Hello Ben. Thank you for having me, John. My pleasure. This is a subject that scares

your shit out of me. You, and how did you stumble upon the story of fentanyl because weren't you at one point in time

didn't you write about like rap music?

Yeah I have a book about NWA and Tupac and I interviewed like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg, all those people, yeah.

But I was the LA Weekly Music Editor and I started looking into this story about why people were always

dying at raves. So like I don't know if you remember a few years back every time

there was a rave they're like one person died, two people died, more.

And they always said it was from ecstasy,

but I knew that ecstasy was really not that dangerous of a drug.

You know, MDMA, pure MDMA, very few people die from that so I was like what is going on here and I looked into it and turned out it was all

adulterated it wasn't real ecstasy it wasn't real Molly it was adulterated with all these new drugs and I kind of went down the

rabbit hole and I found out that all these new drugs were made in China. They're

all synthetic and there were like hundreds of them, and

then it turns out that the most, you know, the worst of them was fentanyl, and that's how I got under the topic.

And fentanyl, most people think of fentanyl, they think of it as being a new thing,

but it's not really a new thing, right?

Was it, it was invented in the 50s yeah yeah it was invented by a

Belgian chemist he was trying to find something that worked better than morphine

in hospitals doesn't morphine work really good?

Well, it does, but for things like,

yeah, traditionally, people have gotten a lot of mileage out of morphine.

But for things like open-heart surgery, he wanted something that came on really fast and it lasted a long time.

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