The Fentanyl Awareness Coalition

The Fentanyl Awareness Coalition (FAC) is founded by bereaved families who have lost loved ones to the fentanyl epidemic. Our energies are directed toward the following goals:

We advocate for the reduction and restriction of illicit Synthetic Analogues in the United States

We endeavor to raise awareness about the new and unique risks – to all segments of our society – resulting from the sudden influx of illicit Synthetic drugs into the United States;

We will accomplish this through our affiliation with member organizations throughout the United States.

Steve Martorano 

The Behavioral Corner is produced in partnership with Retreat Behavioral Health -- where healing happens.

The Behavioral Corner 

Hi, and welcome. I'm Steve Martorano. And this is the Behavioral Corner; you're invited to hang with us, as we've discussed the ways we live today, the choices we make, the things we do, and how they affect our health and wellbeing. So you're on the corner, the Behavioral Corner, please hang around a while. 

Steve Martorano 

Hello, everybody. Welcome again to the Behavioral Corner. It's me again, hanging Steve Martorano. What happens here on the Behavioral Corner is that we are fortunate in that it's a busy corner and really interesting people with whom we hope wonderful information about behavioral health stop by and share it with us. Behavioral health what it's a big, big topic. And so this is a podcast about everything, everything that affects behavioral health. Today, we are very excited to bring you the first in what's going to be a series of episodes here on the corner. devoted to the Fentanyl crisis. If, unless you've been living in a cave, you are aware that we are in the grip of a very long-standing and metastasizing opioid epidemic in this country. The introduction of fentanyl is just the latest aspect of this ongoing process. There is a standard narrative about the whole story of the opioid crisis. And as I said fentanyl has added an exponentially more dangerous and tragic dimension to this. But something else larger needs to be explained. And that's what our guests is all about today. Michael Gray is among people who lost loved ones, to the fentanyl epidemic. He along with those other bereaved family members formed something called the fentanyl awareness coalition, of which he is the founder and chairman. And as I said he's here really to school us on what the current state of the crisis is. These are the fentanyl. Michael Gray. Thanks for joining us on the corner we appreciate it. Thanks for having me, Steve. Good to be how much of that? Did I get it right?

Michael Gray 

Oh, pretty good. That's a pretty good intro. It sets us up for the conversation property? Well,

Steve Martorano 

well, as I read up on the coalition and your work with regard to that I'm struck by one thing immediately. And that is although you are a group of bereaved parents, for the most part, or family members, this is not and you'll forgive me anything like a pity party. I've interviewed a couple of the folks in this situation. And they are scrupulous in honoring the memory of their deceased family members. But there's really not a lot of emphasis on the personal tragedy. Why is that important?

Michael Gray 

I think it's very important, as you say, there's a narrative that's utterly incorrect that needs to be corrected at a national level. If you want to get people to understand that new narrative, you have to bring them to the point of empathy. You have to make them empathize with the situation. So they understand how it actually affects their own life. the problem when you get into the sad stories, and I don't get into the sad story, no interest in it. The problem with that is where I'm trying to bring about an empathetic response. When I give you my sad story, I get empathy, these sort of nasty, lowlife, low class cousin called pity, right. And so when I tell you my sad story, you give me some pity. Well, that's a nice transaction -- transaction completed, we both go back to our lives with nothing having changed. If I can reserve you from a pity response and keep your attention all the way to an empathetic response, ie, this affects your life and your family. Well, then I've changed you, I've made you a soldier in my army. So we're all about the empathy response. And sometimes I say, I say that in sort of a crass way, I'll say to a crowd of people. I'm not interested in your sympathy, don't want your sympathy. You don't know me, you didn't know my daughter, why you're not grieving over her. You didn't know her, never met her. She's a wonderful girl. And you want to hear all about how wonderful she is? Get me in another context. And you'll hear hours and hours and hours and what a super wonderful person she was, and is, but not here. Here. We're about information. And we're about people understanding the situation for what it is. So that's why the people in my coalition are always counseled to we want to tell the stories because we want to relate it to your life because so many of our kids are just like your kids. But at the same time, the last thing we want is a pity.

Steve Martorano 

So it's also it would seem to be the central importance of the individual stories of loss or the circumstances surrounding them, rather than the pain associated with it, because that's I think, where you'll get your empathetic response. Because what I come away with is, it was for the longest time easy for a person like me to view the opioid crisis is something that will happen to someone else. For different circumstances that won't affect me. What I'm understanding now, is that fentanyl, almost like an airborne contagion, it puts everyone at risk because of the way it is now spread through the illicit and counterfeit street drug world. Just a moment, Michael to tell people what fentanyl is. Can you do that?

