Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1379 - Ben Westhoff
Uploaded: 2019-11-07T20:00:08.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1379 - Ben Westhoff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-07. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1379 - Ben Westhoff' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-07. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1379 - Ben Westhoff

hello Ben thank you for having me Joe my pleasure this is a subject that scares
the 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 died 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 were 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
onto 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 wasn't 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 but doesn't morphine work really good well it does but for things
like um yeah traditionally
people have gotten a lot of mileage out of morphine but um for things like open
heart surgery he wanted
something that came on really fast and it lasted a long time and so he
manipulated the chemical structure
of morphine came up with fentanyl it was a blockbuster drug you know and still
is used in hospitals all the
time um it's used you know there's the fentanyl patch for people with cancer
chronic pain and then when you
get a like a colonoscopy they give you fentanyl before that and then uh women
who have epidurals
during childbirth that i believe is usually fentanyl so it's still an important
hospital drug
and so how did it come to be that this drug from the 1950s sort of re-emerges
and it re-emerged during
the rave scene is that what it was it was actually before that it first started
killing people a
little bit at the beginning of the 80s and uh nobody knew what it was it was
from china then as well no
back then um it was these kind of mystery chemists these guys who there was
this one guy in particular
called george marquardt and he was like a a genius maniac who read all the
chemical literature he
learned about fentanyl fentanyl he's like i should try to make this i bet it
would be a hit with um
recreational users and so he started making it um and it stumped authorities
because these people would
die they would have track marks in their arms like it was heroin they would
have syringes but they tested
them afterwards and there's no heroin in their system and so they're like what
is this and the only way
they finally found out was that there was this uh scientist testing racing
horses and apparently
fentanyl was being used to dope horses what it to like um so they would
withstand more pain and would go
longer and faster and could really train harder yeah and so so this guy made
the connection he's like
oh this is fentanyl this is this new thing and he actually predicted what was
going to happen he's
like we are in trouble now because not only is there fentanyl you can make a
new if you ban fentanyl
you can adjust the molecule make another type of fentanyl when they ban that
can make another one
ad infinitum basically wow so the the thing with horses would be that they
would be in pain so they
wouldn't run as hard so they would force them to run harder by dulling the pain
i guess so yeah i don't
know all the details of it but you know it's performance enhancing basically
doesn't it seem
kind of counterintuitive you would think that like an opiate would like make
them sleepy right well i don't
know all the details maybe it just has a different effect on horses that's
right so then the internet
comes along and through the internet people started scouring the medical
literature and scientific
literature and chemical literature and then they find fentanyl exactly yeah
because back in the old
days um you you know scientists would publish a paper they're trying to find a
new drug that they can
patent say the drug isn't a hit no one wants to buy it it goes on some dusty
university shelf never is
heard from again but in the internet age all these papers start going online
and so these rogue chemists
that i reference in the title of my book they start finding particular
scientists who work on the type
of drugs they're interested in and then they start going through all their
papers and they pick out
drugs that they think would work recreationally and so when fentanyl first came
out it was totally legal
people you could walk around with a giant bag of it they couldn't do anything
and so it set in
motion this sort of cat and mouse game between law enforcement and drug chemists
which really still
persists to this day although mostly in china now have you ever experienced any
opiates personally
i've taken yeah like tramadol and like tylenol 3 and stuff like that tylenol 3
is opiates in it i think it's codeine
which is a low-level opioid and i don't know to me it always gets me stoned but
it never seems to like
deal with the problem i don't really like opioids you know what i mean it like
i can't sleep and it's
just not my thing it's not your thing yeah i had the old nyquil had codeine
didn't it didn't it didn't
it did we we've been over this haven't we didn't we try to figure this out i i
remember i took nyquil in
the 90s in the late 90s i was sick it was like the last time i ever took it and
uh it was wonderful
i was lying in bed going this is amazing i don't even give a shit if i'm tired
i'm sick a lot of
people say that i just sank into the bed i was like ah and another time i had a
morphine drip i had
knee surgery and they gave me a little morphine drip and anything every time i
i wanted i could
just hit this button uh-huh and get a little bit more i was hammering that
