#1379 - Ben Westhoff

Joe Rogan (0:05)

Hello, Ben.

Ben Westhoff (0:06)

Thank you for having me, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:07)

My pleasure. This is a subject that scares the shit out of me.

How did you stumble upon the story of Fentanyl? Because weren't you, at one point in time, didn't you write about rap music?

Ben Westhoff (0:20)

Yeah, I have a book about NWA and Tupac, and I interviewed 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 were like, one person died, two people died, or 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 it 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.

Joe Rogan (1:24)

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? It was, wasn't it, it was invented in the 50s?

Ben Westhoff (1:33)

Yeah. Yeah, it was invented by a Belgian chemist.

He was trying to find something that worked better than morphine in hospitals.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

Doesn't morphine work really good?

Ben Westhoff (1:44)

Well, it does, but for things like, yeah, traditionally, people have got 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.

And so he manipulated the chemical structure of morphine, came up with Fentanyl. It was a blockbuster drug, and still is used in hospitals all the time.

It's used, there's the Fentanyl patch, people with cancer, chronic pain. And then when you get a colonoscopy, they give you Fentanyl before that. And then women who have epidurals during childbirth, that I believe is usually Fentanyl. So it's still an important hospital drug.

Joe Rogan (2:28)

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?

Ben Westhoff (2:37)

It was actually before that. It first started killing people a little bit at the beginning of the 80s and nobody knew what it was.

Joe Rogan (2:44)

It was from China then as well?

Ben Westhoff (2:46)

No.

Back then 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 genius maniac who read all the chemical literature. He learned about fentanyl. He's like, I should try to make this. I bet it would be a hit with recreational users. And so he started making it 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 scientist testing racing horses.

And apparently fentanyl was being used to dope horses.

To like, so they would withstand more pain and would go longer and faster and could really train harder. And 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, add infinitum basically.

Joe Rogan (4:10)

So 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.

Ben Westhoff (4:18)

I guess so, yeah. I don't know all the details of it, but you know, it's performance enhancing basically.

Joe Rogan (4:24)

Doesn't it seem kind of counterintuitive? You would think that an opiate would make them sleepy, right?