Michael Gray 

Sure, fentanyl is a synthetic version of what we call morphine. Okay. Morphine is a naturally occurring chemical that exists in the poppy plant. It's been extracted for several 100 years, and it has various effects on the body pain suppression, cardiac and respiratory suppression, so, therefore, it helps with coughs very nicely as well. In the pharma industry, we love synthetic chemistry. Synthetic chemistry simply means manmade, it means a chemical doesn't exist in nature. And we can synthesize it through a process of synthesis where we mix different chemicals under certain reactive conditions and create new chemicals that don't exist in nature novel chemicals. Chemistry in general loves synthetic chemistry, human beings love synthetic chemistry farmer likes it because instead of having to grow all these poppies and worry about yields and worry about the quality of the farm, or in some cases, they're looking at things that are abusive to the environment to go take out of the environment. So we love synthetic because it lets us make what we want whenever we want. So fentanyl was invented in 1959, by Paul Janssen of Janssen Pharmaceuticals in Belgium. And ultimately, it was acquired by Johnson and Johnson many years later, but he invented it many, many things. Paul Janssen is one of the greatest minds ever in the world of drugs and pharmaceuticals. And he invented this stuff called fentanyl, which is a synthetic replicant of the natural drug morphine. And so that's where it came from 1959 We love it, we can make as much as we want of it. We can make it from there are 30 different recipes just to make base fentanyl before you get into all the analogs of fentanyl. So there's wonderful we have lots of control over it. It's fantastic medicine. It blocks pain beautifully. It's used by doctors and hospitals all the time, because A its potency, and B its very fast metabolizing. So they can put you under quickly and bring you back quickly. It's very, very good. Doctors love it. It's very good in hospitals. So that's why we love it. I shouldn't say the second reason we like synthetics is in addition to the ability to make as much as we want at will, we also get the ability to what's called an analog in analog is the process of taking the base molecule and manipulating some of its what we call organic chemistry of functional groups to slightly change the properties of it, that I can start to dial in what it does in a way that I can't do with any natural chemicals. Even with the natural chemicals, I go to what's called semi synthetics, we get some of that ability. So that's why we'd like synthetics. That's what fentanyl is it's a synthetic opioid.

Steve Martorano 

And of course, the irony here is that all of the benefits, both in use and production of the synthetic that you just described, have a downside to them. They, as you say are easily targeted, their potency is extraordinarily high. And interestingly enough that I guess what I read wait to potency relationship makes them incredibly easy to smuggle. From all of these benefits come the downside? This stuff just can leak through a country's border. Even if they are doing a good job, which was probably not with regard to smuggling. When did you begin to see fentanyl overwhelm the opioid situation?

Michael Gray 

I'll just go back to what you just said. And I'll say it a different way. Instead of saying it's the downside of fentanyl, probably a better way to understand it. Because the way I think about the whole crisis and the way I like to teach the crisis is that it's not actually a downside. It's just that it's got the same upside potential for nefarious people that it has for good people. These are all good things. I mean, fentanyl is such a miraculous windfall profit to drug traffickers it's almost indescribable.

Steve Martorano 

What I meant was that it was it's easy to smuggle, right?

Michael Gray 

Yes, yes. But that's what I mean about just a different perspective. I think of drug trafficking as a business. When we look at the solutions for it that's the right way to think of it because that's how it is. Not only is drug trafficking a business, but it's also the ultimate business. Why? Because it's all about the profit motive. Nikes and Microsoft and Coca Cola and these great brands always have these limits called ethical standards, moral standards, regulatory standards, legal standards.

Steve Martorano 

This is the perfect moment and you're the perfect guy to answer the question for me that I've had pretty much explained now, but I want to hear you explain it. You're absolutely right about it being a business. You're absolutely right, that they are motivated on the same basis as any businessman and that's profit. Unlike Nike, which you talk about as an example. I couldn't understand why a businessman would sell a product that was killing his customers. 

Michael Gray 

Great question. 

Steve Martorano 

Why were they doing it?

