Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 207: Animal Pharma

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

This week we discuss Tarence's dialectical history of the opioid epidemic in The Baffler. Long story short: the police bear just as much responsibility as Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. Read the full piece here: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/united-in-rage-ray Support us on Patreon here: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Well, I'm here to report that Tom Sexton received his Tripoli shirt in the mail. Yeah. It's laundry day, pal. This is worse than this is the band wearing the band shirt to the band show. I did it one time in town and just got roasted mercilessly. Really? Yeah. People were like, why are you wearing a Tripoli shirt?

I was like, I think it's a cool shirt. I like my own shirt. And I've not worn it since just because I got roasted so bad. I have to slip out of town under the cover of darkness and make sure I don't get seen. Don't let anybody see you wearing that. Yeah. I found laying at the bottom of my driveway, the bottom of the hill,

I found some state secrets. Really? Yeah. Did the black vans drop their notes on you? Actually, it's funny. Yeah yeah so like on the front on the front there's a a sticker it's like got all these names crossed out one of them says find tyrone but it's crossed out but it's got like phone numbers written on it and this guy it says coddle and there's an arrow pointing to janet pointing to m coddle pointing to lewis lois baker i was like what the fuck is this and so i opened it and i

started reading on the inside and what it is it is uh yeah it's like it's a dossier on the uh mchc cartel yeah you might as well consider me Julian Assange No it's literally someone's note On the water treatment So it's like April 5th Pulled CO2 Reading and got County roads gave to

Dwight and Janet Zero consumption i can return that to the water plant i used to have to do that yeah you go around you test the chlorine and the everything in the water and make a note of it no man these are state secrets now we have written documentation of all the things they've done. To the water. I don't know. I thought that was absurd. Find Tyrone.

Scratch that. It read a different way. It seems like there's a hit list. We found him. Yeah. Well, welcome. What's going on? Shit, man.

Just stopped over at Paco's for a little lunch before i came here and i asked for the the hot sauce from the kitchen you know the yeah real stuff light me up paco poor choice really struggling struggling in your trill billy shirt got acid reflux. I'm in bad shape, man. I'll tell you. I swear I am. Not good. Oh, man. What about you? I'm okay. On the Patreon episode from Sunday, I told a story about how I thought my cats got into the edibles.

Wasn't the cats. I owe my cats an apology. It was a fucking raccoon. A raccoon's been getting in here. I was just reading on the catch the other night and it just poked its head in through the cat door. Oh, he's here. So he must have partied pretty hard and then

come back for more. Whatever that was. So yeah, I owe my cat an apology. What if he came in here and just saw a raccoon on a trip? He was just pontificating About you know You know

The universe and what not He's scribbling Find Tyrone Yeah In a book Yeah man We gotta find Tyrone Hey cab

You know I was thinking the other day so you know rumsfeld died recently i heard that um like a week or two ago could you imagine how much better it would have been if trump had been president during when rumsfeld died what would what would that have looked like i mean he would have absolute he would have absolutely like roasted him yeah but like in that sort of well in that backhanded way yeah it's a bad idea i told him it's a bad idea to go into iraq i told him it's a bad idea to slim down the military but donnie he made some mistakes when he worked here I told him it was a bad idea to slim down the military. Donnie, he made some mistakes when he worked here.

He did. It's true. Was he good? I mean, I think maybe he was. It just could have been better, I guess is all I'm saying. I told him, don't go to Afghanistan. It's the graveyard of empires. Did he listen?

No. But, you know, you see that article that said that Trump's one regret was not lowering the flag after January 6th, the Capitol riots. No. It's like, I should have lowered the flag. That was his big regret. Oh, fuck. For who? I mean, I guess guess democracy i don't know yeah it's like the cop who had a heart attack and died or something i have a woman that got shot and killed there was did i did the cop died right i can't remember maybe yeah then there was the one guy that had that showed his bravery that's so fucking funny something i should have done lowered the flag after the january 6th capital rights which

i did not inside yeah it's like carter's big regret regret was not sending in a third helicopter whatever trump's regret yeah not lowering the flag. The day after. Gotta let all the fats come out. It's a different time, January 2021. It really does seem like a different age. It does. Yeah. I was thinking the other day,

do you remember when ASAP Rocky went to Sweden and got in a fight with someone and went to jail? And Trump tweeted in support of it? Yeah. All of those things make no sense. ASAP Rocky in Sweden, Trump supporting him. Yeah.

Very bizarre time. No, it feels like a different era. Yeah, that is... Oh, God. Got some kind of weed here. Well, so, yeah, like, welcome to the show. I had something planned for today. I wanted to talk about the article I wrote for The Baffler, selfishly.

That's good. I think it was a good discussion that could be had there. Yeah, I think it's, I wanted to do it as an entire episode because there's a lot to cover there. I guess it's probably one of our more serious topics. Not a whole lot of comedy. So if you're here for the yuck yucks, check out now. Yeah, I

have received minimal pushback from it, but I guess if you want to shield yourself from pushback, write a 7,000 word article about something really depressing. It's the only way to do it. Because, yeah, because to,

if anyone's going to criticize you, they have to first get through that major obstacle, so. And not many people do that, Scott, what it is. 1,500 words where we top out. Right, right, right. That's where I give it the TLDR. Right. I'm sure many people did.

Well, this is for those people who would rather listen to something in audio form. It's the abridged. Than read an entire 7,000-word article about it. So I wanted to do this episode ever since I started looking into this. But then my more astute friends were like, don't piss it away on a podcast episode man get it out there in writing first get it out like on the record yeah don't piss it away just where someone's going to then pick it up and write their own thing about it um is this where we

piss it away this is where we piss it away okay i is where we piss it away. Oh, God. I hope you're ready. So, I read something for the Baffler. It's called United in Rage. You can find it at the Baffler's website. But we also talked on the Patreon about how you can purchase the edition of the Baffler that it's in. Which you should do, because it makes me look like I've got some clout. If we can move some copies,

they'll let us keep doing this kind of thing. Right. So, the whole purpose of this is to paint kind of an alternative narrative of the opioid epidemic.

I mean, it's nothing like mind-blowing or anything. It's not like, this is something you've never heard before. A lot of people are claiming you went pro-Sackler. A lot of people interrogating your ties to Arthur Sackler's granddaughter, Prudence. Someone said that I had written it like I was looking for drug war tropes

or something that weren't there i don't know what the fuck a drug war trope is what is a drug war trope in my opinion a drug war trope is just the perpetuation of the us versus the sacklers thing yeah actually now that you mention it this same person tweeted something completely nonsensical. They were like, finally read the piece. It's okay, but if anything, this seems like a big honeypot operation from Roger Sackler, Robert Sackler, whatever. It's just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like you're on the take from Robert Sackler, Robert Sackler, whatever. It's just like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like you're on the take from Robert Sackler? I guess.

Or that like Robert Sackler is the one who decided to do what? Robert Sackler, famously funder of the Baffler. Yeah. No, what it was is, having now read the piece, I guess my main feeling is that what really happened here was more like a big pharma managed honeypot operation for the post-industrial disposable underclass of Appalachia. And that story would probably more accurately start with Richard Sackler. Well, no, I don't think it would because Richard Sackler is not a police chief.

No, no. He has no actual say over what police do. He's not a governor, a political figure. He's a capitalist. He created the conditions for. These people, these stories. Okay, so a lot of people would consider Appalachia ground zero for the opioid crisis.

And I don't know, you know, I think, you know, it probably started a lot of different places, but probably similar type places. I do know that I had a friend that went to UK in like the late 90s. They used to lifeguard at the city pool with. And she went down there and she was like, well, I would tell people about like, people would like snort pills in like 99 in Lexington. And people would be like, what? Like that was a foreign sort of concept.

