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Episode transcript

Elizabeth Vargas:

Sam Quinones, welcome back to Heart of the Matter. Great to have you.

Sam Quinones:

Thank you.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I wanted you to come back because you’ve spent so many years, years and years studying the drug crisis in America and fentanyl in particular. And obviously this is a huge issue for people in this country right now. It’s a political issue, it’s a devastating issue for families. It’s killing people. We have the opioid crisis and drug overdose deaths are skyrocketing due to fentanyl. We have asked a lot of our audience for questions, so I’m going to ask you a lot of the questions today that I have gotten in from our audience.

First of all, let’s just do some background. I saw you on television recently when somebody was referring to the Mexican drug labs and you used air quotes around drug labs. Let’s clear up some misconception. How sophisticated are these drug labs where these Mexican cartels are making counterfeit pills, putting fentanyl in cocaine, etc?

Sam Quinones:

I would say that they run the gamut. A lot of them are very rudimentary because they don’t need to be more than that. The knowledge base down in Mexico on how to make this stuff I think is pretty widespread. I think that there is a generalized knowledge how to do it, and a lot of people who’ve had experience in making this at various levels. There’s also a huge amount of ingredients coming in to Mexico, particularly through ports. And in the case of fentanyl, I think through the Mexico City Airport from the world chemical market, primarily China, India, etc. So these can run the gamut from a little backyard thing to one that a guy I talked to, toured, actually. A drug dealer I talked to in Oregon, toured a very sophisticated with a lot of investment, meaning that they didn’t fear that that investment would be wasted by being shut down by law enforcement.

What is also true though is that the capacity for production is just enormous. And that is why the ingredients, the protection and the enormous capacity for production is why we now have those two drugs, synthetic drugs. Again, we’re now in the synthetic era of drug production. Plants are not involved here. These are chemical only and they have stretched. They are covering really effectively the entire United States from the West Coast up to New England, and pretty much every place in between with the most devastating, the most dangerous, the most deadly, the most mind-tangling drug in the case of methamphetamine that we have ever seen.

In potencies also that we have never seen and don’t seem to be relenting either because the supply is so vast. Normally when you cut your dope on the street, it’s because you don’t have enough of it and you want to make it last. So you put other stuff in there that doesn’t affect the brain or anything. Well, you haven’t seen that. You haven’t seen that really in the United States so far. The prices have dropped, the potency remains really very, very high. And all of that is due, I think, to this remarkable amount of supply coming almost entirely I think out, out of Mexico.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Right. Simple supply and demand. All right. Why do the cartels put fentanyl in their drugs?

Sam Quinones:

I’m not sure. The cartels in a lot of cases put the fentanyl in the drugs. There’s two worlds we need to be talking about and separate them. First of all, of course, is the supply of counterfeit pills. Now, in those, they do put fentanyl and these pills are made to look like, wow. You name it, there’s been… I’ve seen-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Percocet, Valium.

Sam Quinones:

Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Xanax.

Sam Quinones:

You can see… The main one being oxycodone, generic 30 milligram pills, little blue pills. And again, I think that is simply a function of the amount of fentanyl that they are producing down there, it’s just amazing amounts. And the understanding of the American market, which is that we have a lot of people up here who got addicted to pain pills when they had opioid painkillers in them. And there’s a love affair in the United States with pills, and this is an easy way… It’s a new way of smuggling and another way of administering fentanyl, of packaging fentanyl, if you like. And one that seems to last on the street. There’s a market on the street in some areas now, you’re seeing down in Tucson recently. There’s now some signs that these are turning into currency. You can pay for things with these pills, that kind of thing. And each of them, each of these pills does not contain anything but fentanyl.