Michael Gray 

So let's start with the fact that what did I just distinguish between Nike and drug traffickers? Nike has moral, ethical, legal, and regulatory limits that the drug trafficker has not, right? So the first answer to your question is they simply don't care. They're deprived people. And they have a depraved indifference. So they don't care. Now, let's get to their profit motive, and let's get their business motive. Why would they kill a customer? Why would they sell a product that knowingly kills a customer? Well, there's been a term around since long before fentanyl called "hotshot." They've always killed customers. It's good for business. Why? When someone is operating deep into addiction, or substance use disorder, their whole brain is about getting that high. They have no sense of survival instinct at some point in that process. I don't speak to the addictions, part of it, I deal with another part of the crisis, I have no expertise in addiction, but just by my observation of the people who I've been involved with these few years, and see what addiction is all about. And my close relationship with places like Retreat Behavioral Health, it seems to me that when someone's deep into an addictive pattern, the only thing they care about is high. So if I'm a trafficker, what I can do is I kill someone occasionally, which makes my stuff look strong. So the people who only want a high and are willing to take the risks come flocking, right. And so what I do then is I bring business to myself. That I kill people? Will for every one I kill, there's six more coming in the market. So they don't see that. Right? One other element I would throw into that is that there is a difference. It's easy to look at the drug trafficking business as the ultimate business, right? The pure profit motive business without any moral, ethical, legal, or regulatory restraints. But there is a difference between not being legal. They don't have the sense of industry that other businesses have. So let's say in the auto industry, everyone knows some basic safety issues to kill customers, you know, cars get into accidents. And the industry as the industry comes together to try to reduce those risks. These drug traffickers live on islands. Right? They're not going to trade conferences to find out best practices. Right? So what happens is, yeah, they're killing their customers, but in a very limited environment, where they are, it's good for business. They're not losing their business because of it. And in the end, they're deprived people who don't care that that's the reality of what they're doing.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, and I know you're not here to talk specifically about addiction, but a moment here to just point out the depravity of substance abuse disorder. You're right. I've heard stories of people with serious addictions, who hear about fentanyl in the supply, and are excited by the prospect. Oh, good. There's some good stuff on the streets.

Michael Gray 

Right. And you know, if you look at it fentanyl, once again, the many benefits of fentanyl is the gift that keeps on giving. So one of the many benefits is we used to have to do a hotshot with rat poison. And now we don't have any more fentanyl built-in. And we'll get to that in a moment about how fentanyl builds in a death rate. A death rate that's quite nice for the trafficker in bringing that business to himself, because they know he's dealing in strong stuff. So the fentanyl is a built-in I don't have to do anything as natural process of what I mix, a certain portion of the people are going to die.

Steve Martorano 

It becomes in that context. If it's, well, a murder weapon. Anyway, let's talk about I think the jump-off for your group and your message is -- and we started with this -- is that there...there needs to be a shift in the paradigm. 

Michael Gray 

Right.

Steve Martorano 

What's the shift?

