Transcripts For CSPAN2 Texas Book Festival 20240713

Hello everyone. We are going to get started. Thank you so much for joining us for this panel. If you want to take a moment to silence your cell phones and be much appreciated. Thank you so much for joining us i am nate and ill be the moderator for this panel. It is called fat not eat how they are creating the deadliest waves of the opioid epidemic. Its my great pleasure to introduce ben hes an awardwinning Investigative Reporter and has written several books to of which the history of rap music. He was a music editor for the l. A. Weekly. Both were extremely well received as happened this book. He was featured on fresh air as im sure a number of you are fresh air type of crowd and also in the atlantic and has wonderful reviews. Please help me welcome him. [applause] ben and i will discuss the book for about 30 minutes and then will leave 15 minutes for q a simply stick around if you have questions. Lets start at the very beginning. I know there are many people in texas that have never heard of fentanyl, so please tell us what it is and whites killing 70 people. Thank you nate, thank you everyone for coming here. It is great to be here. That no is synthetic heroin, its the third wave of the Opioid Crisis, thi, the first we began in the 1990s with the over prescription of pills like oxycontin. There was a change in the way doctor started thinking about pain and when that was combined with deceptive advertising from Companies Like Purdue Pharma which convinced doctors the opioids were not actually addictive, in combination it led to a situation where people were receiving more pain pills than ever before in their stories of places like kermit, west virginia, a town of 400 people that received millions of pills a year. There were pill mills and people had legitimate need for these pills found that with the prescriptions were finished they were addicted. So many of them turned to street heroin. And so heroin represented the second wave of the Opioid Crisis. Now, as of the last five years or so in a lot of places its a most impossible to find pure heroin anywhere. Almost all of it is cut with fentanyl. Fentanyl represents the third wave of the opioid academic. Fentanyl is also an opioid and it satisfies the same craving as prescription pills like oxycontin as well as heroin. The biggest difference is 50 times stronger and so drug dealers use it as a cost saving measure and a lot of times when people think theyre buying heroin but theyre actually buying a mixture of heroin and fentanyl and so it kills him instantly. And that is the fentanyl epidemic of drug that most people dont want. Talk a little bit about the pitfalls of this process of combining fentanyl with a known drug. What i found fascinating about the book is often the people producing the drug dont know how much fentanyl putting in themselves. Is also an important radical drug used in hospitals so women in childbirth fentanyl is used in epidurals for men who are getting colonoscopies there often given fentanyl it comes as a pain patch and a lollipop used for people with cancer and endoflife care. When we hear about these deaths, were not hearing about hospital fentanyl. Its almost a listed fentanyl in a most all made in china so this gets into the u. S. In one of two ways, one way is right through the u. S. Mail and the u. S. Postal service, fedex, ups, dhl, they all shipped fentanyl and other types of fentanyl through the mail fentanyl also comes to china through the Mexican Cartel who imported, packaged it and send it north to the border and is distributed through the same channels as drugs the carowinds, cocaine and meth. When the fentanyl arrives to the Mexican Cartel its pretty pure, 90 pure or more but the cartel cut it with other cutting agents like benadryl and all sorts of cutting agents and then assent to the border and the regional distributors cut even more and by the time he gets to the hands of the street buyer, nobody knows how strong it is. That is the problem. Even the drug dealers themselves dont know how strong it is. Its also very hard to mix so it only takes two grains of rice of fentanyl to overdose. Its very visible to the eye. So when drug dealers try to mix it up, makes heroin with fentanyl its so most impossible to do. I talked to a former that nondealer who used a mr. Coffee coffee grinder to mix it up heroin and this is the same mr. Coffee grinder you buy in the store and also you get hotspots. So some batches might be benign while other batches would make you overdose instantly. The book is not just about fentanyl its about an entire class of drugs which are calling nonpsychoactive contestant. It was drugs in the laboratory that imitates more familiar drugs that come from a plant the opioid coffee or marijuana or coke at least. Many of these drugs were done in created trying to advance science. Can you talk a little bit about how the process from how they go from a legitimate lab to test in lab. Were anything about traditional drugs, young heroin as you mentioned, cocaine, marijuana, these all come from natural plants like you said. It is very expensive and timeconsuming to grow the opioid poppy and its very setup to for lawenforcement. But these new drugs that youre talking about now psychoactive substances are all synthetic. Theyre all made in a lab so in the past they used to call them designer drugs and thats basically the same thing. These are drugs because they synthetic they can be manipulated so for example, fentanyl as you change the chemical structure just a little bit now you have an analog of