So I feel like a lot of these national journalists that are trying to maybe gatekeep this story or whatever, it's like they have to start from a context that they understand because everybody else's is wrong. Right? Right. So they start with Richard Sackler. Their context, they've never doneler their context they've never done these

drugs they've never done they don't live here no i've done these drugs i put more hydrocodone up my nose than i ain't much i haven't put up my nose i'll be honest with you but right i put that behind me but yeah like i try listen i ain't trying to hear you talk about, oh, this is a honeypot and blah, blah, blah, unless you've like, you know, unless you have had the experience of going to the dentist and then having family members call and ask you what they gave you. Right. You know? Right, right, right. Well, the thing is, is that all these people are, they are all operating on the same sort of accounts. And so that's why I say mine is kind of a different one.

And I think that one of the main themes here is just perspective. You're just looking at it from a different perspective. I'm not absolving the Sacklers. I'm not absolving Big Pharma in any way I think those people should have the worst things done to them not just for flooding rural communities

with opioids but for their crimes are plenty $80 to get an EpiPen stuff like that their crimes are plenty so yeah I'm not trying to absolve any of them. But I think there is a reason why these narratives are these accounts are so popular. And it's for the same reason that, I don't know, liberals, they latch on to like accounts of capitalism gone wrong.

Yeah. And I think that this is one example of it. It's like, and there's several different sort of examples in this genre. Like Beth Macy's Dope Sick is a big, you know, it's probably the least bad book about the opioid crisis right now. But they're about to turn it into a Hulu series, like a dramatized Hulu series, like a dramatized Hulu series.

Man, there is like a, listen, I'm not against like, you know, dramatizations of, you know, real world events or anything, obviously, you know what I mean? But like, it does feel like there is like a vogue for like vogue for sort of pill chic kind of hard-boiled accounts of the opioid crowd. Like we've got enough distance from it sort of now that it's not gauche to sell a TV series. Well, someone pointed this out to me. So HBO just did a series about this. I think Alex, what's that guy's name? Alex,

uh, get, not him. Fuck. I can't remember his last name, but he, you know, he was,

he did a big documentary about Jack Abramoff in the mid two thousands. Alex, um, Gibney, Alex. Yeah. He, I think he may have done something on this, or he may have produced that HBO documentary,

but in that documentary, they actually had a montage of people overdosing to, what, John Denver's Country Roads? Roads, yeah. Just insanity. Like, look, I'm just fucking crazy. I mean, but that's one example. I read an interview with the directors of that film who were like, we're trying, and this is Beth Macy's approach too, we're trying to, you know, humanize the victims of the crisis.

We're trying to tell the story from their point of view. And it's like, no, you're not. Because you're still telling it with you as the sort of mediator. The mediator of those stories. And here's the big thing on all these accounts. Another one is Barry Myers, painkiller, who used to write for the New York Times, and I talk about him in the piece.

And then Eric Iyer, death in mud lick or something like that. Death in mud lick, yeah. And he used to work for the Charleston Gazette, whatever it used to be called. Um, but here's the problem with all of these. And here's why my account, I think is different.

None of these are dialectical. Yeah. We are taking a dialectical approach to predation, uh, addiction and criminalization. Uh, and so what I mean by that none of these i i'm not familiar with and i remember when the the piece with the country roads montage was you know like i saw clips of that when people were sharing that around or whatever but like none of these really take to task local law enforcement the courts yeah or none of that

no how i i don't understand i'll never forget the day we took my best friend from high school to that rehab place over in uh ash camp like you're going toward uh west care west yeah yeah it's actually it's got hal ro' name in the front. We'll get to that anyway. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I can remember there was this guy there that they called Mr. 606 is what he called him. I forget what his real name was, but he was kind of like the guy on the inside that had been rehabilitated, got his life turned back around. Now he was kind of like, yeah, I think he had a job there or something like that.

He had some kind of role there or whatever to like kind of counsel other people on his experience, whatever. And I remember when we took my friend there and I was sitting out on the porch. It was me, Tyrone, and my friend's mom. And he was like, you don't understand. He's like, the judges are in on this. and my friend's mom. And he was like, you don't understand. He's like, the judges are in on this. Like, he knew, like, this is like 2009. You know what I mean?

He was like, oh, it's the tentacles of this opioid thing go far out there. And it was funny because I had never really thought about anything like that. Because even, I guess, in 2009 terms, I was of the opinion, oh, Sackler's flooded West Virginia towns with millions of pills. That's the story. You know what I mean? Right. Maybe even worse than that. Maybe even, like, you know, I probably believed all the tropes about the rise in crime and everything like that because you would hear one.

There was a story about this guy that had beat his grandmother half to death with a meat tenderizer to get money to buy pills, allegedly. And nobody really knows the truth of why all that went down. Right. You know what I mean? Right. You know what I mean? Right. And then ended up, she didn't die, but she had to, like, outsmart him. She goes and lays in the bed, and she says, well, if you're going to kill me, let me die in my own bed. And she went in there, and then she ended up having to shoot her own grandson, because he was going to, like, finish her off or something like that.

And that was, like, everybody heard this tale, and that was, like, oh this tale, and that was shocking and horrifying and all this kind of stuff. And I can remember police and stuff using that as like, oh, you don't think. And it may very well have been a drug-type crime. But that was like, oh, you don't think. What about such and such almost beating his poor poor grandmother death for dope money and all that kind of stuff right you know so it's like the one outlier that they use to sort of yeah a lot of these well yeah and so we'll get to that but a lot of these local crime statistics and claims would make sensationalistic claims like that that oh, oh, this crime is for drug money.

It was while people were on drugs. And a lot of these claims were reprinted by all the authors that I just listed. Just uncritically. And the best prize-winning local journalists. Yeah, exactly. You read Beth Macy's book. She's got statistics in there.

It's actually fascinating the way that she frames it at the beginning of one chapter. It's like people still slept in their beds safely and soundly before oxycontin they hadn't started locking their doors and their shed doors every night before the crime wave appeared and she like cites um a police chief talking about this she cites an atf agent assigned to west virginia talking about this and she just is completelyF agent assigned to West Virginia talking about this and she just is completely uncritical it just takes them for their word just like okay yeah all right but so what it is been robbing sheds for a long time but yeah so what it is and and what I mean by taking a dialectical approach to this,

is that these narratives all have a sort of schematic of characters and a formula. And so on one side, it's Big Pharma, Purdue, and the Sacklers. And it's the pill mill doctors, pain specialists, and the Big pharma sales reps and everybody else. On the other side, it is community activists and scientists and faith leaders

and law enforcement. One of the books literally, Barry Meyer's book on the back talks about the law enforcement officials who valiantly tried to sound the alarm of Oxycontin um so like how did they do that exactly by uh rounding up uh users and dealers and putting them in a cage and taking them to high schools and like showing them off well so this might sound obvious i don't know maybe it's not i i don't know i can't tell but

every now and then i see online people be like um well they you know it's this kind of woke take where they're like well they criminalized crack in the 80s but once white people started using pills you know they they they wanted that they wanted to help which is bullshit complete bullshit they criminalized these drugs um militantly i mean like we'll get into it but but so what i'm talking about is that narrative is is is it's a very simplified one um it is a a classic narrative in american journalism um we talked about that on our episode. Was it The Insider with Russell Crowe and Al Pacino? Yeah. Like, it's a very seductive one for American journalists because it assumes that there's a bad corporate America and they're doing bad things. But all it takes is some brave Atticus Finch types to stand up and speak truth to power and everything will be fine again.

