrested in Burbank. You're familiar with L.A., right? Yeah. Yeah, so Burbank police are fucking assholes, dude. We got arrested. They took our car, threw us back out and I was sitting under a stairwell, freezing cold, withdrawing,
Starting point is 00:40:47 looking at my girl and I was like, we got to get clean. Like, we can't keep living like this. Like, this shit's not going to end well, it's either going to end with my girl fucking dying and me living the rest of my life carrying that. And that's pretty much it. Or us getting fucking clean and trying to figure this shit out.
Starting point is 00:41:04 So for like the next three months, we did everything we could to get into a treatment center or a shelter. But one thing I realized in those three months is that LA does not give a fuck about their homeless people. No, they definitely don't. But also, you were doing something called body brokering, which is super fucking crazy. This is like fraud. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:41:24 On another level. Can you explain what that is? Yeah. So I personally wasn't involved in body brokering. I never got bodybroker myself. The people all around me were. So what body brokering is basically is there's going to, so say Johnny you, let's just say I just met you and I see that you have somewhat of a drug problem. Like Johnny, you know, you can go to treatment for 30 days and I give you $30,000 with that New York shit policy you have.
Starting point is 00:41:50 And that's all you have to do. Just go to treatment. I'll even give you a weed pen in there. to get high, you'll be all good, bro. Just stay in treatment for 30 days, and I'll give you $30,000. And that's how that goes. Wait a minute. I'll give you $30,000 or your insurance company.
Starting point is 00:42:03 The insurance will pay the detox center, and that detox center will pay me, and then I will pay you. That's how that goes. So the detox center is in on it. Yeah, they're 100%. All the body brokers that are working with treatment centers, those treatment centers have open knowledge that the admissions person is doing that. This episode is also sponsored by Cash App. only way that I send and receive money, probably the only way that you send and receive money, too.
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Starting point is 00:43:29 Cash app, Visa, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa USA, USA, Inc. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, sudden debit flex card, and Bankor Debt Flex card. Cashap, green features, savings, direct deposit roundups, overdraft coverage, and discounts provided by Cash App, a Block Inc. brand. Visit cash.com slash legal slash podcast for full disclosures. Okay, so if the treatment and the money gets split up, obviously. Yeah. Like if the insurance company pays the detox center, 30, 30 grand.
Starting point is 00:43:52 So I can do them if I can try to do the math for you. So they get paid anywhere from like, anywhere from like $300 to $5,000 a day. A day. Yeah, a day. So the money goes pretty fucking up. So I've seen some treatment centers get paid over $100,000 for one policy. Okay. So if you're in there for a month of $5,000 a day, that's $150,000.
Starting point is 00:44:20 That's what I'm saying. So, and then. then they'll give a percentage of that to the body broker. They'll give, like, for a New York ship, I know, just because I worked for one of the, like, biggest bodybrokers in, like, L.A. I ended up leaving that job because he was so fucking filthy. I couldn't change this dude. But I knew from him how they were paying people out.
Starting point is 00:44:39 And New Yorkship policies were $25,000 to any admissions person that brought them out. So $25,000 cash, off the record, nothing. Right. And then how much do they pay the actual addict? The actual addict, they'll give them anywhere from like $5,000 to $10,000. They'll give them just chump change. But you're paid, I mean, $10,000 from 30 days for an addict, all they have to do is just stay there and then they have $10,000 to go out and get it.
Starting point is 00:45:09 And it goes higher than that. My friend Tommy was getting paid like $15,000 to like $25,000. My friend out here, his name's Lucas, he's one that actually was involved, or not involved, but like, he saw a lot of the body brokering, and he got bodybroker himself. He told me just last night he got paid $30,000 the last time
Starting point is 00:45:28 he was in treatment. For 30 days? Yeah, for 30 days. So a thousand a day. Did he stay clean after you got out? Oh, wow, it actually works. It works for him. But that's a rare fucking case, bro.
Starting point is 00:45:40 No shit. That's like 0.001 out of 100. So do you think addicts will just do that to get money every now and then? They'll go to a body broker and say, hey, I'll go live in one of these sober living houses for a month.
Starting point is 00:45:54 Yeah, plenty of them do. I would say like anywhere from like 50 to 60% of the sober livings and treatment centers are body brokering their clients in California. And we're talking like hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, bro. It's insane. The money that's getting funneled in through all these treatment centers is crazy. You guys think hospices are crazy?
Starting point is 00:46:17 Look into treatment centers. It's a whole other ballgame. Okay, and who owns these detox centers mostly? I mean, bro, it's really hard to say. Like, I told you, it's, like, I've seen every race involved in this. Because, I mean, I've seen Rico. There's a RICO case going on right now with this guy named Pablo. I don't know what he is.
Starting point is 00:46:38 I think some type of Middle Eastern maybe, but even with the name Pablo, of course. That's his, like, certain, or fake name. But he's involved in a RICO case right now. and yeah it's it's it's everybody bro they're just all there's there's no specific uh race involved in this but i mean like it's just individuals just entrepreneurs or is it big companies oh that's what it was yeah yeah i got you no no no it's big companies for sure like i think the insurance companies are in on it 100 percent i think they're allowing for all of this fraud to happen because they openly know like for example uh for a long time they weren't really buckling down on uh
Starting point is 00:47:16 ID verification. So people were just going on Canva, making up fake IDs, you know, just, and then sending that to them. And they would accept that as ID verification. So the insurance company, it's pretty easy to see when an ID is fake. So, I mean, I think if they're approving it, even the insurance companies are on it. For sure. You know? And then they can just charge more on their policies.
