The Pete Quiñones Show - Episode 1237: **Throwback** How They Used Opioids as a Weapon Against White America w/ Trey Garrison

Episode Date: July 8, 2025

60 MinutesPG-13Trey Garrison is an author and investigative reporterPete asked Trey to come on the show to talk about a book he wrote with his partner Richard McClure, "Opioids for the Masses: Big Pharma's War on Middle America and the White Working Class"Opioids for the Masses - Promo code "peteq"Pete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's SubstackPete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on TwitterBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-pete-quinones-show--6071361/support.

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I can't think of a better way to start 2023 than by signing up for Richard Grove's autonomy course. He's going into season nine, and every season he's adding more information in there to help you grow. I've said this before. I don't think that I could have gotten through 2020 and be where I am right now if I were not a participant in season one. So head on over to freeman BeyondtheWall.com forward slash autonomy. I have a couple links there for you. Check it out and get on Richards level. Thank you. I want to welcome everyone back to the Pete Cignonas show.

I am here today with Trey Garrison and a beautiful view. Yes. There we go. How are you doing, Trey? I'm doing great. How are you doing, sir? Thank you for having me on, Peter. Yeah, no problem.

Let's tell everybody a little bit about yourself. Well, I'm a journalist, podcaster, and an author. I have been in our kind of in our thing, I guess, going on eight years now. And one of the biggest projects and the most rewarding projects I was able to participate in was writing this book, Opioids for the Masses. Big Pharma's War on the Middle Class and the Working White Class. It was a nine-month research project, probably about six-month writing project. It was actually a project with me and my partner, Richard McClure, because we really wanted to do something that no one had done before.

And that is not just look at certain – there's that airplane I told you about. Maybe it's not picking up on your end. It's not. We wanted to take a look at the hotspots hit hardest by the opioid. epidemic and the people hit hardest by the opioid epidemic, which is the white working class. And no one had done it. They'd look at statistics. They'd drop somebody into some little small town where there's been a number of overdoses, some hot spot for overdoses. The guy would stay for two or three days and then just file a simple report that really didn't look at the big problems going on.

And we were able to fund a project where I was able to go into the Rust Belt, into Appalachians, the Deep South. I started actually here in Florida, of all places, my research and worked our way up through the Midwest. And I got to spend upwards of maybe three, four, five weeks at a time in particular small towns, talking to the people on the front lines, whether it was cops or judges or lawyers or health care workers or reformed addicts or actual current addicts in dealing with the problem. and we interwove that story, the narrative there, and telling their human stories about the struggles they were facing with a bigger picture look at not only the involvement of the pharmaceutical companies, particularly the Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family, who really paved the way for this in a way that they should be frog march to jail and facing with due process actual capital punishment for, the crimes they have committed. These are, these are, this was,

this was a soft genocide by bio, by a chemical weapon, essentially. Um, and then we were also able to talk to experts, uh, in the field of pharmacology, um,

at various universities, Brandeis, University Colorado, a few others that explained to us in a way that no one has talked about, which is these opioids for the most part, and I'm not saying that they're never necessary, but for the most part,

the way they are prescribed and the way they have been prescribed going on the last 30 years was, was not only unnecessary but criminal. Now, obviously, if somebody is in some sort of, you know, dealing with some sort of bone cancer or some sort of post-op situation, obviously you need stronger painkillers. You know, we understand the issue of emergent pain. I myself in 2012 had shoulder surgery,

and it was orthoscopic, but it was a pain in the butt. And then I had to have this big ice pack thing that flowed cold water over, and I was stuck in my chair for like four days. And they gave me these opioids. And they're but for the grace of God because at the time, my ex-wife or my wife at the time was a psychiatric nurse practitioner. And she was very well versed on the addiction issues on mental health issues. And I had always had sort of that rug, you know, well, if you're depressed, just go out and do something. Oh, if you're addicted to something, just shake it off, you know, white knuckle it.

And she actually made me more sensitive and more understanding of the issues involved. and it was three days into taking Vicodin on, I think, every six hours, that I was sitting there going, well, I'm bored. I can't do anything. Maybe I'll have one at three hours because they do really make you feel good. Somebody that I talked to and interviewed said that the first time you have an opioid, it's like being kissed on the lips by God. And they're not entirely wrong. That's a little bit of a blasphemous comparison. But I realized that, you know, if I wasn't care of. careful. I was going to, this could become my full-time job. My full-time job could become taking opioids. So I handed the bottle to her and I said, you need to treat me like a patient and only give this to me as prescribed. And maybe in about three days, we need to look at just giving me off this because I can easily see how I can get addicted.

This was long before this became a passion for me. This was just my own personal experience with it. And I just got lucky, to be honest. So that's what I've been doing. That's what my background is. My background, I was an investigative reporter, magazine writer. I wrote a few really horrible. I'm glad they got pulled fiction books. Science fiction that nobody should be forced to read. And in fact, maybe that should be punishment for, you know, for minor crimes. You have to read those books that I wrote.

But this one I'm particularly proud of, and I really feel like the work we did was important because no one had done that before. Well, thank you for doing it because I have done episodes on the opioid epidemic before, but mostly from the economics of it. And we've talked about what we're going to talk about, how people get prescribed it and then they get pulled off of it. And now they're hooked and they have to go elsewhere. And they eventually go to the streets.