So, I mean, these narratives kind of basically follow that format yeah another thing that these narratives rely on is this image of this place is like a de-industrialized place and that's why pills took hold here and you know in other parts of the rust belt central appalachia so that i'm sure i'm again i've not watched any of these works that are you know that you can watch or read any of this stuff to be fair but i'm sure that not a few of them open up with montages of rusted out track coal mining equipment coal mining equipment the coal shoots you know what i mean and probably with like a waylon jennings song playing in the background or something i literally i remember you were with me i think one time me and you got

tasked with like being a like a handler what's the i don't know what the word would be stringer for like a washington post journalist who made us drive him around floyd county trying to get a picture of like rusted out coal mining equipment his name was jody so i don't know but yeah like that's the kind of image that they're looking for and that is in their opinion in their analysis that is why opioids took off in places like this yeah my thesis is that it's a little more complicated my thesis is that at the same time that coal was declining or other industries, whether it's farming or other extractive industries or manufacturing, other industries were on the rise.

And there's actually a new book about this by Gabe Wynott about the healthcare industry, the rise of the healthcare industry. Nobody knows how to say Gabe's last name. I don't either. But yeah, there was a rise of other industries especially in places like this like look at our downtown now as opposed to 10 years ago every fucking storefront is a health care facility now yeah yeah um and there's in the rise of the service industries yeah and that this created a change in the gender economy yeah that this That this might have contributed. I'm not saying that more people were doing drugs as a result. I'm saying that this created the atmosphere for the drug war.

Hell yeah, baby. We got to pulmonary clinic downtown. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. That, in addition to, and this is one of the other things that these accounts don't take into account all of this occurred in the political atmosphere of the war on terror like this was a very crucial component to what happened um early 2000s like for example oxycontin was created in 1996 so actually let's just let's just start there

oxycontin was created in 1996 yeah very powerful analgesic um what it has what it had on it was a time release delay or a time delay release or whatever they're called strip on it which means you take it and it'll last for like eight hours which was you helpful for like cancer patients you know prior to that you just take morphine or hydrocodone or percocet or whatever lasts a couple hours oxycontin was extremely powerful and could last a long time yeah um but it was introduced in 96 and you don't get the big drug war moral panic about it until 2001 so why that's my big that's my big question why does it take six years yeah i think several things had to happen for that to occur so yeah i think pre-9-11 i definitely being in high school i mean i knew like

the drug thing was bubbling but it wasn't the panic it was yeah until like i guess it wasn't codified as like a crisis or a uh a war or whatever you want to call it till after 9-11 probably took sort of the heightened rhetoric of that alarmist nature of like ISIS and bin Laden and da da da da da da da da to to sort of like have to take you know um sort of took its cues I guess is what I'm trying to say from from like all the sound and the alarm about the Iraq War and everything. Yeah, and if you think that I'm being hyperbolic about that, this is a theme

that I ran into time and time again with researching this. Every time I thought I was being unreasonable, hyperbolic, or sensationalist, I would find more and more evidence that showed that I actually wasn't being hyperbolic enough. Everything I thought that i was saying

was ridiculous would prove to be even more ridiculous and you get the truth yeah the truth was always more insane than i thought it would be so for example you can find multiple op-eds editorial statements from attorneys prosecutors police, police chiefs, politicians that liken drug users to terrorists. They literally talk about it. They say, yeah, foreign terrorists are a big threat, but the biggest threat to our communities right now, I'm quoting almost directly an op-ed in the Appalachian News Express in Pikeville.

It said, the biggest threat is homegrown criminals who use drugs. The othering is kind of similar. Yes. You know what I mean? I know there was a phrase that I heard when I would dispatch at the fire department. You know, you'd have all the cops in the county would come in and out of that office from time to time and and one phrase they used for like drug dealers was or not drug dealers but drug users was uh sort of a um i'm trying to think of how i could say this it's kind of like like a, a, sort of a colloquial spin

on the word hybrid. Yeah. They call them hybrids. Right. You know what I mean? As something like, to suggest something less than human.

I found a, actually, dude, this is, this is actually incredible. I found a op-ed in the Hazard Herald that is a perfect example of what we're talking about here. So let me pull this up right here real quick. This is in the Hazard Herald, written by a guy named jared deaton um zombies on maine

so yeah this is uh jared deaton is probably uh has something to do with uh the sore initiative now or something like that be my guess wouldn't surprise me if i found out he's like the city manager of like pikeville or some shit or chamber of commerce yeah or some because all of these things are woven into each other yeah yeah the fate of the region is intricately tied to the drug war yeah and again that is this big dynamic that you see re-emerge time and time again of economic development and if we want to economically develop this place then we have to you know cleanse this place yeah that the words like that were used didn't didn't it kind of hurt or i guess i guess what i'm trying to say is i guess it bolstered the narrative about 2010 when the walking dead comes on the show because i heard

that all the time like yeah boys it's like the walking dead out here well it's interesting like reading this writing this researching it it's like the things that we've talked about on this show a lot over the years the non-profit industry um the extraction industries um the rise of a, you know, the class of, the professional class here that, like, wants to see a better future, whatever the fuck they call it. Like, make no mistake about it. In this context, when you're saying revitalization, you're talking about getting rid of people that have teeth missing. Exactly.

Like, you know, what they would call meth mouth, or like the sort of like uh body horror attached to drug use that kind of stuff that is the thing about this so the opioid crisis or whatever is not siloed off into some other realm it is intricately tied into all of those efforts and in social developments um zombies on main uh with the new courthouse and Walmart super center in Hazard, it would appear that the city is growing and heading in the right direction. While things are looking good for Hazard, a problem still exists, which will continue to hold the city back, the zombies.

Now, I'm not talking about the undead who crave human flesh, but I am referring to the semi-dead who crave pills and alcohol and are lurching around Main Street by 8 a.m. There is no way for Hazard to reach the status that its leaders would like to see until this issue is taken care of. While the sweeps made by the Hazard Police Department usually collect a fair number of these useless fiends. Useless fiends. Dude, it is just, it's incredible.

Like, again, this was common. This is probably like a more sort of liberal person. Probably, yeah, honestly. But yeah, anyways, it just goes on and it's just slanders them more like that. I mean, it's just, yeah, it's just like stuff like that. But so, so yes, like we have to look at the, we have to look at the political economic situation in the late 90s when oxycontin and these quote unquote opioid epidemic that was another thing that that the person that critic we read from

earlier the honeypot thing the drug war trope thing said that i put opioid epidemics in quotations well yeah because it was largely constructed so we have to look at the situation that it was constructed in. So, yeah, let's rewind the clock to the late 90s. You were here, Tom. What was it like? God. The number one song on the radio was Semi-Charm Kind of Life by Third Eye Blind. A song about meth, actually.

It is. Yeah, no, so, I mean, you've got, like I said earlier, the decline of one industry, the coal industry. But you've got the rise of healthcare and service industries. That creates a different sort of tax structure on local municipalities and counties. But you've also got, at the same time, the introduction of welfare reform. The Clinton era is critical here, the late Clinton era, and the move from entitlements to block grants is a big thing. Well, just in terms of how people fed their families

and how municipalities got money and everything had some pretty severe consequences. Absolutely. It saddled counties with all kinds of different obligations. You've also got the crime bill at this time. I mean, this is a pivotal moment. And then you've got someone who I think we're going to detour through, we're going to need to detour through and who will complete the whole sort of, you know, holistic vision of this thing.