Starting point is 00:47:39 Exactly. They charge more on their policies. The treatment centers, of course, are on it because they're getting paid. They're getting paid the most out of everybody, honestly. Yeah, in LA, that's pretty prevalent everywhere. People are getting paid to go to treatment. And that's how a lot of people end up dead or end up homeless in MacArthur Park because they end up running through all that fucking money there.
Starting point is 00:47:58 So easy to spend a couple thousand. Okay, so tell us about MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, just outside of downtown. Yeah, so whenever, so I always would use Craigslist, but one number one thing that I knew is MacArthur Park for sure had drugs. And there were times when, like, five, to 10 of my dealers just were dry. There were dry spells in Los Angeles a lot. It always had to do with the border closing,
Starting point is 00:48:24 then tightening out, like, some fucking shit happening out of our control. But when that would happen, I would go to MacArthur Park, and I would pivot to selling Xanax more. And I would go up to those ladies. All those ladies, you go, you've seen the raid that just happened?
Starting point is 00:48:36 No, but tell us, for people that aren't familiar with Los Angeles, just describe the neighborhood of MacArthur Park. MacArthur Park is pretty much a giant park that's just littered with homeless people using drugs. It's an open drug market. You can walk there, buy Xanax, fentanyl, anything you want. Yeah, it's people talk about Skid Row in downtown L.A., but Cartharthur Park's actually like,
Starting point is 00:48:59 you go there and you can't even believe you're in the 21st century. No, legit. People are shooting up right in front of you. Yeah. Openly, like you see people overdose, nodding, throwing up. Like I said, I saw someone get shot in the head and they just had their body lay there for. for like six hours.
Starting point is 00:49:16 Crazy. So, and yeah, but a lot of that is actually controlled when MS-13 was big. I think they had a lot of control over those cart people. Because, you know, it's like a Salvadoran. It is, yeah, for all the Salvadorians. Yeah, and so it's, I mean,
Starting point is 00:49:32 you look like you're in the old El Salvador. Yeah. You know, like it's just people selling papusas and fruit ladies and shit like that. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, but it's, but I think it's kind of worse even since the time that I used to like I used to manage when I worked in property management the company owned buildings in MacArthur Park and like God you dude you couldn't even let you couldn't
Starting point is 00:49:57 even trust the guy the super of the building because it turns out he'd be like selling like pimping out like $20 like street prostitutes to like you know junkies and shit like out of a vacant apartment yeah shit like that you know so you're but that was the place to go when the fentanyl dried up yeah that was the place to go if i ever just needed drugs really quick like if any of my dealers were lagging on me and i needed drugs quick i knew i could just walk down that strip and with the little because i'm a nolzabe kid like i don't really know spanish whole lot but i knew the words to get drugs like then it was annex you know the name was fentanyl whatever i needed and they just based on my little accent and i guess the way i look i
Starting point is 00:50:41 don't look like a fucking cop that they would always give me what I wanted. Hmm, who'd be selling it? Uh, so it would usually be an old lady or like a Mexican dude anywhere from like 20 to 30 that looked like he definitely never touched drugs in his life would be the one that you're talking to and you would be asking them for the drugs and they would look at the other person be like, yeah, you have it? Yeah. And then they would grab from under the counter.
Starting point is 00:51:04 They'd usually have like a box or sometimes a box of fruit and under the fruit or under whatever stuff they had would be the bottles of Xana. bags of fentanyl, whatever they have. Wow. Yeah. It's really out there that much in the open. Way out in the open. Like, you could literally just grab one of their boxes and run,
Starting point is 00:51:21 and I guarantee you'd have a lot of drugs on here. But you'd obviously get shot, but, you know, like, they're just open. Wow. So that really is, like, cartel controlled. 100%. That's, like, one of their points of distribution. And, yeah, LAPD's been known about this shit, too. They have a, nobody knows.
Starting point is 00:51:38 I don't think many people know, but there's a police station probably, like, two minutes from MacArthur Park. Yeah. So they know what's going on there. Well, they just did a big raid. Yeah. So every now and then they do try to clean it up, but they'll be back. They'll be back.
Starting point is 00:51:52 Because there's so many users that are there. So obviously. That's the problem. Yeah. There's going to be people seeking drugs always. So there's always going to be someone there that's going to want to take advantage of that. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:52:01 Yeah. I argue with people about that. Like, that's how you actually eliminate the problem as you arrest the drug users. Yeah. Which I know sounds harsh. No, I understand, though. I mean, as a drug addict, what got me clean was getting arrested. It was actually facing some consequences.
Starting point is 00:52:17 Seriously. Like, we want to just, like, let people not have to, like, uh, just let people get off easy. Like, that's not the way to do it. Like, you need people to, like, go through, like, a structured treatment program. We need people to have to abide by some strict fucking rules to learn how to actively, or how to productively conduct themselves in society. is a lot of these people like myself, for example, I was homeless for over a year.
Starting point is 00:52:43 I'd have a roof over my head. You could imagine the manners I had, the way I was talking to people, the way I was acting. It was completely beyond the person I am today. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you're just like, you're out of your mind. You're like a walking corpse.
Starting point is 00:52:56 100%. I do. I was smoking crack every day, doing fentanyl. Like, I was not the person that's talking today. What do you think you spent on drugs? Just like a month when you were in your addiction? Just on myself? Probably like,
Starting point is 00:53:11 anywhere from like five to like $6,000. Crazy. So an addict who's getting out of a detox center that he was paid to be in, he could go down and blow all the money he made in a week at MacArthur Park. Oh, easily. My friend Tommy does it every fucking other month.
