Ep. 134 Michael Gray Podcast Transcript

Steve Martorano 
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Steve Martorano 
Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Behavioral Corner. It's me, Steve Martorano, your hosting guide. I hope you're familiar with us. If not, I'll let you know. We hang here on the Corner. And we wait for interesting people to come by. And we're lucky in that regard, where, you know, we run into some pretty interesting guys here on the Behavioral Corner. The name is in the mission. I think we talk about everything on this podcast. And because everything is what affects our behavioral health. The whole thing is made possible with our underwriting partners, Retreat Behavioral Health, and you'll hear more about them straight ahead. What we're doing now is something we rarely do. We're circulating sort of back to a topic that we addressed in the spring...the recent spring. I think it was in early May or so. And that was the issue of the threat posed by fentanyl. Actually, that's just the surface of what our series on fentanyl awareness was about. It had to do with what the founders of an organization called FACT caused a paradigm shift concerning the nature, cause, and actual definition of the overdose epidemic in America. That's what they do it was all about. And now we're seeing some traction on that idea.

To that end, we welcome you back to the program. Michael Gray. Michael is a successful businessman in his own right. He and his wife, Nancy, formed a 501c called ACTUS, The ACTUS Foundation. It was a charitable organization devoted to sort of advocating for solutions to that problem. In addition to which, in 2019, Michael and others were instrumental in forming the group the Fentanyl Awareness Coalition, which was made up of people who suffered family losses through fentanyl overdoses. So as I said, here on the Corner, we go right to the source. We've got the guy that's been pushing this big rock up a hill, telling people there's something else going on, and you need to know what it is. Michael, thanks for joining us again on the Corner.

Michael Gray
Thanks, Steve. Thanks for having me. Good to see you again, and I think we're going to have a good conversation today because I think things are moving in a positive direction. And I think that's what you wanted to talk to me about. A little disclaimer, I recently did a move, and I would say I'm about 60, 70% moves. You'll see pictures sitting on the floor that needs to go get from the wall. I moved from New York to Florida, where I now I live in the shadow of the Retreat Behavioral Health Center in West Palm Beach. So that's one of the reasons I chose this location is to be close to them are great and loving, supportive partner and Retreat Behavioral Health. So here I am in Florida. And I'll give a shameless plug. I'm starting up a new business while I'm here too. So look, nothing affects behavioral health like our pets, the pets that we love. So we've decided we've started up a line of dog food here, we're going into business, a company called ToeTosDog.com. And that's our new business venture and my new partnership with Retreat. And so, a whole new life here in Florida. Unfortunately, your listeners get to see the eggs being broken for the omelet there in the back with all the mess but great to be here.

Steve Martorano
I'm glad you straighten it out. Because I mean, it's based upon the picture alone. We might get the impression you're being evicted.

Michael Gray
We're moving in.

Steve Martorano
Well, congratulations on the move. Congratulations on that. Let's The reason I reached out to you the other day was because I in the span of a week, 10 days, I just seen so many articles now concerning the threat posed by fentanyl. And while it's no news to most people that there's been an overdose epidemic for years and years, as you know, Retreat and here on the Corner. And folks like you had been aware for a very long time of the threat that was going to affect a lot of people who didn't expect it to affect them. And you called your mission the "paradigm shift." We need to change the paradigm that defines overdoses in this country. So let's just, for a refresher course, remind people what was the old paradigm -- Vis-à-vis opioids and overdoses and what did you want to switch it to?