On the other side though, there’s drugs like cocaine, methamphetamine and others that are being laced with these drugs. And I think that’s happening more on the local level, at the local mid to street level dealers who are understanding that fentanyl’s so cheap, you can boost the potency of whatever it is you’re selling by putting fentanyl in it. And number two, you can very quickly create a new kind of addict, a far more committed customer than say a cocaine user. When a person is gradually addicted to the fentanyl you’re putting in the cocaine, after a while, that person needs fentanyl every single day, many times a day. There was an idea that this was being improperly mixed, these were bad mixings. And I’m sure there’s some of that, but I think at this late stage years later… It so shows every sign of it being very intentional that we’re putting it in there because people… It boosts our drug, and eventually it’s going to create a much better customer.

It will kill people, and that is a concern on the street. On the other hand, a lot of people who are selling this stuff at the street level are using it, are selling it to make their own habits. And there is really not the care, the concern so much I don’t believe for people who are dying because someone is about getting his money today, getting his dope today, and he is going to do that by selling these pills or cocaine laced with fentanyl or meth or whatever.

Elizabeth Vargas:

When you talk about that street level injection of fentanyl into cocaine, drugs like that, is that happening in the United States-

Sam Quinones:

Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Or is that happening in Mexico? It is happening in the US.

Sam Quinones:

No, no. I think that they have not found many, many examples, if any, that I’m aware of speaking with narcotics agents in different parts of the country, they just don’t find loads of cocaine coming in with fentanyl in it. No, that’s something that happens… They do find packages of fentanyl, they find packets methamphetamine, they found packages of cocaine, etc. But the mixing of that stuff I think really takes place at the lower level because it really makes business sense, even though it’ll kill people, it makes business sense to boost your product. And also at a certain point, the entire market then is, or much of the market in your region is addicted to fentanyl. And then if you don’t add fentanyl to whatever it is you’re selling, you will get very quickly no customers because everyone needs fentanyl now. And that is very commonly the case now across many parts of the United States.

Not every place, and there’s still new people mistakenly using cocaine, mistakenly using meth. But a lot of this began with people who are already addicted to opioids from our opioid epidemic provided by the supply provided by drug companies and doctors prescribing them. And then they were transitioned by these enormous supplies of fentanyl to become fentanyl users. And the problem, of course, what that is, finally, I just say that there is no such thing as a long-term fentanyl addict. There was with heroin. You could use heroin for a lot of years. I’ve met people addicted to heroin 30, 40 years. On fentanyl, it’s two or three or-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Why? What happens?

Sam Quinones:

Because the fentanyl is so potent, it’s very difficult to mix it well, particularly people on the street who are really not expert at mixing drugs. That was the great thing about… The great promise of fentanyl, lottery-sized profits. The problem is in order to achieve those lottery-sized profits, you have to mix it with something else because fentanyl is so potent that the equivalent of a few grains of salt will get you high, a couple more will kill you, and there is not that expertise on how to mix it. And also that you’re getting an even mix, it’s particularly the case. And so people cannot, even with high tolerances speaking with a drug counselor down in Tucson, but I’ve heard this from many other places in the country, that it doesn’t matter how high your tolerance is, eventually you’re going to get a mix that’s bad and it will overcome your tolerance and kill you. And that’s really what’s happening. The first person to ever tell me that was a recovering addict who himself died of a fentanyl overdose.

Elizabeth Vargas:

All right. Then one of the most common questions we’ve gotten from our audience is what drugs are we finding fentanyl in, and does that include marijuana?

Sam Quinones:

It does include marijuana.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It does? Yes.

Sam Quinones:

Yes. I want to be careful and say though that this is not super common, but I have heard examples talking with drug counselors again, who know this because they take urine samples of people who come to them and the person will say, “No, I don’t use fentanyl, I just smoke marijuana.” Well, there’s fentanyl in the bloodstream, there’s fentanyl in the urine, whatever. There’s examples of that. Not as common as it really was with cocaine.

Elizabeth Vargas:

I’m sorry, but how would you get fentanyl in marijuana? Forgive, I don’t know a lot about marijuana.