But one of the things that you talked about right off the bat in the book is that Oxy was sold as a safer painkiller, even though it was opium-based. and they said that there was, they immediately said there were no addiction problems with it. So, and also just throw this out there right away so people know. You wrote this, I believe this was published in 2021. And in 2021, you had said at that point there was on estimate 400 to 500,000 deaths associated with this, which I assume has climbed.

Yes. And not only due to what has been prescribed, but the fact that people get off of it and then they go to heroin, fentanyl, things like that. So talk a little bit about how it was sold to people. It sold to doctors, really. You have to sell it to the doctors first. Well, to understand that, you have to go to the background of Sackler family with Purdue Pharma. They were Eastern European immigrants, Jewish family that came over in the, I think the 20s or 30. You'll have to forgive me if I get a few details a little bit off.

It was four years ago that we actually did the research on this book, 2019, and I've kept myself reasonably refreshed, but I don't have every stat in my head anymore. But they brought, what's the kindest way to say this? They brought innovative marketing strategies to pharmaceuticals that had previously been looked upon by the medical industry as entirely unethical and entirely detrimental to the patients that they took care of. And one of the early projects that they did was in the 60s with, you know, mother's little helper, the early Xanax type anti-depressants or not anti-depressants, anti-anxiety medications and that sort of thing. And so they were instrumental in,

they didn't have, the law at the time did not allow for the advertising direct-to-consumer of these products, but they went really hard with the doctors, and they were, they started their plan of they'd buy up these medical journals and put their own people in charge, and then they issued these studies and arguments that doctors need to prescribe this. They need to prescribe this more. There's nothing harmful in doing this. And so in the early 60s, they sort of laid out the template for this. But it was in the 1990s, the late 80s, 1990s that they really went hardcore with this. They set up the American Pain Management Association, the American Pain Association, again, I'm sorry, it's one of those two names. And it was an advocacy lobby group that pushed for changes in the laws so that, you know, it was only in the 90s that you started seeing direct advertising on television for prescription pharmaceuticals.

And in particular, they lobbied for various changes in the medical industry. one of them was adding pain as a fifth vital sign. Doctors always check, you know, your blood pressure, your heart rate, pulse ox, that sort of thing. They said pain has to be part of that. That should be an integral part of what a doctor deals with. And they also issued or lobbied for these changes where on exits from hospitals, patients would, you know, you can normally fill out these surveys, how they perceived their care, how they perceived, you know, what was done.

And these surveys were in part used for remuneration through insurance companies as well as through Medicare, Medicaid. They hadn't been there. How was your pain at the end of your hospital stay or your hospital visit? So it became more and more of a thing where doctors started getting it in their heads. We have to make sure that the person's not in pain. And that's really, if you think about it from a philosophical, in a medical standpoint, That's a silly idea because while, you know, no one wants to see another person in pain,

pain is often a warning sign. It's a thing that keeps you from doing the same thing so that you don't injure yourself further. So like if you've sprained, if you dislocated your patella, if you've dislocated your shoulder, if you've broken this or that, the pain is what keeps you from stressing it until it's better. Now obviously I'm just talking abroad things. And so like, again, post-op, somebody who's had a serious surgery, somebody's dealing with the pain, of certain cancers. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about they made it to where it was the ordinary daily visits. It was the ordinary routine sort of things where, oh, well, so you're in

pain, before you let me go, let me give you a prescription for 10 various, you know, Vicodin or oxycontin or whatever it is. And then concurrently with that, Purdue Pharma came up with oxycotton, which they just blatantly lied in their research and in their marketing materials to the doctor. which was, oh, well, we have a time-release coating on these, and this thing is not as addictive as regular. We've processed it in a way that's not as addictive as regular opioids, so don't worry about it. So in 1995, 1996, they launched OxyContin,

and within two years had the market share of the painkiller market. And that was sort of the, we had started trending towards the idea of pain management and over-prescription of opioids, but that was the watershed moment. And since that time, since I think it was 1999, and you cited the statistics that we quoted from 2020 of 500,700,000 deaths, we are breaching a million a lot sooner than we thought

because what has happened is over the last 20 years since this has become such a common practice is there have been ebbs and flows. There have been attempts to correct the ship. In particular, it got really bad in the late 2010's, early 2000 teens. And by then you had some movements within government, within certain regulatory bodies, to curtail the prescription of these opioids. And, you know, I'm not saying that they, maybe their hearts were in the right place and maybe some of the policies were

decent, but didn't go far enough or went too far. But there was a downtick. 2017, I think, was the high point, high watermark at the time we were doing the research. And in 2019, we looked at 2017 as the high water mark. And we thought, even though it was a minor decline, it was starting to tick down as a result of these policies. But what we found on the street, on what we found in our research, and what has since emerged since the publication of the book is these, where they had curtailed, that you had actually an increase in overdoses, because as you said, people will turn to the street version of opioids, which is heroin. And heroin is dangerous enough as it is, but then we also have the concurrent problem of fentanyl starting to come into the country. And that's a synthetic

opioid that is far more dangerous, far more uncontrolled, usually made in cheap Chinese labs with no oversight. So you don't know if you're getting what strength, what garbage goes into it. But it is the high number of overdoses that has since happened is in part because of the addition of opioids to these street drugs or the opioid or the fentanyl directly. Let me, let me quote you. Ready for huge savings?