Michael Gray
You know, it's a good time to ask me that question, Steve, because we've actually refined our definition of the paradigm shift a little bit recently, just in the way we describe it. Because I think it's very important. There was a sort of an impediment to really getting broad acceptance that I think we earthed and have dealt with. So let me just explain it from the top. What I mean by a paradigm shift. And it's a phrase coined by Thomas Kuhn, the physicist, in his 1962 book on the Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And the reason he instituted the term -- the reason he coined the term was because physicists themselves and material scientists, chemists, and scientists of all stripes are themselves subject to limits by paradigms. And what a paradigm really is, is just the overall conditions that we face. So we can get a certain predictability of the outcome, right? The scientific method is all about controlling my number of variables so that when I put an unknown in, and I see the change, I can sort of quantify what happened when I put that unknown in. A paradigm shift could really be defined in some ways as a variable yet unknown. I did all the variables that I thought I should have gotten result a. I got result D. What happened? Well, the paradigm has shifted to the conditions of the experiment had shifted. So a paradigm shift is when the overall condition of something changes. And the reason to recognize it -- and the reason Thomas Kuhn pointed it out -- was because if we continue to operate to an old paradigm when the paradigm has shifted, our chances for success are quite literally zero, there's absolutely no chance to succeed and what we're trying to accomplish. Okay? So our paradigm here, if we go back to what was the paradigm of quote, unquote, drug deaths, from the beginning of our, of our difficulties with addictive substances, let's call it in earnest at the late 19th and early 20th century, until the year 2013 in America, we had really essentially one paradigm of drug deaths, someone was, whether it be through there, you know, a prescription that they got that they took for too long, or a kid partying too much in the street, or somebody's mental health patient who's just self-medicating, and not under the care of a doctor. So they can control it right. By whatever means, it happened. They became addicted. Whatever that means. I mean, we could have a lot of discussions on what even addiction means. But they became addicted. And they became the kind of people who go to Retreat to get that recovery process going, right? Once you were under that addictive pattern. Two things happen. Number one, you needed that drug to stay healthy to stay or even to stay stable. And number two, over time, you lost your survival instinct, right? And those two things converge at some point, in a moment when the desire for the drug's effect sort of out...supersedes your desire for survival, and you take enough that you get killed, and we call that an overdose. And that's how people were killed in drug deaths almost exclusively. Yes, of course, there were some accidents. Somebody took the Medicaid, the blue pill, when they were supposed to take the red pill, you know, older person, but more or less for all intents and purposes, statistically speaking, the drug deaths, particularly illicit drug deaths of that paradigm from the earliest days until 2013, was exactly what I just described. What happened in 2013 was the deliberate pushing of fentanyl into our markets to replace not just opioids, but now replacing everything that's illicit on the street. But let's even stick to just opioids for the moment -- when it was put in as a replacement to die to the morphine, the standard street opioid, aka heroin, right? When that was put out in replacement of that, something very interesting happened. People started dying at higher rates. Well, of course, they did, and stuff is less forgiving than heroin, its therapeutic index is more narrow, and you die easier. And the drug dealers themselves, as the traffickers, can't mix it to keep it safe the way they can keep heroin, Heroin on the street, it's got some contaminants and things that are threatening, but generally speaking, from an overdose perspective, in the heroin days, yeah, to take too much to die. For the most part, it wasn't mixed so poorly that if you took a normal bag size, you would die. But that's exactly what happens with fentanyl. The normal bag has all range of amount in it, because they can't control it at very, very fine levels. Fentanyl needs to be controlled because it's 50 to 100 times stronger than morphine. So what happens now is the addicted under that same paradigm begin dying at a higher rate relative to what they did before. But the real paradigm shift came when they started to realize that fentanyl was so cheap and plentiful. They could start to replace it in other drugs too, and put it into the pills that people are using. To take the illicit opioids. Well guess what they did? Now they took a higher death rate. And they expanded it to a tenfold bigger pool of eligibles. So let me summarize it this way with our new nuance to our paradigm shift. And that is, it used to be done on a scale of 10 -- the one being the kitty takes one pill just to the party one time, never would have done it again, it's just the thing he did once, you know, whatever. And a 10. On the scale was the hardest attitude using multiple times a day. Has had this come in for years, and we knew they were gonna get through it and die. In the old paradigm, only the 10 died. In the new paradigm -- the nines also die, and the eight and the sevens and the sixes and the fives and fours and the threes and twos and even the ones. So what I mean by that is the way kids us, and a guy who fundamentally disagreed with almost everything he says in the addiction world said to me once, "Well, kids use drugs for a whole plethora of reasons for a whole spectrum of reasons, from a mild little bit of discomfort, socially to hardened radical, antisocial behavior, and everything in between." And what I said to him was, "Yes, and in that spectrum of reasons they used, there was only that reason that got killed until the 2013 expansion. Now it's the whole spectrum that dies." So it's a higher death rate per user and 10 times more subject users. That's the paradigm shift. And remember, so in a sense, and I'm not saying statistically by numbers, but in a sense, we're not addressing 90% of the problem. When we only address addiction and overdose deaths, we're missing out on 90% of the problem. And that's why I was screaming about this paradigm shift for five years. The word fentanyl is in the lexicon. You're hearing it all over the place. We're talking about it. We're addressing it. That's super fantastic. How far we've gotten into the new paradigm? We've addressed it. We're adapting it. Fox News. I mean, every time they talk about if they don't talk about this as an addiction problem, they really don't. They've evolved past that. This is a death problem that's affecting addicts, then nine other kinds of people use drugs.