Starting point is 00:53:27 I have a lot of friends that do it every other month. So Xanax is like, sounds like the biggest next to fentanyl. That's what like people go to that like opioids. Yeah. How are these street dealers or these cartel people How are they getting access to Xanax wholesale, like that much product? I mean, it was pretty easy for me. Like, the way I got access to it was through the people at MacArthur Park.
Starting point is 00:53:51 They would sell you as many bottles as you wanted. You could get it anywhere as low as, like, $110. For how many pills? 90 pills in each bottle. Wow. Yeah. So it's all it's like $1.25 a pill or something. Yeah, you're selling them for $5, and you're just adding that on to the other drug
Starting point is 00:54:10 combination you're selling people. Does that come from Mexico? Yeah, a lot of them were the farm imprims. The what? They're called pharma prams. So it's basically a Mexican Xanax. They will be in like white bottles with a white cap. Everybody that has used Xanax and is addicted to Xanax knows exactly what that bottle is. Because nobody talks about that. People assume while Xanax is like you get it from a dirty doctor in America. Yeah. So you can actually get quantity from Mexico. Quantity from Mexico. The only thing that I understood is that there's no regular in Mexico when it came to their pharmaceutical drugs because I was taking some that felt like
Starting point is 00:54:45 20 milligrams of Xanax in it and then the other one would be like a dud you know so that was one thing that was a little off about those but yeah American Zanz are hard to come by at a certain point they started banning them everywhere not prescribing them to people because they knew people were getting addicted to them but it's like you already got people addicted to them so it's like right you know so people's turned to the streets and was the fentanyl that they had down there was it mostly in powder or mostly capsules? No, fentanyl I get in. So it depends.
Starting point is 00:55:15 If you want fentanyl in a capsule, I could get you in an M30, which is like basically a fake blue oxy, you know? So that would be one version of fentanyl in a capsule. Another version of fentanyl would be just a straight rock. And that's mainly what my biggest seller was in L.A. I would sell rocks with fentanyl because a lot of people like to dab, and you can't really dab powder.
Starting point is 00:55:37 Right. You know, so it would be rocks of fentanyl. Okay, so that is the pure, that's the purest form. The purest form you could get it in. Yeah, that's why whenever I sold fentanyl, I tried my best to make sure I only got rocked. Because I knew that powder was cut every time. And so you buy it in like an ounce? I'd buy ounces at a time, multiple.
Starting point is 00:55:56 Already rocked up? Yeah, they would already be rocked up in a bag. Okay, and who was your connect? I had multiple. So like I told you, I did the same thing pretty much that I did in the Bay Area. I brought that to L.A. So me and my girl, we got on Craigslist. We started looking at everybody that was doing ads relatively close to what I was doing
Starting point is 00:56:14 because I knew other people were doing it. I wasn't the first ever do it. So we started going, finding a bunch of connects. I started to find people that were giving me ounces of fentanyl for like 600 bucks, 500 bucks. We started getting really fucking low, you know, and I'm selling ounces of fentanyl or anywhere from like $50 to $100. I mean, Graham, sorry.
Starting point is 00:56:33 Graham's of fentanyl for anywhere from 50 to 100. Wow. And I could bust that down. I can sell them, you know, break it down however I want. Yeah, I'm making good money, so I'm saying. Yeah, kill it. You triple or quadruple your money off and outs. Yeah, 100%.
Starting point is 00:56:46 We were doing that multiple times a week at a certain point. I just quit my job completely because I was doing admissions for a treatment center, and that's when I started to relapse. After my dog got ran over in front of me, I completely lost myself again, and I got addicted to drugs. And, yeah, that's when we started to push fentanyl again. And were you just working off your cell phone or can you go down and just like hustle on the street? Um, no, I was mainly just on my cell phone, man.
Starting point is 00:57:14 Really, like I wasn't having to be on a corner ever. My whole life, I was never a corner boy ever. Yeah. Always just on my phone doing it the smart way online using a signal. You know, like I lived in an era where you could be completely off the grid if you're smart, you know? Off the grid or completely on it. Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:57:33 Um, are they selling? drugs on Snapchat still? Well, you definitely, they're still selling drugs on Snapchat, but that's not where I was selling drugs. I was selling drugs through signal. So I would get people my signal number on the Craigslist ad, and I was getting hit up all the time by people.
Starting point is 00:57:49 But I would always verify them. I would tell you to send me your ID with your face on, with your face next to it, so that I know you're not a cop and I know you're real. That way I could just search your name, see if you have any warrants. I would always make sure anyone that I sold to that you don't have any sketchy warrants out because that means you're trying to get that
Starting point is 00:58:05 warrant cleared by fucking me over. I would always make sure that you didn't have no criminal past, that maybe you might have been a fed in the past and you're trying to still to continue that career. You know, I always made sure that the people all I was selling to were vetted. And I saw my girl that. So you verified them on a computer. Oh, yeah. What system do you put it into? A ton. I would use a ton of different. There's a ton of different things on Google that you can use, a ton of people identifiers. But mainly, I would just look up their first and last name, where they're from and put a criminal case or criminal court. And I would just keep looking up words and keywords to see if I found anything related.
Starting point is 00:58:42 There were multiple people. There was one guy I found out with actually a Fed. So I fucked with him. And I sent him to like 20 different spots and actually didn't even end up selling to him. So I love it. Plenty of times I would like, yeah, I used that, that verification method. And it kept me out of jail, bro. So you never got caught up on like a buy bust selling drugs to a cop.