button just lying in bed
well that's like the irony of uh the opioids it can produce the greatest
pleasure yeah and the greatest
pain you know i think sam quinones said that like um how can one molecule give
you the greatest
pleasure imaginable and the worst pain imaginable yeah lenny bruce had some
crazy quote about it
something about that was like getting hugged by god i forget what the quote was
but um i i i've never had
experience with heroin um but i knew i've known people that were addicts quite
a few and a couple of them
that died and one of them that i knew there was this guy who was a pool hustler
back in my pool
playing days in new york and uh his nickname was water dog i forget his real
name i think it was bill
but no that was buffalo bills his other nickname i don't remember his real name
but anyway this guy
was an elite pool player big time gambler but the thing was he had to do heroin
first so like
they would play games for like ten thousand dollars these huge games and all
these guys would come from
the tri-state area they would come around to watch these matches in bed on the
side and uh water dog
would go to the bathroom and everybody knew what was going on he would go and
shoot up and then he would
come and he would sit on a chair like this just sit there for like half an hour
just sit there
well and then when it was over when the half hour was over he was just like
okay and then he would go
and play in the zone he couldn't miss and he was playing this guy um this this
dude that i knew
named george who was also a big time gambler and he was just screaming and
yelling that this
motherfucker when he's on this stuff he can't miss he had no nerves like
nothing bothered him you could
scream in his face he would look at you like an alien like it didn't didn't
bother him at all like like an
he had this incredible ability to play like at the very best while he was
fucked up on heroin and i remember thinking what a bizarre drug i mean think
about all the amazing
artists that's claimed yeah i think about jazz and john coltry yes yeah lenny
bruce so many people i mean
you go down the line all these different folks i mean that uh mug shot that i
have out there of
hendrix yeah it was heroin heroin in toronto yeah i mean people like people
prefer heroin to fentanyl
like i've heard it described as more soulful people say but the thing is you
can't even get heroin in
most parts of america like pure heroin anymore it's all cut with fentanyl well
you got to go straight to
afghanistan right um that's probably yeah probably mexico yeah yeah jesus
christ now it can you grow
poppies like can that be grown in the uh yeah i've heard that like if you just
walk around on this
like nice neighborhoods you'll see poppies all the time you just don't even
know you're looking at them
and that's actually heroin like you could get heroin from those poppies yeah it's
like if they grow
you know organically and you're not doing it on purpose it's no big deal but if
you start cultivating
it that's when it becomes it's just got a place too i don't know they're
beautiful look how pretty
yeah do you also have san pedro cactus on your lawn sir oh those are pretty too
right yeah you um yeah
i mean those cactus i can't imagine there are a lot of trained police who know
what to look for i feel
like if you're gonna grow some mezcal you know mescaline cacti or whatever that's
the move you're
probably gonna be all right just mix it up with regular cactus pretend you're a
cactus enthusiast yeah
just have it all over your lawn some succulent yeah i'm just really into cactus
man they're pretty
yeah that's a water i'm i go out of town a lot yeah exactly so when you know
what what scares me
is you know i mean i just know people that party i know people that take pills
and it seems like
fentanyl is things are getting cut with fentanyl a lot it's not you know it's
not a an uncommon thing
for all sorts of different drugs like how many different drugs are cut with
fentanyl street drugs
oh man it is like an awful time to be a young person on the party scene um you
know like when
i was coming up and probably when you were coming up they said the dare program
and all that say no just
say no they made it sound like every drug could kill you right right now
unfortunately that's like almost
reality that basically any pill or any powder if you didn't get your pill from
cvs you know your pain
pill or from a pharmacy that's legit it could be cut with fentanyl and that's
how uh prince died that's
how tom petty and the rapper mac miller all died is that they were thought they
were taking legitimate
pain pills is that really what happened that is really what happened prince got
his from this the
black market yeah well the guy who supplied prince has been he refuses to
really say exactly where he got
it but he's still alive the the guy who got him for prince yeah where is he
i don't know i think in minneapolis or something find that guy well the doctor
is also um
like settled or something i think the doctor might have been involved somehow
it's a mystery where he
got these pills but you know prince was like doing the splits on stage at age
you know 58 or whatever
and he was definitely a guy who walked around with a lot of pain he was jehovah's
witness he was not
a recreational drug user as we think about it you know he was he wanted pain
and i'm sure for years
his handler or whatever was buying him off the dark net or whatever and and
they were fine for years
but but then a drug dealer trying to save some money increase profits cut it
with fentanyl and
that's that's how he died and i heard tom petty a