Steve Martorano
Yeah, just to summarize quickly, because I want to get on to where we're going now that the alarm has been sounded if people seem to be paying attention. So you go from the standard definition of, well, we have this problem with these drugs, and this sort of person is going to die from it. To a situation where that whole process has metastasized. And the numbers are now explosive. And people are walking around going, "Oh, my goodness, why are people dying at such a high rate from something that we've seen for years?" occurring in a kind of definable way, so it explodes? Well, now you've explained it, a new substance entered that process that eliminates the margin of error. Eliminates the margin of error. So that means regular users could die just as easily or greater than they did before. And more specifically, people who have no intention of using a drug that would kill them because they took, you know, ecstasy to go to a rave or a benzodiazepine that they ran out of, that they bought on the street. And they start dying. And now so now we're in a position where in addition to people like Fox, you've got the Washington Post doing a huge piece just last week, I don't know if they did it in conjunction with NPR News Hour, but that's where I certainly saw it. The Wall Street Journal does a piece two or three days ago, so it's there. Now everybody sort of understands the situation, your organization, and the work that you people have been doing as beginning to pay off. So now we understand the definition. We understand the terms. What has to happen now, beyond awareness?

Michael Gray
But let me go back and step. I'm not sure that I would agree with the statement that we know the new paradigm. You know, I know it. And all of my 13,000 members know it. But I don't know that those same news organizations you just mentioned know it. Washington Post remains cool, is my opinion and most of these people do about the new paradigm. So what's happening now is, you know, Steve, the question that we need to exploit...the question that we need to exploit that's happening out there is when you just said people are looking going, "Wait, this is a problem we've had a long time, why is it exploding?" And the natural question they would ask is, "When did addiction explode like this in America?" And the answer is it never did. Addiction is not in crisis. Overdose is not in crisis. Addiction and overdose are likely right where they have been statistically forever. They never went into crisis. They never saw an increase. Yes, fentanyl is significantly increasing the chances of death to addicts because of the same reasons that kill everybody else. It's too potent. It can't be mixed properly by the traffickers. And for every bag you get, you're rolling the dice. If you've got a deadly amount, or an amount that won't even get you high, or anything in between, they can't control any of that. So it's definitely killing more addicts. But the natural question the average uninformed person would ask is, When did addiction go through the roof that all these people are dying?" And the answer is no, what went through the roof -- even though addicts are dying at a higher rate, no question about it. But what went through the roof is we went from 3 million addicts, if you will, who would have been the subject of drug deaths prior to 2013, you expanded that to the arguably 35, or potentially 40 million people in America who will inappropriately take a pill of some sort. That's a 10, 15-fold increase in the number of people threatened at the same time that you increase the death rate of the number of people threatened. So you've got this, the synergy of those two principles. But the missing element is my new paradigm, that I don't believe is generally accepted by the public or the media. And the reason I call that Fox News is they are the ones who have begun talking to this in the language of the new paradigms. And it's not because they're right of the political spectrum. And I like that or and it's because they're the ones who seem to have it, right? Okay, who's starting to believe that this is a problem for...for all those other nine people on the scale? Let me give you the number one on a scale three months ago, two girls at Ohio State 3.9 GPA, whatever, super students, neuroscience major, and I forget what the other girl was studied night all night, you know, going to do an all-nighter, they take Adderall, like bazillions of college kids do. And the Adderall wasn't Adderall. What in the world are we putting opioid into a stimulant for? Who knows why they're doing it, but they're putting it in everything. I mean, it makes sense to put it in things that are depressants, but they're putting it into Adderall. So these gals got fake Adderall pills, and they took when they died. That person wasn't dying in 2012 from heroin. It wasn't happening. So I would say we haven't quite gotten there. So the next step is to finish that. We're still in the process of finishing that. What thrills me is when I started this four years ago, nobody knew what the word fentanyl meant. No one knew how to spell it. No one knew how to pronounce it. No one knew what the heck it was today. I think every American knows the word fentanyl. So we've achieved that. And I feel very proud of my members that there a part we had in doing that. The next step was to remove the word overdose because overdose is only one small and, frankly, controlled and stable part of the problem. It's that poisoning that it wasn't an overdose. That's the 90% additive. So we've got to get off that word overdose because it keeps us in the old paradigm.