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More than a third of those deaths involved legal prescription opioids. In 2019, there were 81,000 drug overdose deaths, of which the CDC estimates more than 70% were opioid-related. Yeah. One of the problems with measuring this is that there are multiple different factors that go into and into how we measure it, as well as the various, what would you say, inflection points, overdoses, overdoses by death, actual overprescription. because we were looking at these all when we were targeting what communities we wanted to go into. And you also had concurrent with the around the 2016 when government was starting to occasionally, you know, at state levels crack down on this, you had the movement to give all first responders Narcan. So you had sort of a false sense that maybe the problem was going down because you had fewer overdose deaths. but if you look deeper into the data, you had a rising number of actual overdoses. So while the Narcan thing was good for saving lives, it masked the problem.

And what we've seen since the publication of the book with the COVID lockdowns and all that, we saw an increase in the number of deaths of despair. We saw an increase in the number of people recidivating on drinking and using drugs. Because, you know, they're locked in their house. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go. You know, they couldn't go to their meetings. They couldn't, you know, do their sobriety steps or whatever. And so we had a huge increase.

And then last year, I think, and I don't have the numbers in front of me, but we hit another high watermark, over 100,000 deaths by overdose. And it's only going to get worse. It's only going to get worse because there's no serious concern about the people who are dying. I actually had pushback from people. And particularly even on the cover title, the part of it where it says the white working class, because they would say, well, the opioid crisis affects all Americans. Well, sure it does. But it disproportionately affects white Americans and particularly working class white Americans.

And if you sit there and say that white people don't have unique interests, if you say that white people don't have unique challenges and problems that need to be addressed by government or by society, well, you sound like an asshole. you know that's what you are i mean you're sitting there denying an entire people and then denying the problems that they're facing what does that make you that makes you an asshole here's another quote from the book it says we now live in an america where working class predominantly white rural people whose parents and grandparents would have spat at the idea of shooting up are now living and dying with needles in their arms yes um i got to spend i i i i This was, like I said, this was a passion project for me and Richard, but I'm not going to lie and say that there weren't some enjoyable moments of doing the research. I got to go to parts of the country that it doesn't matter where you are or what you're doing.

If you have a vacation, if you have a couple of weeks off, if you have a little bit saved up, you're going to go to the beach. You're going to go snow skiing. You're going to do those kind of things. You're not going to get to always visit parts of rural America, fly over America, whatever the elites want to call it. and I had not actually spent much time in Kentucky out in the hollers or in West Virginia. And I got to meet some of the most amazing people. These are the quote-unquote hillbillies. These are the people who just, you know, have in rural Appalachia that don't really give a damn about the world's problems.

They worry about their own communities or their own hollers. And they would welcome us into their homes, give us real moonshine. And these are, you know, these are country boys, some of smoked weed, that sort of thing. nothing that you would not expect. But what we found was, because I dealt with some folks who had beaten their addiction, people who had been drug mules driving down to Florida back during the heyday of the pill mills in Florida. They would put them on a bus and send a dozen people down there to hit to doctor shop and then hit a whole bunch of pharmacies and bring it all back to Kentucky or to West Virginia.

Those are locations and fled the area with it. But they were dealing with this. And like I said, these are people that, you know, a couple generations ago, even when they came, you know, their sons and daughters came back from Vietnam, you know, there was moonshine, there was weed. But you take that heroin stuff. You take those needles. And that's the city problem. That's not, that's not for us. But they come along.

And it's almost like this story of like Elvis, if you don't know some of the stories about him. He would say, you know, I don't take drugs. I've never taken drugs. I take medicine. And so these people who had previously worked, you know, when they could still work, they, you know, worked at the coal mines. And that's a repetitive and that's a hard job. You get a lot of repetitive stress injuries. They were targeted by these companies to be flooded to market to their doctors in the local areas or to bring in doctors.

As I found out, there's a whole lot of doctors from India that set up shop that have absolutely no compulsion about writing all these destructive prescriptions because they're getting paid. and it changed the attitude of these folks. People who, like I said, had never, who would have chased you out of town if you had said, you know, I want to bring heroin to this part of the country. They've been like, no. And no, but their attitude now was, well, no, the doctor gave it to me. It's in medicine. And that's really, that's to me, like one of the biggest crimes is the redefinition of these words in a way that makes me be unacceptable, acceptable.

Before I get into talking about and asking about whether this was targeted or not, you had already brought up West Virginia, and I copy and paste of this that I needed to read this directly. And yet no alarm sounded at either the CDC or FDA, even as prescriptions and refills spiral beyond plausible numbers. Distributors simply loaded up pharmacies with more pills and collected record profits on the burgeoning sales. Records and congressional testimony from 2018 show that from 2007 to 2012, distributors sent more than 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into West Virginia. Not into the country. This is into West Virginia. and that broke down to 433 pills for every man, woman, and child.

And then you broke it down even further. One town of 400 residents was sent 9 million opioid pills in two years. Another, less than 1,800 citizens received 16.5 million in 10 years. Another population, 2,900, received almost 21 million pills. during that decade. Was this on purpose? Was this about profit? Was it about targeting a population that is, I mean, openly demonized on TV now?

I mean, on the evening news, white people were they targeted? Ready for huge savings? Mark your calendars from November 28th to 30th because the Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale is back. We're talking thousands of your favourite Liddle items all reduced to clear. From home essentials to seasonal must-habs, when the doors open, the deals go fast. Come see for yourself. The Liddle Newbridge Warehouse Sale, 28th to 30th of November. Liddle, more to value.