Michael Gray 

Okay, so I'm going to explain to you three facts that lead to the situation we're in today. And it starts with what I call the paradigm shift. What is a paradigm shift? I work in the world of science, I keep my mind very disciplined in science. A paradigm shift is a term invented by physicist Thomas Kuhn at Stanford University in 1962. In his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, what he says of a paradigm shift is that when the paradigm has shifted, then all of my variables and all of my results go out the window, and I have to think and operate in that new paradigm. One of life's very few guarantees like death and taxes, as they say, is that if I continue to do my scientific method, under an old paradigm regime, when I know the paradigm has shifted, I will fail by definition every time there is no way for me to get a successful result. So let's talk about the paradigm shift. For reasons that take about two hours for me to build up in my lecture series come to a point of what that paradigm shift is but suffice it to say, all of this is documentable and it all works. So I'm going to tell you the 10 steps of a 10-step narrative, and what that is in 2013 the Chinese industry and government shipped fentanyl to America very suddenly in massive amounts. 2013 Chinese fentanyl. That's what happened. That's the paradigm shift. Those three terms add up to the paradigm shift. Now I'm gonna explain why it's a paradigm shift and then what happened later, to make it a whole lot worse. Okay? Why is it a paradigm shift? Because if you look at the history of drug deaths in America, it's incredibly stable, controlled, and predictable. We've never had a crisis -- and we use that word very carefully not to offend anyone -- we've never had a crisis of drug deaths in America. From its beginnings. In the early 20th century, we first passed the Controlled Substances Act because of things like opium and morphine. until 2014, when the death data started to show this paradigm shift of fentanyl from China in 2013, for that 100 or so years, it never went haywire. It never went off the rails, people talk about the epidemic, but it really was not an epidemic. And it was no crisis. It was terrible. And it was tragic. And certainly, every family who lost a child to them it was a crisis because their child was alive yesterday and died today, that's a crisis. But at a societal level, there was nothing crisis, in drug deaths in America, right up until and including the year 2014. It was controlled, it was stable, it was predictable. And all of the things we were doing to control it, we're helping to keep it controlled. What really set off the entire basis of the fentanyl awareness coalition in my concept, is the new paradigm. I'll tell you a quick story in 2018, as I was researching this, to try to understand why my daughter died, something in my heart knew was different than what the country was saying. But I was trying to quantify that difference. So I stumbled into a presentation being given by a health professor on drug deaths in America. And his title was predicting the crisis, they asked him to predict where this was going in the year 2015. I watched this video in 2018, and with three years of hindsight, gave me a very interesting perspective. So Dr. Burke, from the University of Pittsburgh puts up this death database chart from 1979 to 2014. Now that's 2014 data. So 2013, the paradigm has shifted, but it's gonna take a little while for that data to show it. So in 2014, we wouldn't have seen that yet. So he shows this data and what he shows us that drug deaths in America is dead linear, it grows at this unbelievably linear rate. For people who don't work in science or mathematics. Linear simply means that on an x and y graph, for every point, I go up in X, I go up one and y. And so I get this 45-degree diagonal line as my plot, we call that linearity. Drug deaths in America from 1979 to 2014, were like 97%. Linear, it's almost unbelievable, it almost looks fake, it almost looked like he was making it up, it didn't look real because it's such randomized data. And if you think about everything we've done about the opioid crisis from '79 to 2014, heck, we've done everything. War on drugs. Lock them all up. Let them all our. Swing the pendulum this way. Swing the pendulum that way. Create the DEA. Create the ONDCP. MAT programs. Rehabs.

Steve Martorano 

And none of that changes the line?

Michael Gray 

Nothing. Dead linear. Boom. No matter what we did. 

Steve Martorano 

And then what happened?

Michael Gray 

You can see these bumps in the scatter.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, I know.

Michael Gray 

It always pulled back to this long-term linear plot. 

Steve Martorano 

This is going to sound harsh, perhaps but it's true. There was in spite of the fact this was terrible and equilibrium to the situation.

Michael Gray 

Absolutely an equilibrium. Good word. It was controlled. It was understandable. It was predictable. Okay, the antithesis of crisis.

Steve Martorano 

Then what happened?

Michael Gray 

So then with Dr. Burke says, I'm here to predict the crisis, right? He says, Why is it linear? I don't know why it's linear. Doesn't matter why it's linear. I know, as a statistician, if random data that random is that linear for that long, then it's going to stay linear, because there's something baked in that we don't know.

Steve Martorano 

Unless you change a variable. Unless something changes. 

Michael Gray 

The paradigm. So what he says then is what's going to happen in the future, and he draws this dotted line off the end of the slope at the same slope. And he goes out to 2018. And he says, This is what's going to happen in 2018. And he says, I'll give you two to one odds, I'll give you three to one odds, this will happen in 2018. And you know, what happened in 2018 - 1.5 times what he predicted. And I'm watching this and I have this epiphany. If I were to go to him and say, Oh, you're all wrong, you don't know what you're doing. He would have said, Wait, you're being silly. Of course, I said two to one odds three to one odds. That's what a lot in 2018. Unless the paradigm changed. Okay. Paradigm. So the paradigm change and when did it change? 2013. When did it start showing the data in retrospect, I can start to see it in 2014. But in 2014, it would have just been scattered that existed all through that period. Pulling back to linearity again, it never pulled back because of fentanyl. Why? And here's the why. Because fentanyl is potency -- people always talk about potency. And he shows us three jars, they show the penny with a few grains. What does that mean? Anybody, doctors love that potency. That's what it's all about. So that doesn't...that's nothing bad about that. The key to the potency is that the potency issue exists around a threshold or a tipping point. And that tipping point is the ability of a drug trafficker to mix it properly. When you talk about street heroin, quote, unquote, aka diacetylmorphine. If I take diacetylmorphine, which I want to get into the dozens of milligrams doses, I can even get into the hundreds of milligrams doses, okay. And if I want to do that, that's a 10 to one mix with a typical bank of drugs of 300 milligrams. So what I do is I throw in 10 parts, baby formula, cellulose to one part diacetylmorphine. And I mix it all up. And if you've got the one that only had, you know, 15 milligrams, you're not getting a very good buzz. If you got the one that has 100 milligrams, you're getting a wacko crazy buzz. If I start getting a mix where I got almost all pure diacetylmorphine You're going to go into overdose, but you're going to have time and you're going to deal with the Narcan or get to a hospital whatever. Fentanyl takes a situation that's this broad and brings it to a microscopic narrow. Every time I mix a kilogram of fentanyl, I will kill a number of people full stop. Why? Because when you mix drugs, what you do is you take a powder and a powder and you mix them without the benefit of a chemical reaction. We call that in the pharma industry dry powder blending. And the people who do it have Ph.D. degrees in physics because it's very complex science to take a dry powder and mix it 100 times into another dry powder have completely different chemistries with completely different crystallinity and, and all other kinds of things. And you need a physics degree to mix that stuff well. 