Sam Quinones:

I’m not exactly sure, but it feels to me like a dusting of the plant with the powder. That’s a possibility I suppose. I think with cocaine it’s far easier because fentanyl’s a white powder, cocaine’s a white powder so you can mix them together. And I think early on you were seeing really bad mixes of fentanyl into cocaine. By the way, this is one way in which the African-American community in America has been brought into the opioid epidemic. When I was writing my first book “Dreamland” about the opioid epidemic and that involved doctors and drug companies and then people transitioning to heroin, I don’t remember really any African-Americans involved in that to any great degrees, largely a white and Native American problem.

But with fentanyl, fentanyl began very early… and I talk about this in “The Least of Us,” very early on began being mixed into cocaine, particularly by dealers in the African-American community who had sell to their customers. And you see African-Americans beginning to die of an opioid even though what they really imagined they are using, what in part they are using is cocaine. It’s just, that cocaine has fentanyl in it. I wrote the story of the first African-American man in Akron, Ohio to die of a fentanyl overdose. He was a long time… Struggled with for a long time with the cocaine addiction. Mikey Tanner Jr. is his name, ten years dealing with cocaine off and on, off and on, and he was in a halfway house and somehow got a hold, maybe went out or something, got a hold of what he thought was cocaine, it had fentanyl in it, and he died very quickly in the spring of 2014.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We’re also seeing that the number of overdose deaths in the Hispanic population has tripled and largely also due to fentanyl.
Okay, here’s another question we got on Twitter from Mike McGinley. What happens exactly when a person does a drug with fentanyl in it? What symptoms do they experience?

Sam Quinones:

Fentanyl is an opioid and so very much… So the opioid receptors in our brain that these drugs attach themselves to control a number of things. They control pain of course, and they control our bowels. So an opioid can actually… There are diuretics that are actually opioids, but they just don’t make it all the way up to the brain to create that euphoric effect and so on. But the other thing and important in this case, is that they control our lungs and our respiratory system. When too much of this drug is applied, they shut the respiratory system down.

Elizabeth Vargas:

So when somebody does this, do they instantly just go unconscious or do they have some symptoms?

Sam Quinones:

That’s generally… Speaking with narcotics agents, they can kind of tell from the position of the body whether the… Early on particularly this was true. I spoke with some detectives in Akron who made this point very clearly. When someone is on heroin and overdoses and dies, that person gradually coasts into unconsciousness and lack of breathing. So the opioids shut down your breathing system. So as that happens, your brain gradually coasts into overdose, and so you frequently found people lying down, maybe have time to smoke a cigarette and the cigarette burns down. With fentanyl, it’s more like you almost drop dead. You don’t exactly drop dead, you drop into immediate unconsciousness and very quickly die, but you will be found in all kinds of weird positions.

I did a story about kid named Tommy, who was found basically having fallen off the toilet and hit his head on the bathtub as he was using. And it happened so quickly and when the detectives came, the guy who investigated the death initially said, “As soon as I saw his body, I knew it was fentanyl.” Because the impact is very, very quick because it hits your brain so quickly. That is the point. That was the point of fentanyl.

Fentanyl, by the way, I want you people to know, is a magnificent drug when used surgically. I’ve had it, millions of Americans for decades now. It has been a workhorse of a drug. It’s got a variety of benefits over morphine. Mainly it’s, you’re very quickly in and out of anesthesia, which is wonderful. So you could be operated on. And then a few minutes later you’re talking coherently. And also that’s not possible with morphine. But what happens when too much of that is used, is it very quickly drops you into overdose and very quickly overcomes all your systems for breathing and very quickly people die.

Elizabeth Vargas:

That leads me to a question we got on Twitter from Andrew Dashiell who says, “Will policies to combat illicit fentanyl cause problems for legitimate users? During my cancer treatment I was on a lot of fentanyl, and even then in 2008, it was often difficult to get reliable, timely refills.” What do you think?