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gift vouchers, Trump on Dunbiog Kosh Farage. Absolutely. And I've gone back and forth on the issue of whether it was a malicious targeting in the sense of we just want to do this to destroy these people, or was it for profits? And I guess I've come to the conclusion that it was both and kind of interlinked. If we can make a profit and be harmful to this population that we either, you know, on the one hand, don't care about or on the other hand, we actively dislike. Like I said, they use terms like flyover country. They see rural America, white America as a problem. They see this as an impediment to their agendas. And we, if you look through the emails between executives at these companies,

they view white people as an alien population, as a lesser population. And like I said, a lot of these companies have these, like the Sackler family or various Jewish CEOs and all that, that, you know, they see profit first. They see this as we're another tribe. So what is done to us, if it's harmful, oh, well, you know, I still made them my buck, right? You see the emails between them talking about how when certain states would make changes and make it more difficult for them to peddle their wares. They would make jokes about, well, it looks like old Jed's going to have to be a pillbilly somewhere else. He'll have to go instead of Florida, he'll have to go to Tennessee to get his drugs.

the callousness was absolutely criminal and outrageous and it shows that it was intentional. It was not a matter of, oh, well, we're trying to provide this, you know, helpful service and some people are abusing it. It was, we know what's going on. We know exactly what's going on and we don't care. And we are going to turn billions in profit. There was an email in the company short, like a year after the launch of OxyContin in the 1990s where they said, we're going to blind. blanket this country with this. Who says that? Who says that this is, you know, something we know is dangerous. It can be abused. Our attitude is we're going to blanket the country because it'll

make us billions. And it did. So I went back and forth. I, you know, I'm a human being. I don't like to, there's some part of me that doesn't like to ascribe the worst intents to people who are doing the worst things. I always want to try to like, what's the real thing going on here? Because I don't like to live in a world where everybody's a cartoon villain or cartoon hero. It's silly. I've come to the conclusions these are, these are worse than cartoon villains. These are like bond villains.

These are people that human life means nothing. Profits mean everything. And they still to this day deny any culpability or what little that they've admitted to they've done under the most intense litigious pressure and criminal pressure. So I don't think that there's anything positive that you can say about what their motives were. And I think whatever you think the worst of their motives are, you're probably right. I just wanted to take a break and let you know how you can support the show. Head on over to freeman beyond the wall.com forward slash support. You can see every way, Patreon, my website, which is the best way, subscribe star, substack.

There's even some crypto addresses there. Also, there is my PO box. P.O. Box 832, Auburn, Alabama, 36831. Send me anything you want. I appreciate all of you, and your continued support means the world to me. Thank you very much. Yeah, it's interesting that we went through a, moving on through two years and almost will be three years soon of.

You could say some people make the argument that that happened naturally that that was it came from nature it came from a bat okay okay i'll give that this didn't this didn't happen by accident this was planned this was put together and propagandized by people with the money and the power and the influence to do it you can see that in what i don't know if we want to skip to the end in the sense of what little justice has happened um they the deals they cut to avoid culpability, the things they were allowed to do to preserve their profits, in particularly like the Sackler family, while they were under investigation, while they were facing multiple class action lawsuits from the various state's attorney generals, sorry, attorneys general,

while they were facing lawsuits and pressure from the government, knowing that one of the results of these class action lawsuits could be, you know, a seizure of their funds. funds and that sort of thing, they were allowed to ship offshore to offshore banks, billions of personal funds, billions. Not just, oh, I'm going to save a couple of millions for my retirement or set aside my little scape fund. We're talking billions. It's insane.

And then the actual judgments that they got, in particular the Sackler family, but really a lot of these other companies, there was no criminal liability. They were, in the case of the Sacklers, part of the deal that they signed was. was that they would not be liable for future lawsuits, you know, in other criminal or civil liabilities. And they would admit, and they would give over a small token billion or two. But we're talking about a company that, I think at its high point, it was over $20 billion. And a family that had, you know, thanked a lot of that and set it aside away from the company. It's easy to look at some of the judgments they got and say, well, justice was done because we're talking billions of dollars.

but that's not restorative. That's not, that made no one whole. That money was, you know, whatever was done with it by the states, you know, it got redirected. It's not going back into those communities that I visited that were shattered by this. And it's not going to, even if some of it trickled down in some small amounts of damages, some of the worst cases, and it's not. I'm not saying even if it did, but it's not. It doesn't restore entire communities that were destroyed by this. And in particular, one of the story I like to tell is about Jasper, Alabama.

I'm actually from the Deep South, and I had no idea that Jasper was a coal town. I grew up not too far from there. I just didn't know when I was a kid. And I spent about a month there. And one of the most amazing things I learned, I was talking to a drug court judge who had gone to the University of Alabama, my alma mater, who was actually younger than me. And boy, that's a weird moment when you're talking to a judge and you realize he's younger than you. This is one of those maturity things where it's just like, oh, my God, this guy's, he's a kid, but he's a judge. But no, he's a wonderful guy.

But he told me about the history of what had happened in the mid-2010s in that community in Jasper. In the late 90s, early 2000s, the coal mine, coal planted shut down. And it was devastating to the community, as it was with a lot of others throughout Appalachia. In the mid-2010, around 2013, 2015, a company came in and said because of the way energy prices were and fracking and this and that going on. in the ups and downs of the energy market, it was economically viable to reopen those coal mines. That meant 1,500 direct jobs in a town of like 15,000. That's 10% job growth instantly.