Steve Martorano 

And actually, these guys aren't PhDs in physics that are mixing this stuff.

Michael Gray 

No, they mostly they're uneducated people. They don't have the $3 million mixing chamber that the pharma industry would use to mix fentanyl nor the infrared spectrometers attached to those. What they have is a Bullet blender, no education, and two piles of powder. And in the end, Pharma would say that fentanyl is one of their most challenging mixing operations because its dosing is at the microgram level. So let's understand this a second Steve. A microgram. A sugar cube is a gram. A sugar cube, a typical lump of sugar is a gram. Divide that by 1000. That's a milligram. Take that result. Divide that 1000 again, that's a microgram. That's the dosing level of fentanyl. I got to put that into a 300-milligram bag. So picture a crushed couple of crushed-up Tylenol tablets and I'm going to mix in micrograms, like a couple of grains of salt, and a couple of extra grams -- you die.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah, Michael Gray is with us. Michael is the founder of the fentanyl awareness coalition. And he and others around the country are engaged in the very serious job of explaining fentanyl, its dangerous, and how we are all in this together. We'll have a couple more programs along this line here on the Corner. Straight ahead. Okay, so Michael, we understand the potency of this stuff in the hands of the people who have it have contributed to a street drug that caused the deaths from its use to metastasize and grow exponentially, not mathematically but exponentially began killing people. And the numbers by the way, people are shocked by but you know, an airplane filled with, with people crashing every one day or every hour or so. 

Michael Gray 

747 a day.

Steve Martorano 

Okay, so it's clear, you're right, a paradigm has shifted. And we now need to alert ourselves to this. But there is another aspect of fentanyl that I think really should be alarming to people. And because they use it now, in all kinds of drugs, that you have no expectation to expect can kill you. That's a big problem, isn't it?