Sam Quinones:

I would say that this is the big problem we have faced really since the opioid epidemic and it’s how to balance… I’m going to tell you that I’m not sure I have an answer ahead of time, but-

Elizabeth Vargas:

We saw the same thing though with Oxy-

Sam Quinones:

Oxycodone and hydrocodone and all the opioid painkillers. It’s how to balance the two needs. One is the protection society against drugs that are legal. These are legal drugs provided legally and just in abundance and way too much and an enormous profit. Very much like the underworld, honestly. And then on the other hand, people with chronic pain, people who are in… Terminal cancer is another one, for example. There’s all kinds of ways in which… The problem I think actually gets down to the issue that in American medicine today, we have lost the amount of time we can spend with our doctors. This to me seems like crucial. It used to be pain patients we’re actually welcome to spend a good amount of time. The doctor would listen and listen, but now so much of medicine is like a churn. Push those patients through and get them out of here.

And so actually talking to patients and learning and seeing and then judging them based on likelihood of diversion and likelihood of abuse, people with arthritis in their eighties, I just don’t think that’s really quite this concern that somebody who’s 25 you may have. But it all gets down to doctors spending that time. So what it really feels like to me is that we swing from extreme to extreme. For a lot of years, no opioids at all, decades, and that was not okay either. These are wonderful drugs for certain situations, within certain limitations. And then it was opioids for everybody, no matter the background, no matter the situation. And it needs to find that middle ground. Will we? I don’t know. We don’t have a lot of track record at doing that.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Yeah. Diana sent a question on Twitter saying, “Is the rise in mortality due in part to the decrease in pain medications prescribed to individuals with chronic severe pain? This leads to illegal purchase.” She’s saying “I work in mental health/addiction and many of my clients have had their pain medications discontinued.”

Sam Quinones:

Yes, this is… I would not say that’s… It seems to me that… It’s hard to know because there would need to be a really, a nationwide study on this to determine how much of each is a problem. But I would say that there’s an awful lot of people who are not expecting to use fentanyl at all and are using it because it comes… It’s a supply creating demand kind of thing where you take an Adderall and you don’t think it’s got fentanyl in it and you’re pretty soon hooked. Or a Percocet or a Xanax or whatever.

On the other hand, yes, there are people I’m aware of who… And I’m sure there’s a good number of them as your question says, who have not been able to get sufficient quantities in a more measured way of addressing the pain, the very real pain, the life-mangling pain that they feel is not a joke. It’s not people trying to scam the system. The problem is doctors do have a difficult time figuring out which is which, so my feeling has always been a little bit on the side of the doctors too. Man, how do you figure that out? How do you know? I think one way to know, of course, is by having long-term relationships with doctors and patients. That’s one thing. But frequently in our society, in our medical system today, that just doesn’t exist as much as it did.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We have a question on Twitter from Juan C. del Carpio, “Could you give us statistics per state, which states are most affected and why?”

Sam Quinones:

I don’t have statistics per state. I will say this, that when this first started, a lot of this was coming from China, sent through the mail, bought on the internet by dealers in the areas where the opioid epidemic started first and got hit worse. Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, places like that. And you began to see it hit there in a very isolated way, largely because the people who were selling to the new population of opioid-addicted consumers figured out that fentanyl was, again, as I said, like the lottery ticket they’d always been hoping for. Just huge amounts of profit and small quantities and that kind of thing. And you just get a pound sent to you, man, all the millions of packages that come in the mail from abroad into the United States every day that gets lost in that. And so you began to see these guys doing that.

And then you began to see, because they didn’t know how to mix it very well. I talk in one chapter in “The Least of Us” about how the myth started up about how the best way to mix your fentanyl with some other powder that’s inert, doesn’t do anything, is with a Magic Bullet blender.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Really?