And that's direct jobs because a lot of people don't like to, I think about these things because I'm a former business journalist, but when you bring in a 10, you know, when you increase your workforce by 10%, that also has economic implications for the rest of the town. You're going to have a whole bunch indirect jobs, drivers. You're going to have business growth. You're going to have restaurants. You're going to have service industry. You're going to have all these things that will, you know, cause a town to flourish.

And Jasper is a wonderful little town parts of it. The downtown is just gorgeous. It's very historical. I really enjoyed being there. But, you know, you go outside of the downtown and you're talking about adjunct poverty among white people. Third world poverty. I mean, it was just heartbreaking to see what I saw. And what he told me was they came to the town, the company did. They wanted to hire and reopen the mines. They could not find 1,500 people who could pass a drug test. So they had to shelve their plans.

What do you think that does to that community? It continues its death. It's death spiral. This is a lost opportunity to reignite this, to reinvigorate this town is gone. And you tell me that some part of the settlement with the, the various class action lawsuits, you know, none of that money is going to that community

and what could go to that community to make it whole again? Because none of this would have happened if it wasn't for them in the first place. So there's no remuneration. There's no making it whole. There's no in what we've seen. There still has not been justice. Air Grid, operator of Ireland's electricity grid

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TV and broadband sold separately. Terms apply for more infoosies sky.a slash speeds. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at Jasper right now and it's just looks like a very typical Alabama town. And yeah, I mean, my mother's family is all from Western Pennsylvania, coal mine towns. My grandfather did coal mining when he was young.

Yeah, those very easy people to target. I mean, you're talking about people who you work in a coal mine for 10 years. You're going to have pain the rest of your life. And it's just, hey, take this. It's non-addictive. And then it's like, okay, I can't live without this. I had one written here. It said some people who were living through this.

You mentioned that there were videos of people who just like overdosed in public, like on dangerous and things like that. And this one was insane. So even the survival stories can make you feel a bone deep kind of sadness. In Jacksonville, Florida, a young woman candidly told a local news station of her struggles with opioids that started when she was prescribed them at the age of 16 to alleviate the pain of ovarian cysts. Twelve years later, she was still fighting addiction. And this is quoting her.

I remember doing the pregnancy test, putting it on the ground and shooting up while I was waiting for the test results to come back. Crystal Harrison told First Coast News. I was prescribed them for about two months, and when the prescribes, description ran out, I started looking in the street for them. I went from Lortab to oxycodone to heroin to fentanyl. And it was just, and all it was just, it's been a downhill effect since I was 16 until now 18. And that was a 16 year old being prescribed, basically synthetic heroin. One of the things we found was that the first,

exposure to opioid painkillers for the majority of people who end up, for the majority of people who end up using them, but also those who end up using them. There's a difference, obviously. Some people are at, like, I was lucky, like I said, I took it for a couple of days, and that was done. But the first exposure for people who both use them, as well as those who end up being addicted comes from their dentist and their family

doctor. And, you know, let's assume the best case scenario, the best motives on the part of these dentists and doctors, but you get your wisdom, teeth, and they give you a week's worth of cotton, or they did back in the day. What do you think that's going to do to a 16-year-old? You know, they're still trying to figure themselves out who, you know, all the troubles that you go through in high school, all the, you know, oh, here's something better than you. I'm not going to get caught with this, but, you know, as I would with beer or whatever.

When I was in high school, I mean, I was on the hockey team and we had access to quote unquote black beauties. It's amphetamine. Pretty much every, pretty much every athlete in school. And I mean, this is in the 80s. We had access to pharmaceutical amphetamine. Yeah. And one of the things that we discovered was experts in pharmacology that we discussed, we talked about and we interviewed. for this book told us that there's no reason for things like wisdom teeth removal,

a sprained or dislocated limb or something like that. There's no reason for those kind of levels of pain relief. And in fact, if you stack Advil or ibuprofen with Tylenol, it actually gives you like a 30% better pain relief than actual opioids. So there was really no reason for this had to happen in the first place. It's just all these doctors and dentists were sold on the idea. that you need to give true pain relief, and this is the only way to do it.

Don't worry, it's not addictive. It's not addictive. Don't worry about it. And it's, I don't want to, I have had a very career. One of the early things that I did was working in West Memphis, Arkansas, as a reporter. And this was back in the 90s,

and we had very little budget, as well as the Sheriff's Department, also had very little budget. And the town was at an intersection of two different interstates. So you had a lot of trucking coming through, consequently a lot of accidents. And the Sheriff's Department would use us sometimes as reporters. We'd go to the scene of an accident, but they'd also have us take photos of the scene for the actual criminal record or the accident reports and that sort of thing.

So I saw a whole lot of horrible, horrible things in the sense of mangled bodies, you know, semi-truck and car wrecks never going to be something you want to think about. And it left a lot of haunting memories of some of the worst things I had seen up until we started doing the research for this book. And when I spent some time bedded with the police in Kentucky in various small towns as well as in Lexington. Lexington, by the way, again, one of those places I might not have ever visited. Love the place. Great place, great people. But we went on calls and they would discover things like, and I've described some of it in my book or in the book with me and Richard, a lady would be overdosed on the floor, dead, with a child in the room, a two-year-old.