Hal Rogers. And so, yeah, you've got at the same time Hal Rogers turning this place into a virtual fucking prison camp you know building multiple prisons um so yeah so let's talk about rogers i want to talk about rogers a little bit um i didn't even really think about that but it's almost like when was the first of like rogers sort of uh usps built here um it would have been clay county in 1989 is when the late 80s yeah yeah yeah and i think it was completed in 91 yeah it's kind of one of those things where it's like this is like the perfect storm for him because now they have something they can criminalize to i'm not saying like all these prisons are filled up by local like drug criminals. That's, I don't think that's the case,

but it's like he needs sort of his tough on crime. You know what I mean? Just to sort of fit in like, you know, with this prison expansion, all this kind of stuff. He's putting the narrative out there that this is like, he's letting us know where he stands on crime and everything. Right. It's linked in also to the decline of coal and everything our friend sylvia wrote her undergrad thesis about this about how the point of these prisons was to reclaim land that was unrequited

it was surplus land right um and there were surplus people on which to put, you know. Surplus, yeah. Right. And so we've talked about Rogers before on the show, but he's our congressman, and he's an extremely powerful guy, but he came into office in 1980 on the Reagan Revolution. And throughout the 80s,

and this is one of the most fascinating things about rogers um he does have the appearance of a sort of like tough on crime law and order type guy but he's also from day one been very intimate with the nonprofit industries here, with the healthcare industries, always sort of looking forward to what's happening next, but not shy to use his congressional district as like a sort of laboratory or testing grounds for all kinds of different things. Rogers is, it was a liberal darling for a long time,

like particularly in the nonprofit sphere, because I can remember him being so praised in like the non-profit sphere because i can remember him being so praised in like the early and mid 90s we used to do this thing with the with this sort of wasn't really an ad hoc group it was you know it was like kind of like an offshoot of kftc or something like that we used to do something called river sweep and uh yes we will get yeah but like he like he he supported like trash pickup programs and all that kind of stuff and that carried him some favor with these type of liberals that you interview more for this piece that like have some like very harsh words to say about addicts you know yeah

um yeah so the the most important thing to remember about rogers we talked about this on the episode with jesse wilkerson about Eula Hall, but Rogers was at the right place at the right time. He was able to oversee, effectively oversee the dismantling of the war on poverty programs, but at the same time

position himself as the person, the middleman, the person you go to to see if you would like to see your specific program or whatever saved yeah because he you know he was uh he had an in um and that made of him a very powerful person and in fact this is really crazy in like 1981 or 82 he did these workshops to explore what deregulation and austerity would look like right after reagan got in and what do you know there's a massive picture of him and poppy poppy bush like shaking hands and sitting down while how presents the report from that so eastern kentucky

was kind of the laboratory for how are we going to pull deregulation and austerity off. Right, yeah. So if you're out there and you're wondering why this place continues to stay poor or whatever the case may be, that's a very complicated question, but it could all be summed up as

we've been lab rats since the Reagan era era and in a lot of ways they're still stuck in the reagan era yeah yeah and so you know rogers was able to position himself as the sort of middle person between those two uh you know forces they sort of warrant the the economy here that had been built with coal and war on poverty social welfare, and then the dismantling of that. Something else I want to just as an aside here that's interesting. This is also around the era that Harry Caudill, who the library is named after, is having his liaison with William Stokely,

the famous eugenicist, who Caudill's posing the question, are these people, this is pre-opioid crisis or whatever, are these people the dregs of england he called us and and not comes with cumberland's are these people irredeemable are they just do they love their poverty whatever whatever and this is like probably 88 couple years coddle died right so it's not like that far in the past you know yeah it's happening at the same time that there is this push for economic development here, which was new.

That was new from the 60s. That did exist. There was talk of tourism and developing this place through capitalism. But the sort of big idea in the 60s and early 70s was transforming this place through social welfare programs through government and so then once that dream dies or whatever then in the 80s and 90s it becomes well we will do it through markets and so then yeah that's why you get people talking about eugenics that's why you get hal rogers using this place as a surplus dumping grounds or whatever transforming it through prisons and but at the same time, tourism, and just pork

projects in general, Chamber of Commerce type stuff, bringing in government contracts, all that. So, yeah, the big thing of Rogers in the 90s is economic development and everything. development and everything um so uh basically the way to think about it though is that in the 90s when clinton starts you know when clinton continues the trends of mass incarceration and they write the crime bill and everything rogers looks at this situation and he looks at his own uh you know congressional, his own jurisdiction, and says, what if we transferred the logic of the inner city drug war and the war on poverty to the rural haulers of eastern Kentucky?

Yeah. And that's what he starts to do. And you can actually see there's headlines that say, you know, Rogers cuts legal aid, boosts police. Yeah. And he starts pouring money

into local law enforcement initiatives in addition to the prisons he's building. He's also, you know, beefing up law enforcement agencies. Right. One thing he did in 99 or 2000 was create this thing called the rural law enforcement technology center in hazard we talked about this yeah where they

you go swim in our episode about that lap swimming at the hazard yeah yeah that's where they do their police training and they've got all kinds of fancy technology i found this thing of like a symposium they had there where they featured all this technology. And it's just like, why the fuck do police departments in cities with like 2000 people need like bomb diffusing technology? Yeah. Like infrared fucking crazy ass shit. Exactly.

I mean, he's just pouring millions and millions. I think that by 2003 that law enforcement technologyforcement Technology Center got like $23 million. Yeah. He's also, you know, I forgot to mention that at the same time, he's head of the House Appropriations Committee. You know, all throughout the, actually, he didn't become head of the committee itself until like the late 2000s. But he was always head of an important itself until like the late 2000s but he was always head of an important subcommittee on the house appropriations committee he was at

they call him the college of cardinals there's like 12 of them who are like the heads of the subcommittees on the appropriations committee it's like it sounds very masonic and like yeah very like weird fucking fucking kids bohemian yes yes yeah yeah yeah um so he's like a very powerful guy he controls where and how the empire spends its money right and that includes the drug war in the 90s um and so uh like i said they're the role law enforcement technology center but another thing he does is uh something he gets entire the entirety of eastern kentucky's fifth congressional district turned to the hit to the designation you ever heard of that it's a high intensity drug trafficking area it was the second rural area in the nation to get it um and there's actually these amazing

photos i have to show you of him like standing in pot fields with like kentucky national guardsmen yeah who you know have like parachuted down into fucking like pot fields to confiscate like three plants that somebody had like in a field behind their house somewhere exactly yeah just just shit like that yeah and then um his big sort of you know thing towards the late 90s you already already mentioned it, was Kentucky Pride. Personal responsibility in a desirable environment. That's what it's called. What it is is it's cleaning up streams.

Cleaning up trash. Yeah. They gave, of course, it later on became mediated by the nonprofits and so forth. But they used to just give you money to go around picking up trash out of creeks and stuff. Right, right, right. Yeah. And it was a grassroots thing. Every county had its own pride chapter.

Still does, actually. I think they still give grants out for that shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They've become a little chintzier in recent years. So, yeah. So you've got hal rogers put a big mark in him for just a second because we're going to come back to him it's going to be very important but you've got hal rogers um but then let's go back to oxycontin purdue

east kentucky in the late 90s so i mentioned earlier we hinted at it that there was this moral panic around crime yeah attached to oxycontin yeah well that was basically false yeah um but a lot of journalists and uh newspapers wrote about it um they they amplified this idea that there was a crime wave um i think i quoted one you know cover you know article from the boston herald that was like rc cotton fueling crime wave across country you know yeah well that's it's not so i interviewed this guy he was a former um criminal justice professor at eastern k University, Kenneth Tunnell, and he put out these articles in 2005 and 2006 that had looked at this era

and had looked at crime statistics from this era and was like, there was no rise in crime rates. And the thing is about crime rates is you always got to take them with a grain of salt because they're all reported by cops.

Do you remember, you know, the Welcome to Murder City propaganda that NYPD put out in the 70s of New York City? Yeah. It turned out there was no noticeable rise in crime in that era or anything like that. But it was part of political jockeying on the part of police departments and so forth. You could draw a through line to here for that kind of stuff. It's happening right now. And a lot of it has to do with getting federal money absolutely

i mean it's happening right now like you see all these headlines and stuff about like the post pandemic murder rise and homicides you know and stuff like that it's all moral panic yeah um but like yeah the thing about crime rates is you got to kind of take them with a grain of salt because they're reported by cops but they weren't even fudging their own numbers you would think that if they were really trying if they were dedicated to sell this yeah yeah like they would be reporting that violent crime and property crime like the two crimes most related to drug activity or whatever would be rising but they weren't but they're that lazy they won't even cook their own books exactly and why would they because there's no repercussions you know what i mean they can just say whatever and oh good so so um

so like i said earlier you've got police chiefs making these sensationalist claims about um you know uh people breaking in the houses and stuff for stealing copper uh you know, people breaking in the houses and stuff or stealing copper, you know, and selling drugs. On the face of it, it makes no sense. Because what do you do when you take opioids? You don't want to go fucking do crimes. No.