Starting point is 00:59:03 The only time that I ever got caught up was when we were homeless, just having drugs on me, never selling. Yeah. When I was in the Bay Area, I got my house raided at probably like 21 years old. I was living in East Paul Walto, and I was selling drugs heavy out of there. It was when I was dealing with my dad. And I don't know if it had anything to do with him, but it was somewhat shortly after meeting him, my house got raided. and I don't know if he was getting tailed or something, but luckily I was down the street
Starting point is 00:59:36 and my house actually had nothing fucking in it. I never kept drugs inside of my house in large loads just what I was using. So they raided the house. I actually didn't even go back to that house ever again. I saw I get raided from down the street and I left all my shit there and I went to my mom's house
Starting point is 00:59:52 and then that's when I ended up driving LA to get clean. Wow. Yeah. You said you worked for the biggest LSD dealer and San Francisco? The Bay Area, yeah, for sure. This guy named Noah. anybody that has dealt psychedelics in the Bay Area, truly, you have to know Noah.
Starting point is 01:00:08 If you don't, then you didn't truly sell fucking psychedelics there. This dude, and he's the one that I told you, his dad was a pharmaceutical executive. So he was using all of daddy's money to fucking funnel LSD, DMT, and he helped me unlock parts of my fucking brain that I couldn't even comprehend without these drugs. What? Yeah, I was ready to kill myself at a certain point when I first met him after he got shot in the head. And I told him, I was like, bro, like, I'll protect you. But just so, you know, I'm mentally unstable, like crazy.
Starting point is 01:00:37 Like, I don't really see any value in my own life. Me and him got really personal with each other. And he gave me DMT to take. And I took it and it changed my fucking life for the better. Yeah, rehab probably helped more than DMT, I would argue. But, you know, for sure, for sure. One step at a time. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:00:57 So he got shot in the head, this rich kid? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. He got shot in the head. dealing in Oakland. He was selling weed to different people. And he went to Oakland to go sell a large amount of weed by himself. And the guy pulled up right to the side of his car and shot him right in the head. The bullet went right here and went out. Like through his cheek? Yeah, through his cheek. Is Oakland still dangerous like that? Oh yeah. No, Oakland, people like to say is gentrified,
Starting point is 01:01:22 but there's still the same fucking scamming, backstabbing type of people there. Like it's still the same type of shit going on there. That's wild. So how much LSD could this guy push? Dude, I saw him pushing like tens of thousands of tabs at a time. He was shipping these out to L.A. There was like pyramid ones with gold flakes in them. Like he was making all sorts of crazy designs and sending them all throughout the world,
Starting point is 01:01:48 honestly. He was selling them everywhere. Sending them through the mail. Yeah. Wow. How much, where do you get that? The chemical quantity? Yeah.
Starting point is 01:01:57 Was he making it himself? Yeah, he was making it himself. So even the DMT he was making himself. This guy was a wizard in the lab. So that's why I was really just there to make sure nothing happened to him again. And also the drugs that he would always keep there were safe. Okay. So tell us about an LSD lab.
Starting point is 01:02:13 So, I mean, it was just in his garage, bro. Really, it wasn't anything fancy. Yeah. He was just in his garage pressing, putting chemicals together with beakers and all sorts of scientific shit. But I didn't really understand. Do you think he was getting chemicals through his dad? It's very possible. His dad would come in the garage very many times and had said nothing about this thing's going on.
Starting point is 01:02:35 He would see me packing capsules of Molly, like doing all sorts of shit, and you wouldn't say nothing. Wow. So, but his dad was like a, he's like an Indian dude that didn't really speak a whole lot of English. You should have led with that. The Indian part. That would have, now we, now we believe you. Oh, yeah. And he is just sketchy, dude.
Starting point is 01:02:55 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they're big time drug dealers. Like, not just on like, uh, scientific kind of niche psychedelic level like they own the trucking companies that oh dude they they lost the drugs area they own a lot of shit the indians yeah in the east bay especially yeah yeah that's wild so you're packing molly you sold a bunch of molly you said yeah so we were packing him he was like really someone that was putting me on too like i was protecting him but he was putting me on he got me a car uh he got me a load to sell every single day like i always had everything i needed to
Starting point is 01:03:27 So he really just told me he was like, you find the customer and you find what they need. We'll get it to them and we'll split it together. So me and him just became like best friends for a good while and just sold drugs together. I made sure he was okay. And I think he really just needed a friend after getting a shot in the head. You didn't really need someone to protect him. And he was just, were you carrying a gun? Like, did you ever shoot anybody?
Starting point is 01:03:50 Throughout my whole life? Yeah. Yeah, I've shot. I told you I shot somebody when I was protecting myself when they tried to rob me. Right. Right, right, yeah, that's true. Any other times? When I was younger, there's, there's just been many times in my life where I've been put in situations where, like, I just could say I was just too dragged out to really comprehend what I was doing.
Starting point is 01:04:12 And yeah, I have hurt people. Yeah. But a lot of it had to do with me being on drugs a lot of the time, you know, I could say like everything that I did bad in my life, I truly do regret. I truly am remorseful for. and I'm doing everything I can today to make things right because I know that some people can't talk to their sons anymore. Some people can't talk to their best friends or family members and I know what that pains like because that happened to me too.