And the child, when they were looking at the body, trying to figure out exactly, you know, the sequence of events, you know, the child's already been taken away by child protective services, we're at the actual scene, and they realized there's milk around the mom's mouth. and so she's blue or she's dead on the floor she's been overdosed and they're like why has there milk around her mouth the child the baby had thought well this is how to get mommy to wake up and she started trying to give her mom her milk that you know the last bottle of milk that her mom had fixed for before she overdosed or there would be you know I don't know if you know how bad the exposure to fentanyl can be when it's in its concentrated form actual you know officers like opening a trunk with it stored in the trunk just the fumes itself could send them into an overdose situation. And that actually happened as well. But one of the sites that we went to, here's a baby in a crib. Here's the table they're doing their sorting and they're stepping on their product and all that.

And they're overdosed on the floor. They're dead, the parents. And then here's the baby's crib all of two feet away from this big stack of fentanyl. Things like that's, I mean, I'm not going to ever get that out of my brain. and that's the depravity, the horror that the stuff can bring upon people. And so while I said earlier that I like to try to find, you know, assume that, you know, the motives are a little more complex than simple supervillain versus, you know, a broad-shend hero. When I think of those scenes, I'm thinking these really people are worse than anything.

And, you know, we can come out with in fiction as a stand-in for a villain. These people pray upon their fellow man in a way that, you know, conquerors of old, you know, killers of old, conquerors of old, they would straight up kill you. Okay. And that's horrible. But there's at least some honor in that. But to string you out on something like this, to promise you that it's good for you, to use the people you trust most in your life, doctors, your health care providers, to create situations like this, these scenes of horrible depravity, like, almost biblical evil. No, you don't get any more benefit of the doubt for me on these things.

Yeah, they're just going to take a financial hit, and they'll never have to suffer like the people who are suffering. Nope. You mentioned interviewing people who are actually dealing opioids, people who are making the runs to other states and bringing them back. I would have to assume in a lot of cases, the people they're dealing to are, people in their family, people they know, people they've grown up with, people they've known

their whole lives. It's their community. How do they handle it? How do they, I mean, how do they get past it once they realize exactly what they're doing? I think that that motivates a lot of these people because it's not just a matter of getting clean yourself. You know, that's a hard enough struggle. And I think we all should be trying to be more understanding towards people dealing with

this. I think that when they start to realize that, that's what really kicks him into high gear. And that's why I saw so many wonderful stories of people who had overcome their addiction and then were reaching out and trying to help in their own communities. One lady I interviewed, actually in Jasper as well, she ran, she was the head of a women's recovery home. And if you had met her on the street, if you had met her in any other social situation, you'd have thought, okay, she's maybe 30. She looks like a former Alabama sorority girl. You know, slightly conservative, you know, very well put together outfit.

You know, has that kind of cute Alabama sorority girl look to or whatever. And one of the first things she told me was about how she went to prison for accessory to murder in her 20s. She told me about how her parents had actually taught her how to fake injuries. They would load them up in the car and take them around doctor shopping throughout northern Alabama through southern Tennessee and through east northeastern Mississippi and go doctor shopping and go to you know sit there and and fake their way through oh you know this injury knowing exactly what to tell the doctors that they get these prescriptions and get them filled and that was her you

know her her her adolescence that was her from age 10 to about age 15 so it's not just a matter of like people praying on their own communities people are praying on their own families when they're caught up in this. And then she went to prison as an accessory to murder. It was one of those situations, and I don't recall all the details, but the long and the short of it was she was present and her boyfriend committed the murder. And so she did a couple of years, but obviously she wasn't as culpable. And when she got out, she was clean.

And she had gone through a program within the prison. And she was clean. And when her mom picked her up from prison to take her home, she said, I need to make a stop. She was going to pick up drugs. and then make another stop on the way home to sell. And she thought, if I don't get out of this now, right now, if I don't get out of this car, just about, I'm going right back into this. Because my parents are, you know, imagine picking up your child who says,

I'm finally clean. I've been in prison, mom, because of this lifestyle you got me into. And you pick them up and you're like, oh, I need to take you to a drug deal on the way home. I mean, that's the depravity that stuff makes possible. And in turn, she had taken all that pain. She had taken all that, you know, that realization of what she was caught up in and had first gone to this program as a member. And then within about three or four, five years, she was the head of the house.

She was the president of the organization. So there are stories of victories out there. And there are stories of people who realize the damage they've done for the communities and to their families, to their people, to their fellow working class white people, They're middle Americans, and they're actually doing something about it. And that's one of the few things that when I think about some of the images that I'll never get out of my head in a bad way, that's one of the things that I always try to hold on to and think, yeah, we can still overcome this. We can conquer anything, and these people are proving it.

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standard pricing thereafter, TV and broadband sold separately. Terms apply for more infoise, sky.a slash beads. Talk a little bit about TV ads because I know there are countries in Europe where it's illegal for pharmaceutical companies to advertise on TV.

yet. Oh, yeah. It's, I mean, here every, I don't have, I haven't had network TV in years. So I don't know, but I remember, I mean, I think I cut the court in 2014 or 2015, but I remember all the ads. I remember that, hey, this could cause diarrhea and death. Hey, you know, so talk a little bit about that. How do they manipulate that and use those?

Well, I'm old enough to actually remember. I went to high school in the 80s as well. I'm old enough to remember when there were no pharmaceutical ads on television. And when the first ones came on, they seemed so clumsy. And in fact, they seemed like they would scare you away from the prescription more so than towards it. And we're not talking about painkillers per se. We're talking about, oh, this lifestyle thing that, you know, your allergies or some chronic problem that you have. and here's something that could help it.