Sam Quinones:

Yeah, and which you can get at Target, $29.95. Magnificent tool, by the way, for making salsa and smoothies and all that. But it uses a blade and a blade doesn’t mix powders, you don’t mix powders with a blade, you mix liquids with a blade. So you began to get these horrible mixes and people dying in large, or overdosing at least, in large numbers in like a weekend. But then beginning in the 2017, ’18, Mexico began to make this stuff and it began to… The quantities just began to be much, much larger. You began to see it spread across the country and to the coast.

I’m from California, it hit California first mass overdose event was in Chico. Since then, it’s pretty much in everything and that just has to do with massive supply. I haven’t talked to any place that doesn’t have this problem. I was talking with people from a native reservation in Canada who have horrible, horrible death tolls there. One woman said she lost five members of her family. It’s not just in the United States either. It’s everywhere.

What states now lead the country? I haven’t seen the figures recently, but what is more important than that, I think is the fact that the supply is so vast that it’s now nationwide. And remember this too, also methamphetamine. This is very important, methamphetamine because this is about synthetic drugs. Now it’s fentanyl. Could be something else somewhere, but they have marketed, manufactured and smuggled into the United States, not just fentanyl, but also methamphetamine and methamphetamine that they’re making is so potent. It’s driving people very quickly to symptoms of schizophrenia, mental illness, meth-induced psychosis, in homelessness you’re seeing this all over the country and it’s really a remarkable thing.

And we have never seen that in our history. First of all, I don’t think we’ve ever really seen one source cover the country with one drug so completely as, say, fentanyl or methamphetamine. Cocaine never really quite did what I think those two drugs have done in terms of just covering the country. But the other thing is that historians always talk about how we have these cycles. First is ten years of depressants, then stimulants, then back to depressants. Those have been… The mass supply coming out of Mexico has completely ironed out those cycles. Now it’s just two drugs, a depressant and a stimulant made together, smuggled together, used together, frequently killing people together.

Elizabeth Vargas:

All right, I have a question now from Bueller’s Girl. “What are social media platforms like Snapchat doing to stop the sale of counterfeit drugs on their sites? Have any laws been established concerning this?”

Sam Quinones:

I would say that there’s a debate among parents, because this is largely a group from parents outraged that their kids, particularly during COVID, were using Snapchat, Instagram, some others to purchase drugs during COVID, while they’re all alone in the house, can’t leave the house and that kind of thing. And some parents you talk to say, “Okay, Snapchat has done some stuff.” Others say, “Well, not nearly enough.” But essentially what happened, has emerged is that dealers on the street no longer face the most important question that faced drug dealers for decades. And that is, where do I get my dope? Where do I get the dope that I’m going to sell? Supply was restricted, it was very difficult to find it. Even in the time of cocaine, it was still not that easy and the cocaine was always weak or could be weak depending on where you were.

Now, the supplies coming in from Mexico are just so enormous that that question does not occur to anybody. You can find supply to sell all over the place if you you’re in that world. Now the big question is where do I sell this stuff? I can’t sell it really on the street corner. That’s not really very safe. Where do I sell these drugs in a time of COVID when everybody’s in the house and the only connection they have is through apps on their smartphone? Well, that’s when you began to see Snapchat and others become so popular with young people, become a place where young people would buy drugs from anonymous dealers who would put menus up of “This is what I sell.” And they wouldn’t say that this contains fentanyl.

Elizabeth Vargas:

No, they use icons, they use little icons.

Sam Quinones:

Icons, right. And it’s to say, “I got Percocet, I got Xanax, I got this, I got that.” Never do they say… And this only contains fentanyl. You think you’re buying an anti-anxiety drug because you’re depressed or you’re anxious at home and I can’t get out and so on. And in LA at least I know that the drug dealers took to delivering at home because they couldn’t get people to leave.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Is that still happening post-COVID?