You want to just fucking watch TV and go to sleep. Yeah, I want to get fucking stoned and go strip copper, which is a hard fucking thing to do. Yeah. Busting out drywall and then all that and getting in there and then like you know like not getting yourself killed while doing that exactly it's not easy and imagine doing that like fucking it blistered out your head yeah it completely strung out like it's it's completely it's's like, do you remember when, like, a few years ago when, like, Bath Salts was in vogue for, like, half a second? And everybody said Bath Salts turns you into these, like, cannibalistic, like, humanoids.

And, like, people, like, eat people when they're on Bath Salts and stuff like that. Yeah. It's kind of like that. It's kind of like they have to like say, or even like the J.D. Vance, he'll be an elegy scene where his mom's like taking the opioids

and then she gets like, starts skating through there and it's like, that's not, she would just be kind of slumped over in the locker room drooling on herself

if she was real. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, and the thing I want to point out here, and this is the thing that I kind of ran up against a lot while researching this from my own personal life

and from reading all these mainstream accounts. If people want to do drugs, they can do drugs. People take drugs. It's an immutable fact of human existence going back millennia. We've been trying to find a way to get intoxicated for as long as we've been a species exactly yeah and so the idea of completely eradicating a community or a society of drugs is never going to happen but also hilarious that for a class of people cops i'm saying that pride themselves on being these tough on crime whatever,

and they know, they have this know-how, because they have to deal with these people on drugs every single day, their myths don't even make sense. Right. The first time I ever heard the myth about you can take LSD once and trip 10 years later because it stays in your spinal fluid or something was from a dare was

from a fucking dare cop in elementary school you're right you know what i mean yeah it's like none of that stuff squares with the reality of getting high you know right it's all fancy full nonsense right yeah and so that's another thing um that needs to be stressed, which is that one thing that you really can't deny that was happening, maybe crime rates weren't going up, but use was. I mean, there is a reason that there was a moral panic. There was increased usage. There was increased overdoses. I mean, this was, at the end of the day,

this was a public health crisis. And when I say that, I don't mean it in the liberal sense or the conservative sense. I don't mean it like, oh, you know, people were on these drugs and maybe they shouldn't have been criminalized, but they also shouldn't be using it. I'm saying that if people want to use drugs, they should be able to and they should be able to do it safely and however they want. And if they want to get off of them, they should get help. I mean, they should have access to help or you know what i'm saying like people should be able to do what the fuck you say interesting term no you're right it's uh yeah it's it's it's uh it doesn't need i i'll give you an example i ran into this when we were we were doing the needle exchange

program i was trying to get that off the ground and it turns out letcher county's health board includes um tell you how much they dehumanize uh drug users in eastern kentucky letcher county health board has a veterinarian on the board god damn it uh but like that like we were i remember sitting in this meeting and i remember kitty gish was one of the handful of people that was like kind of agreed with me one or two others but a lot of other people were just like said well we're just going to like promote drug use if we do this we're just going to give them easy access and it's like that that is the point here and i remember turning to the director of the health department and him saying that we had like like for the longest time like letcher county had like just a handful

like maybe five or six cases of hiv infection that year they had 22 new cases and he said after that that um that there are that there was like i think he said six new cases of hepatitis c diagnosed every day in lecture county at that point i remember that and i was like how do y'all see this okay and not like treat this as like, treat this as, like, a public—this is, like, about curbing infection rates. Right. At this point. This is not about the moral dimensions of drug use or whatever you think about that. You know what I mean? And they could not—they could not see that.

They could not, like—and a lot of that has to do with what you're dealing with here. It's because they're dealing with 15 years of, like, propaganda about the criminalization and how these people are subhuman and like, da-da-da-da-da. You know what I mean? We've got to stop these monsters. It's almost their version. Their war on terror. I think that's a good parallel that you...

I talked with people who we know in this community to be, like, quote-unquote liberals who just found medication-assisted treatment suboxone and other things just completely ridiculous just like they they they saw they really do think that it is wrong for people to be inebriated or intoxicated in some way and all of them are drunks a lot of them are drunk i've seen a lot of these people you say drunk off their ass you know well that is a that is literally been at dinners with these people where they're slurring their words and like being inappropriate with like young robinson scholars right because they're so fucking drunk well that's the thing about drug use and and that i've tried to hammer in this

piece is that it is you have to think about it dialectically, it is a social relation. There is one part of drug use, the part where you take the substance and there's a chemical modification inside your body. But then there's the other part of it which ties you into society in some way. And so otherwise,

how else do you explain that alcohol is considered fine? It's like social drug use versus anti-social drug use. Exactly. Yeah, I've seen alcohol ruin multiple people's lives. Oh, I've seen, yeah. There's no doubt about it. So, yeah.

So, like I said, you've got, this is a public health crisis, but it wasn't treated like that. Right. And so you've got people making some absolutely ridiculous claims, sensationalistic claims. You know, and these are good journalists. These are people I know, that we know, that were writing these things. The Lexington Herald-Leader wrote a series in 2002 called Prescription for Pain. Like a 12-part series about this. That Hal Rogers wrote.

I read. Hal Rogers read this. And that's when he decided he wanted to do something about the opioid crisis. Yeah, it's like these well-meaning liberals are unwittingly like getting federal money funneled into bullshit causes exactly about drugs exactly they ate it and abetted this they absolutely did so this enters in the next phase of this story so that when how rogers finally links up with this growing quote-unquote crisis when he decides he wants to finally do something about opioids it comes at the most insane moment and i didn't put this in the piece because i just

didn't know how to actually pull it off uh without sounding uh well you got 7 000 words already you don't want to take people down even further avenues of whatever. But the moment this occurs, that Hal Rogers decides, I'm going to finally do something about opioids in eastern Kentucky, after reading this thing in the Lexington Herald-Leader about opioids. It occurs in 2003. And what happens in 2003? Hal Rogers gets appointed to head the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. He gets to personally oversee the largest restructuring of the federal government in over 50 years.

He gets to oversee the creation of the agency prosecuting the drug war. I mean, I'm sorry, the war on terror. War on terror, yeah. war right i mean i'm sorry the war on terror or on terror yeah and so as like one of the very first things he does is he sends all these homeland security grants to police departments around the the region i mean there's multiple there's multiple headlines about it like hazard got millions of dollars in homeland security grants uh to update their own sort of communications infrastructure and other things. So did the Piteville Police Department.

You have a direct link between the war on terror and the war on drugs. Well, and so then what he does next after that is then he launches Operation Unite. Yeah. And so what makes Operation Unite different from earlier? I mentioned the high-intensity drug trafficking area, and the Kentucky State Police were also launching their own, you know, drug raids. They had done one in 2001 called Operation OxyFest. Yeah.

That's a ridiculous name. But what makes OxyFest? Yeah. That's a ridiculous name. But what makes... Oxy... It sounds like a goddamn thing, Malcolm. You know that OzyFest? It does! Yeah, Hillary... Chelsea Clinton was there

at Operation OxyFest in eastern Kentucky. So they... Let me ask you a question. So OxyFest was like a roundup. It was a massive drug roundup, yeah. It sounds like a fucking music festival dedicated to OxyContin.

Well, it was in some ways, but... There was a spectacle. What differentiates Unite from Operation OxyFest, the high-intensity drug trafficking area, Kentucky State Police's efforts to whatever, is the community component, the social component. How Rogers tried to model Unite on pride, on Kentucky pride that we just discussed a minute ago. And so what that meant was that there was a grassroots element to it.