But also, you know, there was always that long disclaimer at the end. It's like, could cause diarrhea, could cause explosive diarrhea, could cause death, could cause high blood pressure, could cause heart attack. And you're sitting there thinking, that all sounds worse than this condition I'm dealing with. But they were clumsy at first, but they've gotten very refined since then. And you really see it for everything. We are so overprescribed. Americans have been sold this idea that if everything in their life is not perfect,

that there's a pill for it, that there's a shortcut, that if you're, you know, I'll get to this point in a minute, but going back to what you said about Europe, I was fortunate enough to live in Europe for about a year. And I noticed when I did catch broadcast television that, yeah, there were no pharmaceutical ads whatsoever, none. And in fact, I have some friends in Europe that we talk about these sort of things. And I was saying something like, I need to get a, I need to stop the store and get some talent on having some real lower back problems right now. And he's like, what the hell is Tylenol? I was like, well, it's a non-prescription painkiller, you know, anti-inflammatory whatnot. And he's like, why do Americans know the names of all these different drugs? They have no, I mean, he's a very well-educated, very plugged in person, this guy I'm talking about. He had, he was like, Advil, what are you talking about? You know, Theraflu? What is, what is all this?

it's just not part of that culture in the way that it is with us, the way that they've sold it to Americans. And not that Europe doesn't have its problems, but this kind of made me sit back and think for a while. And I've come to this conclusion after the publication of book, which is when you look around at our society, American society, Western society in general, American in particular, when you have over half of your population going on two-thirds is on some sort of prescription. drug and not all of these are painkillers, but some sort of prescription drug for dealing with either the effects or trying to ameliorate obesity, drinking, drugs for dealing with the fact that you're an ex-smoker, you know, all these different drugs are out there and 60% of Americans are on prescription drugs of some sort. If they're not seeking relief from the painkillers themselves, they're seeking relief from other self-medications that they are indulging it.

And that could be overeating. That could be sloth. That could be alcoholism. That could be all of these different things that people try to do to escape. When you have six out of ten of your populations on prescription drugs, it's not those people that are necessarily sick. It's your society. Those people are trying to, they're medicating themselves against the society you've built. and I say that and it looks like I've been drinking. This is a virgin Bloody Mary, by the way. Just for the record, because I'm, it sounds like I'm coming off of some Puritan. But, no, everybody enjoys a good beer once in a while.

Everybody enjoys a small vice. But, you know, if you keep a count, I've actually, when I've made myself tuning to network television, I've taken a scratch pad, the number of prescription drug commercials and what they're for. and they're all from things like obesity or dealing with, you know, other problems that arise from overeating that arise from all these different bad behaviors that are escapes from the society that we live in. So the fundamental fix is not going to come at the individual addict level. It's going to have to happen at the societal level. We have to fix our six society before we do anything else.

Yeah. Well, I'm mentioning Europe and how Europe doesn't really have the opioid problem we do. well, they needed to destroy Europe, so they just imported rapists and murderers. True. Yeah. It just made it a lot worse. And I assume that's exactly what they're trying to do here as well. You know, just to add a little insult to injury. Even some people in our sphere will say, yeah, I mean, I see the targeting.

I see what they did. But people need to take some responsibility for themselves. that they allowed this to happen to them. I'm not against that. I don't disagree on the one level because the recovery for the addict has to start with them. They have to realize that they have to make a change. And there is an amount of personal responsibility.

But what you've got to look at is, particularly when it comes to opioids, and that's my area of specialty, the majority of people who become addicts did not start because they were thrill-seeking pill poppers who were just looking to have fun, looking to zone out man, like we used to talk about the hippies or whatever. Like I said, they get it from their doctor. They get it sometimes as early as age 16 for wisdom teeth removal.

Once you hand somebody something that is so powerfully addictive, particularly to a developing mind that young, what do you expect is going to happen? And how much responsibility do they have? because they trusted their parents, they trusted their health care provider to have their best interest at heart, but they don't. Or either the health care provider or their parent is ignorant

and should have done a better job in educating themselves, or they don't care. And that's the case with too many of these imported, speaking of imports, these imported doctors, the criminals that I was able to come across the doctors that were write these prescriptions,

even in the face of the restrictions that were at the state and federal law, level, invariably, they were imports. Invariably, they were Indians who had no stake in the communities they were setting up shopping. And we didn't experiment because there was this thing like, oh, obviously we've changed the rules here in Kentucky that you can't get these prescriptions anymore the way that you used to. Okay, so let's see if we can do that. And all that they had done was really at a step, particularly in the case in Kentucky at the time that we did the experiment, which was you could go to a pain management clinic and get your regular prescriptions,

but first you had to have a referral from your family doctor. So it was an extra, you know, assuming you had either whether you had insurance or not, maybe an extra 150 out of pocket, one extra visit. Then you're off to the pain clinic where they're going to get you onto a cycle. They're going to renew it for 300 a month. I think it was the, you know, was the monthly visit fee. And it was cash. And it was like no insurance necessary.

Who do you think that they're catering to? Who do you think that Dr. Gupta is catering to in this small town in Kentucky? One of the quotes I took from the book, it said, the full human cost is not simply an accounting of the dead, but includes the impact of despair and hopelessness that follows in the wake of opiate addiction and abuse. Now, I mean, this is taking, this is extreme because this is also taking your health, and it's destroying health, it's destroying lives. It is ending lives.