Starting point is 01:04:38 And I deeply regret everything I did in the streets, but that's exactly why I'm doing everything I can today. So you saw and knew a lot of people who died. Yeah. Mostly from drug overdoses. Drug overdoses, there was a lot of shootings in the Bay Area though, too. A lot of people got shot and killed. Two of my best friends right now, Rico and Dante,
Starting point is 01:04:59 they're both in prison right now for murder charges. They shot some football player at San Jose State University. Yeah. So I saw violence everywhere. My best friends would always go to jail or prison because they would always be involved in stuff. And luckily, I always had good friends to not involve me in their court cases.
Starting point is 01:05:19 You know? Yeah. People don't, people forget, because it's become so associated with like Google and Facebook the Bay Area. But it's hood as fuck in many, many little pockets of San Francisco and the, and the East Bay. Oh, yeah. It's ghetto as hell in some areas, right?
Starting point is 01:05:37 Like, I wouldn't, like, it's really just, uh, they glamorize the Bay Area a lot, but there's a lot of parts that they don't give a fuck about and just let, just go. Yeah. It's really sad because, like, a lot of, um, it's just really sad because me as an addict, Like I've been in so many situations where all I needed was just somebody to put their hand out and, you know, offer some help. You know, because there's so many times where I would have been glad to have been given, like, the smallest amount of support in my addiction. So you don't think you got that? You don't think the state provides that?
Starting point is 01:06:12 No, but like I told you, the last three months in my addiction before I got clean, I was actively trying to get into shelters in L.A. Actively trying to get into the state rent facilities. They all had a wait list. They all couldn't take me for some reason. There was just always some reason that they couldn't help. So, I mean, and then me also seeing people on the streets also getting denied. I didn't really understand who was getting help at all. So I don't understand that.
Starting point is 01:06:37 Like billions of dollars have been pumped into the homeless industry in California. Why is there a wait list? There shouldn't be any wait list. There's so much housing that's been built. That's what I don't get. Yeah. No, and that's honestly, what I've been trying my best
Starting point is 01:06:54 I've been trying my best to reach out to like mayors and people that are trying to run for a mayor in L.A. like Spencer Pratt, I try to reach out to him to see where his head was at with the addiction because they all talk a lot about addiction. They all talk a lot about treatment, but none of them really have offered
Starting point is 01:07:13 an actual solution that really seems like it would work to me. You know, like a lot of them think that. Like for example, Spencer Pratt, he talks about wanting to help addicts a whole lot, but he also talks about how they're unhelpable, that the ones that are under the tunnels are just going to stab you in the neck. So it's like, what is it? Do you want to help or do you not? Well, on the one hand, he's fearmongering because the streets have become very unsafe
Starting point is 01:07:37 in certain parts of L.A. I get that, right? So you need to have law enforcement intervene. But at the same time, you've got to try to figure out a way to actually help these people, you know, most of them that wouldn't be criminals if it weren't for their just insane out of control addictions, you know? You've lived, so if you've lived in, if anybody's lived in L.A., those overpasses that you drive over every single day, if you just go under them, there's a little pocket and literally a door and there's homeless people living in every single one of them trapping out meth, doing meth, like, it's crazy.
Starting point is 01:08:12 Like, there's a whole underworld in L.A. It's fucking crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And like the politicians just stay being trash. You know, like you guys. got to get California needs almost like a dictator, but a benevolent dictator. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:08:27 And he's like a naive Buckele type guy who's the president of El Salvador. Like he needs, there needs to be a guy who like speaks to everybody but is not going to bow down to Zionists and the Jewish lobby, which can't be understated how powerful they are. Dude. You know. And, and of course, all these other lobbies too. It's not just them. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:08:49 it's a whole gigantic mess of different industries that are just taking taxpayer money and putting it in their pocket. And the problem just keeps growing. You know? Yeah, but it's pretty insane to think about
Starting point is 01:09:04 you kind of lived in that that jungle. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've been trying to tell my story for so long because I really think that a lot of addicts that are living in L.A. right now just like see no hope.
Starting point is 01:09:19 that they look at these treatment centers and they see that they really don't care about they don't care about us. Like when I just left sober living I just left sober living probably like a week ago and when I left like I didn't get no congratulations from the owners or anything like that. Instead they were just absolutely angry
Starting point is 01:09:38 that I left without telling them and it just tells you that these people don't care about your success. They care more about getting money in their pockets. So they would rather have you fail. Much rather. That way I stay. in treatment longer and get somebody gets paid more.
Starting point is 01:09:52 So tell us about those treatment centers. Like, how do they actively set people up to fail? So they don't let you get jobs. They don't let you work a lot of the time. They make sure that they just provide a lot of inconveniences, is the best way I can put it. They provide a lot of inconveniences to make it almost impossible for you to get in a position, to get an apartment,
Starting point is 01:10:17 to get to the next step in life. And like that's what I mean, I'm not trying to even bag on the owners that I just left from, the sober living. It's just more like a lot of these people have to change their perspective and understand that, look, if you're really so focused on the money, then be focused on making your client succeed
Starting point is 01:10:33 because that will bring you a lot more money. It'll bring you a lot more people that will attract a lot more people seeing a successful treatment center that's pumping out clients that are like getting their own apartment, starting their own companies. Like, bro, I was homeless 12 months ago. And in these 12 months, I've started a company. I've got seven contracts with detox centers.
Starting point is 01:10:53 I've been able to, you know, get my own apartment. Like, I've done a lot of, like, good things. And that's possible for anybody. It's just, it feels so impossible when you're getting constricted by the, like, ingenuine rules that sober living places to supposedly help the clients. So they want to break these people so they start using again and come back. Yeah, they break you down slowly. Hmm.