And this was the unique thing about unite this is what made it unprecedented and innovative was that it tried to wage a comprehensive social war against opioid use yeah and so it tried to yeah basically turn everyday citizens into like sort of like i mean the word nazis is overused but like you know know rat out your neighbors and what's going on at the same at the exact same time Patriot Act people encouraging if you see something say something

it's like a wholesale encroachment on our privacy like at the municipal level too it's interesting I've never drawn those parallels before well yeah so it basically it's saying there are new public enemies look citizen you may not be able to participate in the war against the muslimic jihadists yeah you might not be able to kill uh any taliban but what you can do exactly if you see your neighbor acting a little funny

they've got a myth called this task yeah yeah yeah um and so uh and so that's another thing i need to point out that unites and these other initiatives went after other drugs than just opioids but the opioid epidemic in oxycontin was the underlying impetus for all of it in their own words in ox literally, Rogers said he read the piece on Prescription for Pain, the piece in the Lexington Herald-Leader, and that's why he launched Operation Unite. This is so amazing, because I can see all these pieces coming together in my mind. It's like this is the natural progression of all this.

I'll save this. Keep going. Okay. So, like I said, you've got, yeah, keep those in the back of your mind. War on Terror and the social components to it and all this. And so, UNITE has three prongs, right? UNITE stands for Unlawful Narcotics Investigations, Treatment, and Education. So, the first was the law enforcement prong,

which is pretty self-explanatory. Even then it was kind of innovative because it had like three task forces. Dude, you should have seen like all the Unite snitches that were like in like, you know, like Weisberg PD and other things. It's so funny because it's these guys that had like the cop haircut

and they all like grew ponytails and beards because they had to go like you know go undercover buy drugs and stuff they looked fucking ridiculous like they looked like a like somebody just put a ponytail on a cop you know what i mean yeah so there were snitches there were undercover informants then there were other people who would get busted and then they would become informants yeah then there were other people who would get busted and then they would become informants you know what i mean um and so there was the law enforcement component uh there was a three task force in the region like the big sandy cumberland and the fucking north fork i think i think they modeled it after those yeah um and these task force were you know made up of various detectives from around the region there was like 40 or 50 of them. How Rogers called them like an elite unit.

You know? They were elite. The best of the best. Cream of the crop. Yeah. And all these guys were around thinking they were the Navy SEALs or fucking like local cops. And what you had was basically for this to work, county governments have to file interlocal agreements.

So, like, a fucking detective from Letcher County can serve a search warrant in Perry County. Well, yeah, that is exactly what happened. Because I can remember when that happened. Like, Wattsburg cops couldn't even go make an arrest in Jenkins. Like, once they got to that city line, like, city incorporated, their jurisdiction ended.

Yeah. That's a thing of the past now. Yeah, they do whatever the fuck they want. Yeah, Lassburg Cop could drive to fucking Lexington and probably make an arrest. And so this one woman who I interviewed is a defense attorney in McKee in Jackson County, Sharon Allen. Shout out. I think she's a fan of the show now. Oh, yeah.

And she actually challenged this as unconstitutional because one of these, I think it was in Jackson County, they had not filed the correct agreement. They hadn't filed it in the correct place. So technically, they didn't have jurisdiction to issue search warrants, but they were doing it anyways. So technically they didn't have jurisdiction to file to issue search warrants, but they were doing it anyways. And Unite was just completely taken aback and, you know, defensive and, you know, aggressive about the fact that anybody would even dare challenge their ability to do this.

That's the thing multiple times i encountered them just getting absolutely like red nude and mad that anybody would challenge their authority to do anything yeah i mean i found a article in the hazard herald from like 2000 this is but that makes total sense this is why this is the era that came into again to get back to that parallel, because like the creation of ICE, you know, ICE is much talked about. All these sort of like, sort of police agencies that are questionably constitutional sprung up during this era because this is like, this is the war effort. You know what I mean? Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. And like the war effort, all of these, like, they all, well, to Tybo and Sharon Allen, like, she had, you know, filed this and they were completely, yeah, I mean, they lashed back in the press that she would even attempt to do this or whatever. whatever but yeah so like the war effort though there were um there was the sort of uh you know law enforcement aspect of it the punishment aspect of it but like the war in iraq there was a humanitarian aspect of it and unite was modeled exactly on that it was like well we're gonna punish you there will be debathification. But if you play along and go nicely, there is a humanitarian effort because we're out to help you. And that's where the treatment comes in.

They said that they were offering treatment solutions and things. But they weren't. I mean, even if they were, they hadn't funded the treatment side of Unite adequately at all. I think that they started with like— That T and the E, it's telling that they're at the back end. Exactly, exactly. Like at the beginning, Hal Rogers got like $8 million in federal funds for them. And I think like 80—I think it was 70% of it went to the law enforcement aspect of it so it's like treatment

didn't get any but even if they did the real the problem with the iraq war and the problem with this is that humanitarianism and war violence like they are contradictory aims they're not going to work right right yeah it's it's so stupid that we fail for all this it i'd be curious to know too because oh during all this you also have another war the war on coal yeah and how that ties in i'd be curious to later on dig into that i think that the third prong of this well i think that the war on coal kind of found fertile ground. The Friends of Coal thing kind of found a fertile soil bed. They're doing the war on drugs.

They're doing the war on terror. Yeah, let's just use the whole framing for this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So like I said, there was the law enforcement side. Then there's the treatment side, which wasn't funded at all. And in fact, as I pointed out in the article, Unite actually rejected the most up-to-date science on treatment. In 2004, they were still saying that we're not looking at Suboxone. We're not looking at theoxone we're not looking

at the mat treatment at medicated assistant assisted treatment like they rejected it and i even quoted one the kentucky river care right here in fucking whitesburg well at that time i think they're in jackson they said the culture of this region wasn't ready for mat for a medic medicated assisted treatment i mean like and they took their cues from unite you know what i'm saying yeah so and i know people and this is like a delicate thing because i was really worried about writing this because i knew people were going to get pissed and say well unite did eventually provide treatment that we wouldn't have normally had and that's true but it was like but left a lot of bodies in the way yeah i mean there was like two years between when unite started and when they actually started

issuing vouchers for treatment and when they they built that one in ash camp that treatment facility in ash camp and and uh i can't remember where the second one they built i think it was in clay county yeah um but yeah there's a lot of bodies in that fucking two year time period um and so uh and so then there so yeah there was those two prongs and then the third prong though and again this gets back to what i was saying a second ago this is what differentiates it from every other drug war effort at the time it was the education community outreach component. So what Unite did was they encouraged every community to start their own anti-drug group. And so, you know, there's Unite Pike, Unite Letcher, and all those other groups. In doing that, they also encouraged a lot of these groups to become court watchers.

I think only one or two counties actually did it. Like Clay County was one of them. But what they were doing, and the first time I saw a headline about this, I was like, this is interesting. The headline I saw was, citizens attempt to hold Unite accountable. And I was like, well, good. I'm glad somebody was doing this. And then I started reading the fucking article. And it was like, no, they were actually going to the trials of every drug offender

and trying to intimidate the judge, jury, and prosecutor into demanding the most severe sentence available. So what they were trying to do was, like, make sure Unite wasn't being too pussy. Yes. That's exactly what they tried to do. God damn, dude. I mean, they were vigilantes. And I've heard of people, even people say this of their own family members,

like hoping something earth-shattering happened to them. That's the only way they're going to learn. That's the only way they're going to get off this stuff. You know what I mean? As if somehow the using of drugs was somehow much worse than anything that could happen to them. Yeah. Itself.