Michael Gray 

So let's talk about that. So I said, I'm going to explain three things, the paradigm shift, and what that actually means. So I explained what it means scientifically, let's explain what it means quantitatively, that linear graph of 100 years what fentanyl does -- when Dr. Burke said he doesn't want to speak to what it's tied to what's the underlying linearity that's leading to drug death? The reason he didn't is that the thing that it's tied to was so obvious and the pre-2014 point was to say because of its implicit, obvious and obvious nature is what was that related to? Addiction. For every addict that came into the world, and used chronically some portion died. And so those two things tracked with the paradigm shift did in 2014 with fentanyl is it took these two lines that were locked. And it kinked this one upward. Because now more addicted people are dying peruse, right? By definition, it came that the 100 years related death curve where more people were dying. But all it did was take the slope a little bit. The big change came later. And the big change came. In the beginning, fentanyl was coming 100% from China mostly through the US mail in the beginning. One kilogram at a time raining all over the country. Okay, through the US Mail. Then it started coming down through they started shipping bulk down into Mexico, it was coming up through the southern border. When the Trump administration declared the National Emergency in 2017, they recognize right away this has to stop and they knew right away it was coming to China. So they went to China and told China to stop making fentanyl which by the way, the Chinese government was giving a 13% tax rebate to their pharma companies to do illegal is it was from the get-go. Well, the Chinese were remarkably a conciliatory and this and so oh, you're right. You're right. We've been telling your people we're gonna stop this now. Well, what they did is they took the precursor chemical, the one that turns into fentanyl, and they started shipping that to Mexico. So all we effectively did by getting the Chinese to stop making it was shift the manufacturing from China to Mexico. So now the Mexicans control 100 virtually, practically speaking 100% of our fentanyl in America. Right? Illicit fentanyl. What's the change there, Steve? Well, this used to be made by scientists with cleanroom garb on Ph.D. degrees in pharma factories, an ocean away. It's now made by drug traffickers on our southern border. Right contiguous border-right. So what...so let's think about that a minute. What are these Mexican cartels? These are world-class expert marketeers of illicit drugs. Do not underestimate them as some mindless thugs. These people know how to move illicit drugs a Nike knows how to move sneakers. Okay, these are world-class businessmen. And so the first thing they did is they got this powdered white stuff called fentanyl that acts like heroin and they put in heroin business couple of years at this point in the west coast of Mexico, and they said, "Well, who uses this white powder? It mimics street-level diacetylmorphine heroin. Yeah, but how many people in America use that stuff? I don't know, to two and a half million maybe. Okay. So it's an opioid that acts like heroin, two and a half million people in America. But we can make as much of this stuff as we want. How many people take opioid pills in America? Oh, like 20 million. Isn't that true? And the American government is, is stopping people from taking those pills. Oh, this is fantastic. Let's start pressing fentanyl into pills. And it started with the Oxy 30. It started with blue M oxy 30. Okay, all we got to do is get that blue dye, get that pill pressed, put some baby formula, enter whatever cellulose and put my fentanyl in, press it up. I got myself a perfect pill, right? We just took our 2 million potential markets and moved it to 20. Remember what I said though, Steve, what did the paradigm shift tell us? The death rate at either 2 million, 5 million, or 20 million is higher. So now you not only increase the death rate per user, you then increase the user base by tenfold. Well, the Mexicans weren't done yet. These drug cartels are very smart people. They said, Well, you know, Americans don't just use opioid pills do that. What about all the Xanax those kids take? Adderall. Ritalin. Let's print it all. Why not? So they start printing all this stuff. The latest deaths you saw at Ohio State, it looks like they were Adderall deaths. Okay, so now we have the paradigm shift, where fentanyl came in and pushed out dicey to morphine because it was a better product to the trafficker. Why? Because what used to be a pallet that cost $60,000 is now a brick that costs two and serves the same market, it was a no-brainer that would push it out. It pushed it out and brought in a higher death rate. That was the paradigm shift. But what the Mexican cartels did was expand that paradigm to a much broader market, arguably 30 million. 35 million people right now. Okay? And that death rate is carrying with it. That's why you're seeing the death rate off the rails. So here's my final statement on it. Paradigm shift raises the death rate. The Mexican cartels expand the market which puts the death rate at an exponential level. So here we go. Who are all of those 10 million 20 million 35 million? These are recreational users without substance use disorder. These are people who take a pill here and they were at a party and had been doing that for 50 years and 30 years ago, 20 years ago, no harm, no foul. They took a couple of pills that a party went on with their life today they die.

Steve Martorano 

So in that context, fentanyl in the hands of these people has not only upset...it's upset, in fact, the supply and demand dynamic. These deaths and this use are not, strictly speaking, if I hear you correctly, about an increase in demand, it's that people are taking a pill for one thing and winding up dead for another.

Michael Gray 

Once again, if we know that drug death for 100 years was tied to addiction and never went up, we know that addiction does not go into crisis. It just doesn't. Right? Now you talk about a demand shift. People will say COVID COVID COVID caused a lot of extra addiction, nothing causes extra addiction. You know what COVID costs a lot of bored kids in America. So it increased probably the market literally only the market of the non-addicted, recreational user. I use the example Steve when I was in high school, I was a wrestler. I was an athlete. I didn't do any drugs, and never smoked marijuana. I've never smoked marijuana. I've never done any drugs. Okay? And it started as a kid, and it became a habit it started to kick because I was an athlete. It wasn't a moral choice on my part. I made lots of friends who snorted cocaine, and smoked dope. I didn't care. It didn't mean anything to me, wasn't a moral choice on my part not to do drugs. It was a choice to and I joke about it is I wasn't a good enough wrestler to smoke weed. And still, win. If I smoke pot, I get slaughtered. Right? I wasn't good enough. But think about this. What if somebody had taken my sophomore and junior years wrestling away like we just did to American kids? What was I going to do with all my time in those two years? Yeah, but I spent working out six hours a day, what was he going to do with that time. Maybe gonna take a pill. So there's the demand. The demand increased for COVID because you had more bored kids. Addiction never goes up. So my final statement on everything I just told you about the paradigm shift. And the move to pills and the expansion of the market. It all comes down to this: Despite popular opinion in everything the news says we do not have an overdose crisis in America. We do not have an overdose crisis in America. We have a crisis of fentanyl poisoning of people who are not using chronically and therefore are not overdosing. They are being deceptively poisoned. But all they wanted to do was take one Adderall pill, which isn't going to hurt anyone and they died for it.