Starting point is 01:11:17 Yeah, it's so but you're working with them now. You started a, I mean, it makes sense. You've been marketing online for a long time. Yeah. But now you're doing, now you're working with detox centers. Yeah, so now I, so yeah, so I said I started a business marketing company. It's called Santana, LA Outreach Solutions. So what I do is I do web development, SEO, I do social media marketing.
Starting point is 01:11:40 I provide everything possible to show people what treatment is. And on the websites, I try to go really deeply into explaining addiction. what it feels like to have dual diagnosis. So what it's like to be addicted to cocaine while also have depression and anxiety, you know, all of these things. Because I think the number one thing
Starting point is 01:11:58 that I struggled with and my addiction was having my family never understand me. You know, or people just never understand me. And I think that's like one thing I've always noticed is like people never want to understand that dude that's homeless on the side of the road,
Starting point is 01:12:12 how he really ended up like that and how he's continued to stay like that. Yeah, I always think about that. I look at a guy who's walking around in booty shorts and a fishnet stocking. I'm serious. He watched a tall, jacked black guy, but he's dressed like a woman, just walks up and down barefoot outside of the studio every day.
Starting point is 01:12:34 And I wonder, God, that guy started out. He didn't just, he wasn't just born that way. Yeah. Like, he started out as a person. He has experiences. He has a past. Like, how does it, how does it weigh up to that, you know? It's crazy, bro.
Starting point is 01:12:46 And like, yeah, that is honestly, you know, one thing I always used to joke about when I was in my addiction and like people would be twacked out on crack. I'd be like, dude, everything that dude's doing right now makes complete sense to him. Like, you know the guy that you just talked about? Everything he's doing, putting on that little two to whatever it is, that shit makes sense to him in his head. That's how fucked these drugs are. Like, they make you think that what you're doing is actually what you're supposed to be doing. Yeah, you got a bunch of boils on your leg. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:13:16 I don't know if the camera can see it. That was from fentanyl. Mm-hmm. How do you get that? So, look, I've never been a fucking picker in my life. I got this shit all over me. There was a drug going around in a lot of the fentanyl, like, for quite a long time. I know a lot of people know it from Kensington, the flesh-eating zombie drug.
Starting point is 01:13:35 They started putting that in the fentanyl in L.A. And then I know that it was in a lot of people's fentanyl because, like I said, I had like 10 to 15 dealers at a time, bro. So I'm buying from everybody to see who's fucking... Fentanyl is okay. Nobody's was. Everybody had the same shit in it. And that was what you were using? Yeah, it was Trank.
Starting point is 01:13:54 Trank, okay. What is Trank? Trank is what you see about on TV, the flesh eating zombie drug. Completely just think of fentanyl but a hundred times stronger without the actual enjoyable feeling at all. It's just completely like you're just out, you're zombieed out and you just can't function whatsoever. Like I had my girl on Trank a few times because me and her were both smoking fentanyl and I saw her and she couldn't even move her fucking eyelids if she wanted to. Like it just completely disables people. And then the worst part about it is it does things like this.
Starting point is 01:14:30 It completely just shreds your skin. And it was scary, bro. At times I thought that I would have to like amputate my fucking leg if it continued. It was that bad. I saw some dudes that were drug dealing fentanyl. He literally had an intent. entire bandage wrap around it because every time he touched it, water would puss out. That's how fucking bad addiction gets.
Starting point is 01:14:51 Yeah. That's fucking. It was gnarly. Insane, dude. Yeah. That's insane. I mean, it's just, it's like hell on earth in those places. It really is.
Starting point is 01:15:01 Like, I think back to this one guy named Raven that I was selling with ounces of fentanyl. That's the dude. That's just told you about with the leg. Oh, my God. This dude was like 300 pounds selling meth fent fent fent fent for like. Dude, he was well connected, really well connected in L.A. actually. He would have like a little kitchen and you would just see like, I'm not even kidding, like breaking bad shards of fucking ice just in trays like this. Like this guy was plugged to the fuck in.
Starting point is 01:15:29 And if anybody knows about like the Asian prostitutes in L.A., those were the ones that he was selling to and providing drugs to. Okay, the ones on Figueroa? Yeah, yeah. Okay, tell us about FIG for people that don't know about the blade. basically fig is like what the blade is anywhere else like in Vegas where everyone's prostituting themselves there's young women though it's really unfortunate a lot of these women are like under 18 like there's not it's not like I mean there are also older ladies too but a lot of like fucked up shit's going on there and uh yeah fig's just a place
Starting point is 01:16:02 where women go to lose their dignity lose their souls and it's the host roll yeah and those and those hos are using drugs all on drugs all on drugs I mean, you would have to to get through that day. How could you possibly? Yeah. I mean, like, just think about what they do every day, sucking like 20 random dicks a day. Bro, I couldn't even do one. Like, holy shit, bro. I could do a couple.
Starting point is 01:16:26 It's between me and you. You got a little more hard than me, but yeah, yeah. I'm just trying. It makes the time go by, you know? Damn. Oh, that's so sad. Did you see, like, did you hear about, like, human trafficking? There must be some of that going on.