fentanyl. And sometimes these fentanyl analogs are Even Stronger and more deadly than fentanyl itself. So now we have literally hundreds and hundreds of new drugs where as a hundred years ago we only had a handful of drugs. Now we have up to 100 new ones each year. A lot of these drugs were invented for legitimate medical purposes and they were made in medical science laboratories in the 70s and 80s and these drugs were published in paper but they just sat around on dusty shelves and University Libraries and no one pays too much attention until the internet age and the internet age all these old papers start to be published online in the chemist that i mentioned in my book title, they go on the internet and search out all of these papers were scientists are talking about a new drug. And they take these drugs like i said that were intended for a medical purpose and they repurpose them as recreational drugs many sold on the dark web, many are also sold on the regular web but what they have in common is their all made in china. This might be a good time to talk about the dark web because im guessing thats another thing that people are not particularly familiar with but it emerges as an important way to distribute these illegal things can you talk with the dark web and its role . The dark web is a disguised internet protocol where its impossible to find out who is publishing a webpage. The dark web is most famous for these markets, bazaars that sell everything illegal under the sun. So the most famous was silk road and that was taken on a furious ago. Based in texas right . Yeah congratulations. The other dark web markets have everything from guns, drugs, fake rolex watches, credit card numbers, child pornography, it is really the wild west. And is very hard to crack down unless there is human error the code is basically unbreakable and a lot of times people who are buying and selling communicate encrypted messages and its very hard to crack. So that emerged as a place where the new drugs and the scariest part, teenagers are some of the most common consumers using the dark web because theres so tech savvy and it results in situations where the teenagers can go online, go on the dark web, by drugs using bitcoin, the cooker currency and have the drugs delivered directly to the door. You talked about the anonymity of the dark web, some of these dealers on the dark web were so confident they were willing to acknowledge himself as a reporter about what they did. Was very surprised, i wanted to interview dark web dealers in a number talk to me and one was willing to meet in person. So this is a dark web dealer who was selling different analogues of fentanyl and after fentanyl was banned these different analogues in china. He would order different types of fentanyl analogs from china and get them sent directly to his home and then he would repackage them and sell them on the dark web so i wanted to know his story, how he can morally justify this type of action considering keep going round live tv you never know what will happen. By the way that seen in the book where you meet the dark web dealer in person and he brings his daughter to the meeting which is an outstanding scene in the book, talk about his rationale for what he did. I was very surprised we met at a Fast Food Restaurant and he brought his daughter and he claimed to be doing good in the world and what he said was he was in opioid addict himself even addicted to pain pills for a long time but theyre very expensive and what he said the type of fentanyl that he sold was a nasal spray. He actually made his own nasal spray, he showed it to me and it looked at something that you by cvs or walgreens except it was much stronger than your typical opioid medicine. One spray was the equivalent of taking an oversize oxycontin pill and he said his prices were so affordable that he could help longtime addicted opioid users maintain their addictions for a fraction of the cost of buying oxycontin. He said considering the big pharma and the companies that produce pharma which are now being sued all over the country considering the damage that theyve done to the country, he considered this as an alternative way for people to maintain their addiction. He was a robin hood kind of figure . He did see himself that way. The other chapters in the book that really sing for me were the ones where you went to china and that is what separated this book from a sterile report on a crisis to one that is a wonderful read, talk about your trips to china. Thank you for the kind words. Back in 2017 i started reporting on fentanyl and everyone kept saying by 2017 it was killing more people than any drug annually in american history, worse than the crack epidemic, heroin, pills. I kept hearing all the statistics but no one had ever gone to the stores, no one had over gone to china. So i thought where do i start. I dont speak chinese, so i started googling by fentanyl in china. On the real website. On the service web. Yeah. And it may sound silly but list of companies came up, dozens and dozens of Different Companies selling fentanyl in china popped up, i clicked on the webpages and they have the salespeople email addresses and i emailed them, i made a fake email address that said i was interested in buying that fentanyl and if i came to china when they show me their lab and a lot said yeah. So in early 2018 i bought a plane to get initialed up, i went to a city in lujan and is not known to most westerners but its 11 million people, a chemical manufacturing hub and they make a lot of legal chemicals and thats what they do, theyve a