For some moral reason, for some whatever. Well, I mean, the approach to addiction in this country is just, it's so bad. Yeah. I mean, it's so antiquated. It's so, I mean, no offense to people in 12-step programs. I don't really have anything against it per se but that being the main way we well i mean i understand that like aa and 12-step program works for a lot of people but it's telling that our best option is something that has like a spiritual sort

of quasi-religious component to it exactly instead of like something a little more i mean i hate to sound like a liberal when i say this but like firmer science based sort of you know what i mean whatever well it's also just dangerous i mean if you relapse a lot of people that overdose usually do it in relapse i mean i don't know the whole idea of complete abstinence, I don't know if it's... But I don't know. Some people are powerless to substances. I myself think that I am sometimes. Well, I mean...

I don't know. I go back and forth. These are not things that I have come to any sense of consensus on or conclusion about. I had a lot of trouble with this aspect of this piece because how you actually treat addiction is a topic of... Still a very fluid concept. Yeah, yeah. I think, though, the point that I'm driving at here is these are humans.

We've built so many paradigms and institutions in this country to treat them like they're not. Right. And Unite was innovative in that it tried to mobilize all of the social forces available to treat them like they weren't. And it tried to treat them like, yeah, these, like, again, using the war on terror analogy, it tried to treat them like they were public enemies. Right. And it did so at a moment of critical, like a critical conjuncture of political economic history here.

a critical conjuncture of political economic history here when you've got massive changes in the gender economy occurring that you know that should have seen some sort of accompanying change in the political structure here but didn't and so you have to ask like why well it's because people were encouraged to not channel their rage and anger over their conditions into some sort of solidaristic political activity or action but instead to go after their neighbors who they thought were taking drugs right and that's that's a that is a formula for disorganizing the working class yeah and i think that that is when you talk about like um you know, well, you know, what what is going on in these communities that, as you were mentioning earlier, there's entrenched poverty less than a human and to view them with suspicion and to not – I mean, we've even got friends that do this. And I was even doing it probably up until like five or six years ago probably too. I mean, it's just all of us are so inundated in that idea.

Yeah. So I don't know so that's you know that was the unite uh sort of community um and you know they held massive rallies pastors would go and they'd work the mobs up into anti-drug frenzies people would make statements like we gotta kill the drug dealers you know stuff like that yeah i mean this was this was matt this was a social uh revolution in some ways or was it upheaval anyways yeah i remember there was sort of a um i don't know what you would call it but i can i can recall police that worked in you know up at city Hall around the same time. When, like, somebody would overdose, they'd have to send the coroner over there. And, like, these cops would say, that's another ad. And you'd say, what's an ad?

An ADD, another dead doper. Yeah. So I was just treated as, like, this most disposable people. Like, there was, like, a, I don't know, like, a like a language or like slang terms for like what they you know what i mean there's a whole culture that sprung up around it but what they in terms of the dehumanization of drug use at that time it is it's weird to think about now and it's it's you could you can draw a straight line between how all this came together and how now every podunk police agency

in eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, west Virginia, wherever, now has like, you know, 47 cops and 247 AK-47s and like 60,000 rounds of ammunition in their fucking trunks and closets. It's like we say,

it's the new deal for cops. Yeah. Well, and you know know and the thing that i kind of left out i haven't mentioned so far and and that links up the community aspect of this with the law enforcement aspect was the way that they did drug roundups the roundups were incredibly inhumane um they would round up 40 to 50 people take them to a large public space like a public high school gym or a parking lot where everybody in the community could see them and put them on full display. Like I interviewed this woman who told me this insane story about how her group in Harlan County, they had started a group because they wanted a women's rehab facility there. They got a call one morning from Unite saying, come out, we're going to make a big announcement. They were excited. They were like, well, this is we're finally going to get's rehab facility there they got a call one morning from unite saying come out

we're gonna make a big announcement they were excited they were like well this is we're finally gonna get our rehab facility they get down there it's the local it's at the old high school gym there in harlan and it's a fucking drug roundup there's like 50 or 60 people just fucking chained to the floor basically and they're like you know we don't want to be here we don't want any part of this if people someone's addicted we want them to be able to come to us and not feel like we're going to turn them over to the police or something. What I'm getting at here is it created an atmosphere,

a larger atmosphere, that made recovery, however you want to define that, virtually impossible. And so then you have to ask, well, what is... Unless you're rich unless you're loaded i know plenty of rich kids that got hooked on drugs yeah and you know what what happened to them they would go you know to florida or tennessee or any like the big you

know what i mean like it was a class war. You know, tennis rehab facilities. This was class war, absolutely. And so then, yeah, so then, so what you do, what you see next is the aftermath, the after effects, because we probably need to start wrapping this up. But, so, you know, one inevitable question I feel like I came back to over and over while writing this was like, would things be, quote unquote, as bad as they are now? And by that, I mean, you see these headlines just yesterday, like overdoses are higher than they've ever been in 2020. You know, like, would things be as bad now if we just hadn't criminalized this early on and had actually treated it like what it was which is a public health crisis yeah um and so you look at stuff you i don't know there's no way to actually answer that scientifically probably but i think that you can make a pretty good case they did create the conditions for um further uh you know uh discord and communities and violence and other things.

It's interesting to think about because the same liberals that would have, or that I've even heard, Trump politicized this mask thing early, and that's why we're in such a big mess. We're the same type of liberals that would have been like calling people zombies exactly exactly so if you're a liberal out there you're sitting there and you're you know you hate trump because of everything he's done to like destroy this country consider the fact that you did something maybe if you're from communities like these it's more destructive than it is equally as destructive. Yeah, absolutely.

You know, and then you also look at the, I think that where I was also coming at this from is that the carceral effects of this. You have people in 2005 and 2006, public defenders saying, we're creating so many caseloads. So many people are going through the criminal justice system. We can't keep up.

And they were asking for more money from, you know, attorney general, the U.S. Attorney General office in East Yirgitaki. And one guy even interviewed Ernie Lewis, who used to head the Department of Public Advocacy. Who is USAG in this time? It was this guy named Joseph Familaro He died in 2002 His name was like Van Heusen

Or something like that I can't remember his first name He had like a Dutch name or something like that He went Ernie Lewis He went to see the USAG For Eastern Kentucky at this time to ask for more money for the public defender program. And he said he basically got laughed out of the room. They did give more money to prosecutors.

They hired special prosecutors to get these drug cases moving. But what they started doing is they started putting so many people in jail, in local jails, that they started having to build new ones entirely and so and this is one of the other myths that i came at this you know i came at this thing with this in mind but was very astonished to see this like every time you see a headline about when they sue purdue pharma like west virginia sues purdue pharma k Like, West Virginia sues Purdue Pharma. Kentucky sues Purdue Pharma. For the costs associated with the opioid epidemic. Well, if you read

between the lines, on a lot of those lawsuits, the costs they're referring to... Law enforcement. Yes, they're law enforcement. Basically, they just want the cops reimbursed. They want the cops reimbursed, and a lot of them had to build new jails and stuff. Like, for example, Pike County.

They sued Purdue. Not families that lost people. No, no, no, no. Pike County sued Purdue for $7 million in 2007, and it was because in 2005, they had spent $5 million on expanding their jail, basically. As they said, the jailer said, to hold people due to the opioid epidemic and it's like you did this you didn't have to put them there that's like eric andre meme with the gun yes exactly it's exactly right and so that's what i'm talking

about like with the big pharma thing it's like okay they may have flooded these communities with pills but choosing to criminalize them was a choice it did not have to be that way why would purdue pharma do this exactly and again i'm not absolving them they deserve to be hanged to be the worst parody whatever but but these law enforcement agencies had a choice to make about how they handled it. And they did the exact wrong thing. They treated it like the war on terror, basically. And so now a lot of these counties, and I counted, I counted at least half a dozen new jails in eastern Kentucky since 2001.