Starting point is 01:16:40 Yeah, there's a lot of, so, you know what's actually, crazy is the guy Raven that I was actually dealing with, there was a part of him that I just kept turning my head away to. Like, he kept talking to me about how those Asian prostitutes that he was selling to were actually, like, he was their pimp. They were coming to him and giving him money. And I knew the type of guy Raven was. Like, he's the type of guy to definitely rape girls against their will. So eventually I had to get away from that dude because I just knew the evil he was doing behind closed doors. He might not be doing it in front of me, but he led out a lot of words that I understood what he was doing in the back. They were definitely actively human trafficking
Starting point is 01:17:21 people. Yeah, like, and what does that mean exactly? Like, keeping them drugged up? Keep them drugged up to where they don't even understand that they have more value to life than just giving their body out and giving the entire profit to somebody else. It just makes no sense to me. Well, it does make sense to me. The only time somebody could possibly continuously prostitute themselves and give money to somebody else, they have to be drugged up to do that. It's illogical. In Toronto, every arrival is a statement, and nothing says it better than this.
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Starting point is 01:18:16 Canadian New Vehicle Total Registrations for calendar year 2025 for the Cadillac definition of luxury. Again, don't want to sound insensitive, that's also a badass pimp, old school. But this is not like Oakland fucking, you know, like Willie Dynamite kind of... Merrill flashy shit, yeah.
Starting point is 01:18:35 No, this was an old white guy. It is probably like 50s. and just super grimy, has pus all on his leg, and these girls are coming to him to buy drugs and rub it all upon him. Like, he's fucking Hugh Hefner because he has drugs. And that's the reality of what L.A. is, is grimy-ass dudes in power, just getting a bunch of hos. Mm-hmm.
Starting point is 01:18:57 And the law allows it. Yeah, and I think that's why so many people liked coming to me and my girl to buy drugs, because I always had my girl with me. They always knew I wasn't going to be on a weird shit. So girls would love coming to me because I always had my girl with me. Who, yeah, who are the customers? Like, if you're selling the grimyest drugs, meth, fentanyl, Xanax, yeah. Who are, what's the breakdown of like a typical customer? You know, it's really, I just think in all my customers right now and like, it's a bunch of random ass people, dude. It's
Starting point is 01:19:30 like all walks of earth. One thing that drug dealing Tommy is they don't discriminate. And if you really dealt drugs, you know that. There's all sorts of people that like drugs. Tunes, housewives, tech guys, business owners. There's a bunch of dealership owners in L.A. that I was selling to. Dealership? Yeah, like people that own dealerships. Car dealerships? Yeah, car dealerships.
Starting point is 01:19:52 Like, a lot of them were on Coke. Yeah. Yeah, so there was just all sorts of walks of life. Yeah, I know, like, the Coke is more high end. It's a little more acceptable. You kind of get normal people to buy the Coke and the pills and shit. But, like, I'm trying to figure out, like, fentanyl, like, are the youth? What really worries me is like the youth, the 17, 20 year olds that have already given up.
Starting point is 01:20:14 You know, yeah. It seems like that's increased a lot with your generation and with the kids even younger than you. Yeah. There's actually a kid named Houston that I was selling to. He was like 17, bro, and homeless on the streets. I used to pull up. See, I told you how I don't discriminate on selling to people. He would come to me with like $5 sometimes and I would hook him up so he wasn't sick.
Starting point is 01:20:35 But it just showed me that like this country does not get up a fuck. A 17-year-old is on the streets, has no parents, no family taking care of him, not even from this state. He's from Oklahoma. But he got body-brokered out here, and now he ended up on the streets. But point being, it was just so sad for me to see fucking 17 years old on the streets, homeless, no parents, no family, no support, nothing but just the love from your drug dealer. Right.
Starting point is 01:21:04 So, you know, like being his drug dealer, I try to show that kid a lot of love. I tried to do that to all my customers, like, because I noticed, like, the one thing about selling drugs is it takes the soul out of everyone you sell to. Like, regardless of how much you like them and how much you try to talk to them and keep them in a good headspace, like everyone you sell drugs to will eventually lose themselves. Yeah. And you're also on drugs losing yourself. Right. That's why I know, yeah. It's like just this cycle.
Starting point is 01:21:33 It's like drug addicts that are just passing drugs back and forth. To it. Yeah. Like there's very, I mean, I'm sure there are a few Mexican cartel guys that are bringing it up. You'll never see that. You know, it is an organized gigantic multi-million dollar operation. They're giving it to their lieutenants who are breaking it down and giving it out to the guys. Yeah, they all have drivers. They have drivers. Yeah, they never. The guys at the top, they never actually meet the people. They always have drivers to meet you at random places. Who were your connects? Are these Mexican guys? Yeah, those Mexico. So the, the, top top people that I was dealing with when it came to like getting ounces and ounces of everything it was Mexican guys that were just meeting me at different places they always had drivers they would text me but the driver would meet me so you never met yeah never met they always kept you super low key made sure that everything was completely organized that's where organization was and I saw that they valued the way I worked because all I was was just I'm buying from you and moving on like we're not gonna talk I don't need to know anything about you and you always know anything about me yeah cash
Starting point is 01:22:37 straight, never anything else. So we kept shit super low-key. I kept that going for quite a while because that's when I was in the senior home. So shit was moving really fast. And yeah, even when I went to detox, I still have them hitting on my phone. You know, even a year later,
Starting point is 01:22:52 I still have people hitting on my phone to get drugs. So it's going to be a while before my past actually stops haunting me, but I think that's why I really wanted to tell my story here today is because, you know, I do want to leave all of this shit in the past. Like, I hear a lot of people try to escape this life, and it just never ends, it feels like. But I cleared my warrants.
Starting point is 01:23:13 I have my criminal history behind me. Hopefully, I never get back on drugs again. What was the key to getting sober this time? I would say the key to getting sober for me this time was feeling enough fucking pain to be done. Like, seriously, like, I had to just feel enough pain to be like, I can't go through this shit again. You know, like, every part of me was broken. And I, the only thing I had was God at one point. I was never really a believer in anything, but I know that it was a power grader than me that got me out of that fucking homelessness.