Sam Quinones:

I believe to some degree it’s happening. I don’t think it’s happening quite to the degree that it was going on during the COVID years. I went to a Snapchat protest in front of Snapchat headquarters in Santa Monica in June of 2021. There was 60, 80 groups of families each with a poster saying, “Snapchat is complicit in the murder of my son, daughter.” What was striking was that all these deceased people were young. They were all under 25.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We have another question. “Are these fentanyl test strips? Are they 100% accurate?” I know that we’ve interviewed somebody, all it does is detect the presence of fentanyl, not the level of fentanyl.

Sam Quinones:

No, I think that’s true, yes. But the problem is that you need to test, if let’s say you’re testing some powder that you want to know, maybe it looks like… You sold it as cocaine, but to you is cocaine and you want to know. The problem is you cannot test that cocaine once and put it in one part of the baggie of cocaine that you have or the little bindle or whatever. You have to test all parts of the bindle because it might be that the fentanyl, there’s only a few grains of fentanyl in this thing, and you got to make sure that you are testing. You test five, six different places, I think. And I have to tell you even then, and I’m not sure you could actually test-

Elizabeth Vargas:

Right, you might just miss the couple grains.

Sam Quinones:

And if you have a pill, then you have to crush up the pill first into powder, which takes some time, and you have to have utensils to do that. And then again, you have to test the whole, all the powder.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Then you’re not taking the pill that you just… I don’t want to be encouraging drug use in any way. You shouldn’t take the pill. Don’t take the pill. For somebody who’s bought a pill that they want to take, they’re not going to destroy the pill to test it. Right?

Sam Quinones:

Yeah. The other thing that I think is maybe coming common, although I still have to do more reporting on this, is what happened when I spoke to a long time dealer in eastern Tennessee, and she told me she used those strips to give to her wholesaler. She was a mid-level dealer, had lots of clients, all were her friends, they were all long-term opioid painkiller users. And then they were effectively transitioned, not that they had a choice, they were transitioned to fentanyl. And when that happened, she said she began giving fentanyl test strips to her dealer to make sure, because they now were addicted to fentanyl. Heroin was not going to do it.

If you were going to buy something, you make sure you test the entire batch to make sure that it has fentanyl in it. I don’t want to dissuade the use of fentanyl test strips, but I don’t want also false confidence to come from what I say because it really takes a very rigorous testing to make sure that a packet of powder, let’s say, does not contain fentanyl. You just have to check it all over. And that is sometimes in the middle of a party, are people doing that? My feeling is most likely not.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We have another question here. “Can I die or overdose from fentanyl if I don’t use drugs?”

Sam Quinones:

No, unless somebody slips… Nobody ever got addicted to a drug she didn’t use. I would say this one thing, fentanyl becomes active when it hits your mucus membranes. So touching fentanyl, no, I’m not sure that’s so dangerous.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We keep hearing the stories of police officers who-

Sam Quinones:

I don’t think it’s really the problem that people make it out to be. Although it’s never… This is the most deadly drug and the smallest quantities can kill you than we’ve ever seen on the streets of the country. And so it’s never wise or a good idea to be cavalier about this stuff. On the other hand, it’s also true that it really is… It activates, in the bloodstream. When it gets into the bloodstream, that’s when the problem is.

Elizabeth Vargas:

We had another question from Ella who was asking about Narcan being available, how widely available is Narcan? Because we know that is the one thing that can save somebody’s life if they have overdosed on opioids or most likely fentanyl.

Sam Quinones:

Yes, it’s a terrific drug and needs to be as widespread as, say, I don’t know, fire extinguishers in restaurants kind of thing. It has been widespread used by paramedics for many, many years. And in ERs and so on. Naloxone, as the drug is known, or Narcan as the brand name version of it is known, is a fantastic thing. And it does revive people.

Now, there are some caveats to that though. One thing is, and this is what we’re also seeing because of fentanyl, we have never seen so many people overdose to an opioid perhaps, maybe even in the history of the world for all I know. It’s just a remarkable number of people in the United States overdosing to an opioid, and mainly now fentanyl. And we’ve never seen, I think this is safe to say, so many people ever in the history of the country be revived from an opioid overdose.