lot of great universities who produce scientists, chemists, most go into the legitimate field but some go into the illicit field. I find out there was a company who is making more fentanyl ingredients and fentanyl precursors than any other company. So fentanyl precursors are basically what is driving epidemic. There was sold to the Mexican Cartel who make fentanyl the rest of the way and to get to the border. Its equivalent of sudafed. If you hear about the math crisis, you hear about the backward meth labs and these cooks were going to cvs or walgreens and come out with a sudafed in the store. And then they would use the sudafed to make math. The fentanyl precursors are that equivalent without that they were not in business. They have their own chemist who can make the precursors. I went to the company and i emailed the salesperson and i said id like to meet you at your company and they said sure, we will meet you there at noon so i was based in a big hotel, i showed up in the lobby and i did not know what was happening, it did not look like a Chemical Company but they took me upstairs and showed me they had two floors of the hotel dedicated to their sales staff. So their sales staff was 20 something recent college graduates, almost all of them. And there was hundreds of them. They were in cubicles and looked just like a western office. This was considered a job for someone who spoke english . Exactly. They had a great health plan, they gave people free cell phones to the employees, they had movie nights where everybody went out and free room and board, in terms of the salespeople lived in the hotel and all the while they were selling the chemicals for the deadliest drug on earth in their minds legally. Release producing it legally in china. It was totally legal in china and even though it was illegal in the u. S. , the salespeople claim not to know about the fentanyl problem. At first i was dubious but i found out really fentanyl does not register in china. Even though it makes more fentanyl than anyone else the citizens there dont have a fentanyl problem. So the salespeople said we dont even know what this is or why its so popular. Some people are selling sal thousands of chemicals from the same factory. Is just another chemical that someone in the west is interested in. Exactly. They claim to sell 10000 other chemicals, some of them were maybe real that they sold sometimes but the main moneymaker the salespeople told me were the fentanyl precursors and also steroids. They sold lots and lots of steroids which is the same situation, legal in china but scheduled in the west. You have a very provocative suggestion that you did not export too much. That is possible and laced a few people in these operations think of this as a reversed opium war. If youre familiar with the chinese opium war, there were two in the 19th century, basically england was selling lots and lots of they said fentanyl is not a drug that we will have to worry about. It is too powerful, users do not like it and basically nothing to see here. It was only one year later in 2016 that fentanyl over to care when in the other drugs to become the deadliest in u. S. History since then there has been a lot of typical war on drugs, policies that we have seen. In my book i explore a more rational way for the fentanyl crisis. I believe in something as harm reduction. Harm reduction is basically idea that people will always use drugs inasmuch as we dont want them to, there is nothing we can really do to stop them. Except, we can try to make it safer. So there are a lot of different policies what is called fentanyl testing strips. A lot of the reason people die from fentanyl is because they take other drugs and fentanyls in there. In this fingerprint and the singer tom petty both died because they took prescription pills that they thought were regular opioids but theyre actually cut with fentanyl. The rapper. Miller died the same way. What these do, you can make a mixture of your drug and you can get the strips in there, theyre just like a pregnancy test, you dip them in and if theres one stripe is fentanyl if theres two stripes theres no fentanyl. In studies have shown drug users arent dumb. They realize theres fentanyl and there the less likely to use the drug and less likely to overdose and die. What the dea said was untrue. You just dont like it and is too powerful. Their desperate to get the products that they can get. There are instances where fentanyl is being sold as fentanyl for some people its a powerful its an attraction for but the vast majority of the people only want the drugs that they want. So i also traveled to spain and they have an Amazing Program there called supervised injection facilities. These are places where users can legally go and use drugs. They could shoot a pair when or fentanyl, smoke crack cocaine, it sounds crazy to most americans but there are doctors and nurses on site, clean needles, treatment programs, is basically all dedicated to making sure that people longterm addicted users can use these drugs safely. And they never had a death of one of these facilities anywhere in europe or canada where they have the facilities but in the u. S. They are illegal and none that are operating legally here. We seem to be much closer to a second possible solution. Which is legalizing marijuana. You point out the reason that they might kick down on these overdoses is something that they have not talked about there is a synthetic marijuana. Although is not marijuana at all. But it seems drugs known as k2 or spice you can buy legally overthecounter, they mimic the effect