I mean, like, at least six counties in eastern Kentucky since this began have had to build new jails and that what i use that have had to i mean i use that with scare quotes because in their minds it's a political prerogative yeah but it's also an infrastructural one too it's like we've pointed out before with that statistic from jack norton and judas shepp's piece that if you're if you're looking at this from their perspective, it's like, well, there might not always be people around, civilians around for civil infrastructure,

but there will always be prisoners. And the rate that this is going up at, in 100 years, every person in Kentucky will be behind bars. So we can build more jails. And we can get money to build more when we yeah it's interesting to think back because when we were doing the prison fight a few years ago we really i guess had no idea what we were up against from a rhetorical standpoint right like we won that because we got lucky despite any hagiography you might come across about that right including one featuring my face but but the truth was is it it like all things being equal we were up against

decades really i mean almost two decades of just constantly being like i remember going around people be like well i i don't understand why you you got all these dopers out here running around and like they couldn't understand why i thought that was just not anything that we need to be concerned about. You know what I mean? From a crime perspective. Right. You know what I mean?

Right. Yeah. That's, it was, it's insane. Yeah. It's insane to think that now it is all, it's woven into,

it's not just some sort of like culture war thing or just something that people shout out for scare tactics or political points. It's woven into the political economy of how counties are administered, at least in eastern Kentucky. I mean, I did not study southwest virginia west virginia rust belt ohio any of these other places but i would be willing to bet that if you looked if you took a fine comb to a lot of these places you would find similar pretty similar contours so i don't know um to make a long story short TR TLDR yes Purdue flooded the streets with pills but cops criminalized them and the users the people that use them they treated it like a criminal crisis when it was in fact a public health crisis and um yeah uh I don't I don't know.

Yeah. Well. Just rewriting history over here at the Trillbillies HQ. Yeah. Using cold hard facts. This is the Coors Light cold hard facts, folks. That's right. Cold hard facts.

Brought to you by the Coors Bottling Company. That's right. Cold hard facts. Brought to you by the Payfoot Coors Bottling Company. Sponsors of the show and opponents of mass incarceration. Yes, champions of closing the racial wealth gap. Oh, fuck. All right. Well, so anyways, go read the piece if this hasn't been enough for you in an

hour and a half you can find find it at the baffler um you can use it to win arguments against people who rely on the simplistic narrative of uh well this is what it's really good for i mean from my perspective is dunking on liberals with uh well well, it's us versus the Sacklers. Well, yeah, but. Well, where I'm going with this is that we just came out of a year when the biggest rallying cry was defund the police. And so it's like, okay, well, how did the police operate in rural areas as well? And what I have found and what I know to be true now is that defund the police should apply universally. I mean, obviously, that's probably an obvious thing to anybody, but it's good to have some evidence for it, some empirical data.

But it's good to have some evidence for it, some empirical data. But, yeah, I think that, you know, if you're just looking at it from that perspective, yeah, I don't know. Defund the police, both in small-town America and in Chicago. Yeah. I don't know. That's really all that needs to be said about it yeah i think that but if that's your rallying cry then you got to interrogate some of these things that i mean well that's that's the thing i mean because a lot i that's kind of where i was going with this yeah that i think a lot of those people would um who say defund the police would probably also obfuscate the role of the police

in creating this quote-unquote crisis. They were heavily complicit in every step of the way. And so, fuck the police. We should defund them. They are bad. They make things worse uh and every time you see one of those headlines about overdoses going up just say okay the sacklers yes they contributed they created the underlying conditions for it but the police threw gas on the fire and in some cases created new fires and threw all of us in the fire.

What was that? Little fires everywhere? Yes. That book might be a good title for this. So, yeah. So, go read the piece. It's at the Baffler. The Baffler.com should be on the front page.

Go support the Baffler.com should be on the front page. Go support The Baffler. Support us while you're in the giving mode. Yeah, if you're in the giving mode, go to the Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash Trailbilly Workers Party. This is what we're doing with all that hard-earned... Hard-hitting journalism. That's right. We are doing journalism.

Because I sit around and I say, you know, I've got this money from this show. I do twice a week. What am I going to do with it? And it turns out what I'm going to do with it is I'm going to sit in the library and look at microfilm until I have back and neck problems and arthritis in my wrists. Well, that's from jacking off to the microfilm. But, you know. But anyways, please continue to go support us at Patreon so that we can continue to do stuff like this.

I don't know who we'll take down next. I would really like to do... Well, I'll tell you this. I don't know who we'll take down next. I would really like to do... Well, I'll tell you this. I was thinking about this coming in today. Did you see this thing going around of the judge in Mississippi, the guy that got thrown in jail? Like, standard protocol is to, like,

take your cell phone from you. Did you see this? Uh-uh. I don't think so. Well, they didn't take this guy's cell phone from him for whatever reason. And he didn't know that, like, I guess like i guess they thought well he had his cell phone well they must it must be all right to have your cell phone in jail so he called his wife from his cell uh-huh and uh like when the cops were going around i guess like checking doing cell checks whatever he asked if they had like a phone charger he could use. And they were like, phone charger you can use.

So, yeah, my phone died. Whoa. And then they booked him. And the judge in that jurisdiction gave him 12 extra years. He was going in on like a drug crime that was going to keep him there like nine. I don't know. It was like a short period of time. I don't know what it was.

Jesus Christ, man. It's like their own mistakes yeah constantly oh my god man and it went to the mississippi supreme court and it was upheld there that's dude this is the crazy thing about this because you look at crime rates again go back and look at the crime rates from the early 90s or the late 90s and then our early 2000s. It's like before they actually started going after OxyContin opioids militantly, the crime rates were about the same as they had been in the early 90s. But then they actually start going after them and then the crime rates go up.

Felony indictments in Letcher County alone tripled between like 2001 and 2004. And it's like, yeah yeah because cops create crime create crisis to generate money exactly all right it's not fucking rocket science yeah these doesn't this does not mean there's like a rise in these social ills the same ills that are in communities have always been and will probably always persist exactly you know what i mean and usually times their ills is not even the right word for them but i i was thinking about that i saw that it reminded me of the guys getting like the book thrown at them for like beating the hell out of that guy that watched fire down below it's like i know we have a you know that's teehee haha with that but i think it would be fun to start doing more stuff where we like look

at like just draconian punishments that are held down and kind of shine a light on those things because there's probably people rotting away here for really dumb reasons dude oh yeah that was like like even dumber than like drug use or anything like that right because that that was extraordinarily dumb yeah that that example and these guys lost their like that right because that that was extraordinarily dumb yeah that that example and these guys lost their whole lives right because they beat up a guy but in this piece i found a guy who got five years for selling two percocet pills yeah two perks five fucking years of your life just gone just gone yep i mean and these are the people that they're rounding up kingpins right yeah you're, you're not doing shit.

Yeah, you're not doing fucking butt. Ugh, God, I hate cops, man. Anyways, it's all perspectives, really. I guess if you don't come into contact with police, if you're not harassed by them on a daily basis, I can see how you could look at this situation and be like, yeah, this is all Sackler. But if you are looking at this from another angle someone who is daily harassed by these

fucking terrorists and listen make no mistake about it this is not you know this is not uh you know just segregated to black communities or brown communities or anything else you know what i mean it's like you say in this thing it's like that whole refrain about the what was it that you said like the the liberal tweet that you see going around yeah it's the what they're they're like um people didn't care about right treatment for drug until white people started exactly yeah that's like that's not true yeah it's not true this was a class war yeah this was a class war from the very beginning. So that's another point you can score with this piece, if you would like. To show people, no, this actually was a class war. And we wage it every day.

They wake up every day and wage class war. What do you do? What do we do? What do we do? We should do it. Hey, they like to do their wars. we should take up a war of our own. That's right. That's right.

So anyways, thanks for listening, everybody. Go read the piece once again at the Baffler. We'll see you over at the Patreon on Sunday. Bye-bye.