Steve Martorano 

All right. And I understand and I want you to make the point clear in case I'm confused that when you say there is not an overdose crisis in America, there is a fentanyl poisoning crisis. Nowhere in there, are you saying that there is not a need for substance abuse disorder treatment? 

Michael Gray 

Absolutely not.

Steve Martorano 

Okay. 

Michael Gray 

Substance abuse, I'm arguing doesn't go into crisis. But it keeps getting worse. We have to keep fighting it. Everything we're doing keeps an eye on it. Linearity, imagine what would happen if we took it all away? No, we have to do everything we're doing on substance use disorder, and more, we still need to understand more, because it shouldn't be unsolvable the way it's been. Okay, so I'm arguing to everything we're doing about addiction and more. The problem is we're doing nothing about the crisis part.

Steve Martorano 

About this shift. Yes, we're taking...

Michael Gray 

Crisis resource and crisis energy and applying it to the noncrisis part of the problem. Addiction needs all the resources, it's got an ensign, it doesn't need all the resources that we could be applying to the nonaddicted user who is dying to prevent their deaths. Yet we're doing nothing as a country we have yet to lift a finger to prevent my daughter's death tomorrow. Nothing. 

Steve Martorano 

You know what? 

Michael Gray 

I'll give you one last statement, Steve.

Steve Martorano 

Yeah

Michael Gray 

When I started the Fentanyl Awareness Coalition. I don't know, you know, some of the people...the kids were hard, you know, long-term addicts and stuff. It's not...we're not all about people can't...your victim, the child can't be an addict. This is what I say here are my membership criteria. Is the following statement true about your child? If my child did exactly what he or she did in an exact manner, they did it in the year 2012. They'd be alive today. Every one of my coalition members, that's a positive answer. That's a disgrace. But I'll tell you the real disgrace. Five years later, if I say to them if my child did exactly what they did in the exact manner that he did today, they did exactly the same.

Steve Martorano 

They're dead.

Michael Gray 

Because we've done nothing to prevent it.

Steve Martorano 

Michael this is an extraordinary point of view. I mean, you make the case not only with passion but with logic. And you know what it's like trying to turn around a gigantic steamship, trying to turn them around, take some time. We don't have that time. So thank you for your efforts in the organization. Real quickly, somebody sitting home going, Wow, this is a problem. What should I do? What should they do?

Michael Gray 

What should they do is they should argue to their legislators, local and federal, and they should argue anywhere they can, that what we need is a massive campaign of prevention against the nonaddicted non-SUD victim of the Fentanyl crisis. There's only one thing we can do with those kids. We build another rehab. What's that doing for my daughter? Nothing. We have to do something for them. And the only thing we can do really communicates and put awareness. But I mean massive, massive saturation awareness at to the tune of billions and billions of dollars that only comes from a federal national effort. And that's what we have to do. We have to slam this thing shut.

Steve Martorano 

And you know what, we're, this is gonna sound ridiculous. And I admit that but we're back to first principles here. Remember, in the '80s, when just say no, was laughing, was laughed off the stage as being ineffective. It may have been it may now be still the same, but it is the answer. Young people got to know right now that there's no margin of error. If you don't know what you're ingesting, if you don't have absolute certainty about what it is - do not take it. There's no margin of error. Michael, I know that you see, you've done this for years now. You are going to be at an event in Florida sponsored by Retreat Behavioral Health. I think that's on the 23rd of June. And we will have programs here. A couple more leading up to that. Thanks for joining us. This problem is obviously not going away anytime soon. We'd love to have you back as often as you would like. 

Michael Gray 

Thank you, Steve. 

Steve Martorano 

Thank you for your time, and thank you all for your attention. By the way, if you've ever paid attention to a program, this is the one to pay attention to. And you can follow us on Facebook and subscribe to us and do all that nice stuff. The Behavioral Corner. We'll see you next time.

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