Starting point is 01:23:47 That got me out of that fentanyl addiction, crack addiction, like all of these things I don't think I could have gone through alone. But, I mean, at the same time, I'm incredibly proud of myself for doing it. Mm. As you should be. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Well, congratulations of your business.
Starting point is 01:24:05 Yeah. Yeah, I know 100% man. And, you know, one thing also is, like, the hardest thing for me was about getting clean, which is not knowing the resources that were out there. So, like, my biggest goal was starting this company is, like, really pushing out that ethical treatment is available. There is treatment where you don't have to go and get paid to fuck your, fuck your life off over again.
Starting point is 01:24:27 When you go to these 30-day treatments, you will actually be cared for. There will be groups ran, you know, like these people actually give a fuck. So right now I pick seven treatment centers. that I like truly care about and like if anyone needs treatment I'm on uh Instagram at Los Angeles outreach and if anybody needs to get clean please like reach out to me because that's like my biggest mission at this point since I got clean was to help other people because bro I know the fucking pain it's so deep and I understand why so many people just choose the easy way out because it's like this shit breaks you you know in every way well we'll definitely
Starting point is 01:25:02 put a link to that and you know you advertise and market the best we can. Thank you, man. I appreciate it. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because I never, I don't personally like understand the draw to doing drugs. I was always scared of drugs, even like way before fentanyl, like even Coke. I was like, man, I don't know.
Starting point is 01:25:27 You know, I was, I don't get it. It wasn't until I started doing this podcast and talking with people. I actually honestly still don't get it. I just walk around just a little depressed, just like all of us, but I never turn to drugs because I see the inevitability of it just collapsing your world. Yeah. So you know that little feeling you said of like depression that you feel? Imagine that being so overwhelming that you can't even breathe.
Starting point is 01:25:55 I guess that that's what it feels like. I think as addicts, some of us just like feel things so fucking intensely. And genuinely, you have to just. Just the way I stopped becoming an addict every day was just stop being a fucking victim to my feelings. You know, stop using my feelings that are so overwhelming as an excuse to use because just like you said, you feel it. And you go about your day and you're fine. You know, so just don't let it be an excuse, you know. That's the number one thing that will help you stay clean is not making excuses for yourself.
Starting point is 01:26:28 Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's a good point. Like, but even non-addicts can use that advice, right? Yeah. Like don't, like you feel something, but it's just a feeling. Yeah. It's just a feeling. It's not actually who you are.
Starting point is 01:26:41 You're just experiencing it at this moment. Yeah. So not being so attached to how you feel. Don't identify with your feelings. That's it. That's beautiful. Yeah, that's a nugget. That's a nugget that we can all use.
Starting point is 01:26:53 100% right? Yeah. Yeah. 12 steps is rule. I love 12 steps. Yeah. I go to eating sometimes. I don't even drink, but like sometimes I,
Starting point is 01:27:00 will just go to meetings because I had to do tons of that when I was locked up. And so I kind of like have a nostalgia for it. But it's a great way to just, it's like a Bible for living. No, genuinely, I really wish that like I have some family members that aren't even addicted to drugs, but I wish they would go through that just to find it in themselves to be able to accept their past more and be able to accept the things they did. Because genuinely, like you said, 12 steps is for anybody. It's not just for drugs and alcohol.
Starting point is 01:27:27 It's just to be a better person and live a better life. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Did you reconnect with your mom? Yeah, my mom actually, she just recently had a stroke two weeks ago. But I went to go visit her in the Bay Area. Like I said, she had me at 17. That was my best friend. I love my mom so much. And I went to go visit her. We got to reconnect.
Starting point is 01:27:48 She has three sons now with my stepdad. So I got three little brothers. So, yeah, being a big brother now is crazy, bro. So sobriety is insane. This new life is just something that I'm not. I never really imagined. It's like one thing that I realized is like whatever plans you have, the universe has plans a thousand times better for you in store.
Starting point is 01:28:13 If you just walk the right path and just have good intentions and do the right thing. So you from, you started using at 13 and you were pretty much high until you were like 27. Yeah. You had like brief periods, but. Brief periods, bro. I'm not even to call it sobriety, really. I was always just fucked off. And using.
Starting point is 01:28:34 And finding some excuse to cope with life with drugs. But genuinely, I will say there were a lot of times that I started to lose hope. But I'm just so glad I kept going, man. Yeah. So glad I kept going. Yeah, dude. Well, I'm glad you came out here today, man. That was a fucking, that is a crazy life story for such a young man.
Starting point is 01:28:57 Yeah, I know. Glad you made it out. Look, man. No, I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on. And just thank you again for giving me an opportunity to hopefully give addicts like some hope that, you know, you don't have to fucking continue to use drugs, continue to go down that path. There is a better way of life. Well, you will.
Starting point is 01:29:12 You did. So, Anthony, thanks so much, man. And go check out. You can reach out to people can reach out to you or they can, you can give recommendations for the detox centers. Yeah. The ethical detox centers. Exactly. Right.
Starting point is 01:29:25 The ethical ones at Los Angeles outreach. And you could find me on there. Contact me, DM me, and I'll be ready to help you. That's what's up. Don't find him on Craigslist. Yeah, I'm not wanting to go on Craigslist somewhere. That's fucking so crazy, man. All right, you guys, we'll see you next time.
Starting point is 01:29:40 Take care. Peace out.

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