of marijuana in the brain but much more powerful and much more dangerous. K2 and spicer basically called synthetic marijuana but really its not the same at all. They react on some of the same receptors but they said the receptors into overdrive so if you get stoned you might get the munchies and might be kind of relaxed, watch a movie but with k2 and spice your hear starts te fast and people overdose and die. The reason these drugs became popular not just because people like them, its because of drug test like the kind that employers give to employees and parents give to children, marijuana shows up on these drug tests were as k2 and spice do not show up so thats why it became popular. You said part of the positive reaction to this book is youve been invited to speak to people in washington about what our response ought to be. Can you talk about what you shared with them . I have been lucky to talk to people in the highest branches of federal government and a lot of people want to do what i expect them to do which is continue more of war on drugs policy. The way i look at a, the dea help take out pablo escobar, the colombian cocaine kingpin, the number of decades ago but since then the cocaine has not dried up and in fact theres more cocaine coming out of columbia now than ever before. El chapo was put in prison but that has not stopped the flow of drugs from mexico. Now china is the next country to be in our crosses. I can understand it better than anybody. I was the first journalist to go inside a fentanyl lab and we did not talk about that here, you have to read about it in the book but i did go inside the lab and watch people synthesizing these type of fentanyl on the scale that i could have never imagined. It was very nerveracking. My wife was not happy. But president trump, ill give him some credit, he has made fentanyls part of the trade war, he is basically saying if china cannot get fentanyl exports to the u. S. Under control he is going to put more sanctions on different areas of chinese exports and at the same time, people who commit lowlevel fentanyl offenses are still going to jail and in fact lowlevel fentanyl dealers are being given longer sentences and the problem with that, often these dealers are not Big Companies are hearing about, their addictive users themselves who are dealing to support their habit. So those are not the people we should be targeting. Which is also very familiar if youve been following the drug war since the 1980s. That might be a good note for us to stop on which would leave us 15 minutes for questions. Does anyone want to be the first one, we have two microphones one in the front and one in the back. Dont be shy. And then i will sign books at 1 00 oclock at 2 00 oclock. Yes, maam. Hi what advice you have for how to talk about this with kids who think spice and k2 are cool. Thats a great question. When i was coming up and i suspect when you were coming. We got a lot of the deer programs, just say no and we were told that most all drugs could probably kill you. Unfortunately now that is actually true. And the reason is because fentanyl is cut into almost any pill or any powder, is cut into cocaine, meth, heroin, prescription pills, about the only drug that you can really trust would be marijuana, real marijuana if you can see it in small it is probably safe. But almost any pill or powder if you have not checked it or use the fentanyl testing strip for example you have no way of knowing if fentanyl is in their and it could kill someone instantly. Thats the most Important Message to talk kids. The same is true for k2 and spice. It can be wildly random. Absolutely. With all the Media Coverage on the Opioid Crisis n. [inaudible] would you comment on that . Absolutely. When it comes to the pure crisis of the pill i think most were acting in good faith. My dad is a doctor and doctors legitimately wanted people not to be confined to agony. Into the pages themselves often were following Doctors Orders so i have all the sympathy in the world for them and i dont have any sympathy for Companies Like Purdue Pharma which downplays the risk of addiction. Nowadays things are little bit different. Because opioids are not prescribed nearly as much as they were before. There is an effort be made to find alternatives to opioids and i think for people who are just getting and have an injury now, they should be alternative. And the personal responsibility when people are educated are very important. When it comes to the people who got hooked in the 90s and 2000, taken opioid pill away from them is not a good answer. A lot of these people switch to street heroin and its a very calm located issue. I think we might have a question in the back previous her. Why dont people just take the legal pill that they can get, why do they switch to fentanyl . I cannot hear you. Why dont they just take oxycontin and legal pills they can get rather than having to switch to the fentanyl, can you talk about the crackdown on legal pills . That is definitely happy in a big way. Theres all the new laws over the country in a talk to a patient from colorado who was a longtime legitimate opioid user, she had no thinkers were matured i frie he said she had toattd write another prescription. The class recommended alternatives like yoga, acupuncture, a lot of cases even things like high levels of ibuprofen and things like that. So like i said i think the great things to consider from the start before you become addicted to these pills but for someone who has been using these for so long it felt degrading and like i said i dont think its the best