But, I mean, we see this despair and hopelessness. In my opinion, you know, when Joe Biden goes on TV in front of a red background and basically calls, you know, a significant portion most almost all white, you know, basically terrorist, people that need semi-fascist, people who need to be watched, you know, looked at. People who need, you know, what I met, Paul Gottfried might even invoke the therapeutic. state where there's something innately wrong with them that needs to be repaired. People ask about that. I always say it's to give us despair and hopelessness. It's to when you see these TikTok videos of these kindergarten teachers talking about wanting to teach anal sex to their gay anal sex to their kids, that's to beat us.

It's to give us despair and hopelessness. But all of this, all of this is, and I would say the same thing about, you know, sending rapists into Sweden and just basically changing their culture that women don't even know what rape is anymore. They don't even know how to define it. They don't know if they've been raped when they've been raped. Or they're scared to report it because they don't want to seem like they're racist or whatnot. Yeah. My friend Borsley coined a term for this. It's the humiliation ritual. And that's what you see with the TikTok videos and that sort of thing. I think there was a story just a couple of weeks ago. And I think it illustrates it. Think about

about every reference you see to within the mainstream media to white people, to white women, to white people in general. Invariably, it is a negative. There is no mentioning of white people unless it's a negative. Even Republicans do this. Their biggest, their favorite attack these days is, well, this is the problem of white liberals. And that's why we need a coalition of multicultural working class people. it's all a bunch of crap,

but the only time they ever mention white people as a group that might have its own unique identity and its own interests and its own needs that we expect that the government will meet to protect, to provide for, that's the whole purpose of government. The mention of white people by any of these, it's always invariably a negative. It's always morally suspect. If you talk about white people in any positive way you are morally suspect, And that, as much as anything I can think contributes to this sense of despair, the sense of hopelessness. I mean, if we continue down this track, and I'm not trying to make grandiose predictions on anything in particular, but if we continue on the track that we're on, then we can look at our future by looking at what's left of the Indian tribes in America, living on these little reservations, and I'm not to mean physically,

but they live on these little reservations. They have absolutely no pride left. What little pride that they get is from grifters coming in who claim to be Indian and want to set up a casino. But dealing with addiction, dealing with just despair because their culture is gone. And that's what they would like to see of white people. And they want to see that in Europe. They want to see that in America. And we have to say no.

We have to start fighting back. otherwise i mean this is this is about our future this is about our people and we deserve better they deserve better we owe it to our ancestors and we know it to our progeny and it seems like what they want to kill is they want to kill that fastian spirit that goes forward and seeks to conquer that seeks to overcome and multiculturalism is you know people are like oh multicultural what is multi cultural what is multiculturalism does a couple things first of all multiculturalism isn't about you know enhancing certain cultures over others is basically about destroying all cultures. If you destroy all cultures, then, you know, there's nothing, there's no foundation for somebody

to rest upon. Multiculturalism also definitely allows a certain segment of the population to be able to hide. And then when you start noticing, to use a term, once you start noticing, it's like, well, we can't hide it. We can't hide anymore. I mean, we have, there's 20 different cultures in this country and holy crap, why are they seeing only ours? I mean, because 2% of the population and, you know, half of the world's billionaires and

control pretty much every single industry, especially anyone that helps to create culture. And eventually, you're going to start, someone's going to start noticing. Yep. And that's the biggest fear. that they have. And that's why bringing awareness to this problem, waking up, using the expression, but the expression big normie, waking them up to what's going on. Like, you know the old saying, if these people were painted blue, everyone would notice. Hell, if they were just Asian, everyone would notice exactly who we're talking about. We all know who we're talking about.

And it's by design. Like you said, it's, you know, throw all the paints into one big bucket. And then you have this sort of lower IQ mystery meat kind of population that pretty compliant doesn't have that spirit to overcome. And in fact, you know, you even demonize the idea of the Faustian spirit as stealing. You know, we didn't conquer, we didn't explore, we didn't pioneer. We stole all this. We stole this land and that sort of thing. And you make morally suspect any defense of yourself. And I mean, And in a way, if you could completely remove yourself from a moral judgment of it, you could say, well, that is a unique way and almost an admirable way that you conquered in other people. You made them want to commit suicide. You made them want to just fade off into nothingness. But it's horrifying to anybody with a moral center. And that's what's going on. And multiculturalism, you know, obviously my only interest is for myself, is for my people, for white people. multiculturalism destroys that but I actually do recognize that multiculturalism destroys other cultures it destroys other cultures that deserve to have a right to be themselves to to be who they are

and they just need to do that in their own countries in their own regions I have no problem with that we get painted with so many negative stereotypes just because we say I want to stand up for white people I want to stand up for white interests they they seem to want to graft onto to that automatically. It's some sort of superiority, some sort of anger or some sort of need to destroy. It's like, no, absolutely not. I just want what's best for my people. And actually, if those people over there also flourish, then we can have an exchange. We can trade. We can visit each other. But then we go home, you know, we have the recipes. You can stay over there. We'll stay over here. We might come visit. We might exchange. But there's no reason for this

idea that everything's got to be top-down destruction and conquer. That's just how they demonize the idea of white people standing up for themselves. Well, let's end it right there before we get in any more trouble. Appreciate that you having me on, Peter, and it was a great hour. Thank you. All right.