Elizabeth Vargas:

It’s really miraculous.

Sam Quinones:

It is. On the other hand though it’s very important to keep in mind that when you… And I say this not lightly, because we are seeing now people with 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 overdoses to their name. Every overdose is a chance for brain impairment because as I said before, it’s a depression of the respiratory… It’s a deprivation of some amount of oxygen to your brain. And the brain parts that are really most active in those are the ones that use lots of oxygen, memory, prefrontal cortex that governs consequences and executive decision making. And so just saying, “I revived this person and that saved his life,” that’s technically true.

Elizabeth Vargas:

But he could suffer brain damage.

Sam Quinones:

And he could die from the next overdose and from the next one after that or from the next one after that. And so people end up dying who account as statistics, “We saved this guy’s life five times, eight times.” And then he showed up dead, because we don’t yet have a policy that moves people from Narcan reversal of an overdose into treatment. Because just saying “You’re on your way, on your way on the street” is just a really, really dangerous thing to do. I think we’re seeing that now. And we need to find ways of getting people off the street once we’ve revived them.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Finally, Sam, I have two teenage boys, and I have tried to put the fear of God in them. I’ll be honest. I have said, “I get it. I know that you’re going to try a beer or maybe it’ll be a party where they’re serving alcohol and you need to make good decisions and be smart.” But I have really drummed into them and I don’t know if it’s going to work. I don’t know if it’s the right way to go, but I know we have a lot of parents who listen to this podcast. I have said to them over and over again, “Do not use any drug. Do not take any pill. Do not smoke anything. Do not snort anything. Do not swallow anything because you don’t know what’s in it.” Am I being alarmist and hyperbolic?

Sam Quinones:

No. No, that is the truth. And I mean, the problem is that we come from a long history of alarmist proclamations about drugs, dating back to the thirties at least. And what I find fascinating is all those outlandish alarmist claims made about marijuana, say for example, cocaine, whatever, now they’re true. Now they’ve come true. People do die from one line of cocaine. One line of meth will drive you to mental illness. A pill will kill you. I have a 16-year-old daughter and I’m like… pushed back. Not pushed back, moved away from the heavy-handed stuff because she gets… She’s probably heard more about this in her life than any other kid in America because I’ve been doing this for ten years now and done lots of interviews that she’s heard and all that kind of stuff.

But I try to focus on education, on facts. And the facts are very stark that there is no such thing as risk-free recreational drug use in America anymore. It’s just, yeah, you might be able to get away with it, but eventually… There’s too many headlines that are… You can point to the case where this has actually happened. And so I just think that that alarmism is not important, but facts are, and the fact is that all the alarmist claims that we made about drugs 40, 50, 60 years ago, they’ve all come true. And so therefore, yes, you really cannot get away with using drugs now at party… And that’s why I say, I told my daughter occasionally, “Try to keep it light, but don’t… Anything that somebody offers you at a party, you cannot take it. I’m sorry. It’s just not okay.” That’s the situation I think that we find ourselves in. Not to say that every line of cocaine is laced with fentanyl. That is certainly not the case. But geez, how many people have died because they used cocaine with fentanyl in it. It’s just not alarmism to point that out.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Or took a single pill that somebody gave them and said, “Oh, you’ve got back pain. Here’s a Percocet that’ll help.”

Sam Quinones:

The first time many of those parents who protested in front of Snapchat knew that this was happening was when they found their kid dead. I had five parents, five families tell me that that day.

Elizabeth Vargas:

Sam Quinones, thank you so much for returning to Heart of the Matter with more on some really important information on fentanyl, the fentanyl crisis, the overdose crisis, sweeping the nation. Really appreciate it. We hope to have you back again.

Sam Quinones:

Wonderful to be with you again, Elizabeth. Thanks so much for your interest. Appreciate it.