answer. Yesterday. I was wondering what you thought about in a lot of cultures particularly being rap music among younger kids and if you as a Marketing Tool and the drugs that people take it completely ingrained within your culture. Rap music is something i know barbara two books on that. Its very distressing to me houston has talk about for a long time. It is basically coding costs are mixed with soda and taking recreationally. A lot of rappers have been killed themselves but nowadays people are talking about xanax, different types and those very dangerous as well. The most legal combination the doctors are seen are opioid mixed with sedatives and they kill people, i dont think its great at all for rappers to be glorified that. So youre unnoticed rappers. If you look question is on point because the culture develops around a particular drug and im to get in particular of ecstasy in the 80s. By the way in my the last person the group in north texas to know that you could buy ecstasy at the bar, at the club until 1985. [laughter] true story, totally legal. I did not know that but some people would argue that it was relatively benign compared to what we see today. Exactly. Thats a case of a lot of these drugs, very few people die from that marijuana nobody has ever died from an overdose. Lsd too, people dont realize that some people may have thought they were a bird and jumped off a roof but no one has ever died from lsd overdose. So these new drugs coming out of china are fa fake lsd, fake marijuana, fake ecstasy and all these drugs are more powerful and more likely to kill people. Yes, sir. Legalizing marijuana might be a help in im not sure if thou should intention but im curious as to what you feel about marijuana as an alternative as to some of the painkillers. I dont use marijuana so i dont know but is this an alternative to the painkillers that might be less addictive and actually provide relief with all the other downsides. I heard people talking about marijuana as a potential substitute for opioids. I dont know enough about it to say if its a good idea or not. I have not read enough about it. I will say legalizing marijuana is something that should be done with caution. In colorado which was one of the first states to legalize marijuana, they have been encouraging signs, kids are not taking it in larger numbers for example but also distressing signs that people who are driving while high much higher rate of fidelity of people driving while high and it seems like decriminalization is actually something working well in some places for example the country of spain and portugal both decriminalized all drugs and have seen a lot of positive results from that. But meaning is not legal but youre not going to go to jeff or. Exactly. You will not go to jail but theres not weed stores on every block and things like that. You have to approach these things carefully. Relative to the concept that you said drug users dont necessarily prefer fentanyl but when you watch a documentary or tom petty and they have income and they wanted something, those people have the type of income and when you watch a documentary the pushers that are pushing the fentanyl, once they tested they seem to be the things that they sell the most is here one, when they havent had it dies. Thats the best seller. What about unaware versus saying they dont want to knowingly say theyre using it. You said a lot of good points. The first thing to know if you want prescription opioids and if you need them legitimately and prescribed by your doctor and getting them from a pharmacy, those are safe, theyre not instances of being cut with fentanyl. But if youre buying off the black market off the dark web from a street dealer or anyone else, these pills, these legitimate pain pills can be stamped with a oxycontin logo, with the vicodin logo, they can look 100 legitimate but they can be cut with fentanyl. So these dealers have the Pill Press Machine that can stamp the pill to look exactly the same. So tom petty, prince, whoever was getting there pills for them, i think tom petty bought his on the street and came out of a show and was in pain and bought them from someone on the street. These sources used to have pills that were legitimate but now these pills are cut with fentanyl in greater and greater numbers. I cannot stress enough how important to stay away from random blackmarket pills. What was the second part . Do you remember . Might there be people who actually do want fentanyl. There are people who have been using heroin so long they cannot get high from heroin. That was another very good point. For a long time heroin users are not getting high anymore. When they take heroin and takes care of their withdrawal symptoms so they dont have its a really bad flu ive often heard. So taking heroin gets them back to baseline but theyre not getting high. Fentanyl however, gets them hi again because its a much more powerful so you mentioned cases where people always ask me, its the number one question why would dealers dispense fentanyl if its killing the clients. Why would they knowingly kill their own clients. I talked to a lot of people and they say when in addictive user hears that someone overdosed and died they dont try to stay away, often times they say that must be the really good strong batch so they go after that batch. Thats important reality for a lot of people. I would like to bring conversation back its really hard to hear can you talk lovely. Sorry i have a head cold. Speak close to the mic. I apologize to anybody behind me who gets this from the mic. I want to speak about marijuana as a normal legalization and Medicinal Marijuana its really obvious that is more important people are seen side effects and there are detrimental effects of this. As we go on with this and is a war on drugs progresses, how can we separate the language around regulating marijuana in the adverse effects of that in separating not from the effects of fentanyl. What language should we use in looking for as we hear reports and as we get, not just news reports but as politicians talk about it. What should we listen for . For an interesting answer we can look to the country of new zealand which it took about in my book. Not usually what people think of when they think of drugs or drug policy. But new zealand undertook a very interesting experiment just a few years ago and they legalized all these new drugs, overnight the synthetic cannabis like k2 and spice, all the party drugs all became legal. So this was a test case for the subject were talking about. So what happened, overnight is stopped being the drug dealers in the drug manufacturers who were producing and packaging these drugs. So the problem with the new drugs including fentanyl is not really the drug itself believe it or not you can take a safe dose of fentanyl. A safe dose of k2 and spice, anything. The problem is nobody knows the dosage should be. There is an old saying that the dose makes the poison. Even water can be fatal if you drink too much. So what this legalization did was brought regulation into the marketplace. So in new zealand all the sudden people had wellregulated synthetic marijuana and in the u. S. Like i said was killing people left and right and people were overdosing but suddenly in new zealand they had a safe version of the synthetic marijuana and everybody there was almost no for tallies. Thats an example of what happened. This only lasted a year, everyone freaked out and theres a lot of what about the children rhetoric in new england and did the legal to stick experiment with legalization. In the ensuing years the synthetic marijuana now again made by the drug dealers, made by the drug cartel is too stro strong, it is not dose properly and now again people in new zealand are dying in scores from synthetic marijuana. How can we relate that to the u. S. Andrew yang the president ial candidate is in favor of decriminalizing opioids and so this is a very hard thing to swallow for a lot of people. Even for me when i heard about it, decriminalizing opioids, we basically would say its okay to shoot a pair went in fentanyl, that did not make any sense. But what his argument is, this is an addiction problem and we need to bring these people out of the shadow so when people are being locked up for heroin, fentanyl, the rate is incredibly high when people get out of jail, get out of prison, theyre very likely to use again. But when we bring the people out of the shadow and provide them with treatment, healthcare, even with things with counseling the rates drop tremendously. So that may be the way we should start thinking about it. I think that is a good note to in don because he reached the end of our time. Before you go remember they will be selling in the book signing tent and ben will sign two minutes from now. [applause] thank you. [inaudible conversations] live at the texas book festival in austin. For complete schedule of everything airing from texas, visit our website, booktv. Org or check your program guide. In the meantime he is a portion of our program with our archives. With Emmy Jacobson on the history of the cia. What i learned in looking through jfks archive was that the pigs impacted the president so greatly, he was humiliated in his first 100 days as president. After having won the election on a very specific position that communism must be defeated. In cuba and vietnam read the top of his target list. And to have that failure at the bay infuriated president kennedy. And he did something which in my opinion has not been looked at or reported before. What he did was he switched the authority of the covert operations from the cia working under title 50 to the Defense Department working under title ten and it got very messy in terms of the paramilitary operations that were happening in the very early days of vietnam. This is long before war was declared by president trump. And that was very interesting from a historical point of view because you see the same thing today or i should say do you see that same thing today. I let readers decide or try to let readers decide and it come to their own conclusions about bigger sweeping issues that affect all of us as citizens. After the vietnam war any kind of paramilitary or military force was looked down upon the special forces was gutted, the cia paramilitary was essentially reduced to mill. The Church Committee took the cia almost down and this idea was no one wants anything to do with the warfare, paramilitary, its dark, dirty, ugly, not a gentlemans game, not a gentlemans work for game. Really the citizens of the United States did not want anything to do with war. Period it was very important point of the cias history because you had a whole bunch of operators without war. In the right about that in the book in the moment where theyre not needed. And theres a lot of activity until reagan takes office. You hear the tip of the spear which is what we call the special forces operators predict tip of the tips assassination. It is ultimate guerrilla warfare capacity that the cia has nina has existed since 1947. There is clearly through declassified documents and first interviews with sources about how this has evolved over