Steve Martorano
I want to understand... I want people to understand the scope of this thing. But now fentanyl is an illegal drug produced for legitimate pain management for many, many years. I mean, there are a lot of people that have gotten fentanyl in various medical procedures that never knew it was fentanyl because it was controlled and it was medicinal. So fentanyl is, you know, not some witch's brew that just popped up. But...but where is it showing up illicitly in what supply of drugs? Now you've mentioned Adderall. But what about I'm thinking in particular, what about the marijuana supply in this country? You know, with legalization, proliferating, and really no controls on the quality of what's legal or illegal in terms of marijuana. Is fentanyl showing up in marijuana?

Michael Gray
As far as I can tell, there's one certified, legitimate case. I've chased down dozens of them, and they're all...they're all hype. They're all...they're all true. So it doesn't seem to be a big thing happening at the moment. But it appears to have happened. And remember, there's something very important in this. It could be worse than we think because when marijuana is tested in a forensic lab, it's a completely different test. They're not going to find fentanyl in it. It's totally different on your test. You have to be testing it to see if it has fentanyl in it, and that's not anybody's SOP. It could be happening. But we don't know it. We haven't quantified it.

Steve Martorano
Michael, is there a danger that off-market over-the-counter drugs can be, you know, counterfeited drugs can be tainted with fentanyl? You could buy a lot of...a lot of drugs online that are perfectly legal, or you can buy them from other countries -- and you really don't know what the quality of those are. Are they susceptible to something like fentanyl creeping into the supply?

Michael Gray
in America, probably at the moment, no. So I spent a part of my career chasing counterfeit drugs and through sort of the pharma...with the pharma industry. And so America's got a pretty squeaky clean pharmaceutical supply chain. So if you get something at CVS or buy it over the counter or even at CVS, your chances that that's illegitimate or compromised or counterfeit is...is really nil in America. Not so for many other countries in the world, which is why I was involved in that because it was a global issue. But you take Mexico, for example. People buy their drugs in, like, you know, bodegas and gas stations, right? And who knows what they're getting? I mean, they've had a hard pressure, hard heart blood pressure medication, and who knows what they're getting. One of our newest members we just dealt with last week. Her son went over to Mexico for the night. You know, they live on the Mexican border, and they went out partying out there like kids do, and on these Mexican border towns, and the parents don't like it. The kid is 19 years old. He's an adult, you know. Just be careful these days. He bought a Percocet pill down there. And he one came home, and he came home and everything was fine. He ate his dinner, and he was like, went to his room. And unbeknownst to his parents, he had the plan, I guess to take that particular a little buzz. Sleep with the buzz. Why not? Lots of kids do something like that. Dead -- found dead the next morning. It was Percocet pills. It was fentanyl. He bought it in a quasi-legitimate shop and in a Mexican and Mexican border town. And so yeah, it happens. It's not happening in America a big way. And that leaf across. So counterfeit has two things right through it. If somebody has to make it, make the counterfeit and make it look like the real thing. The really difficult one for places like America which are pretty well-regulated markets, is to get it to crossover into the illicit supply stream, right? So I've traveled Asia my whole life. You can go to night market to buy your Louis Vuitton bags, Rolex watches, your Tommy Bahama shirts, and all that stuff. You kind of know, you can kind of tell that these are these are fake knockoff things, right? You can kind of see and nobody's really that secretive about it. Nobody's trying to tell you it's a real, you know, Rolex watch, right? But to go into, you know, Tourneau and get a Rolex watch, and it'd be fake, would be pretty hard to do. I mean, I've seen some of these fakes. They're extraordinarily good....particularly. I mean, these are $1,000...$1500 counterfeit watches that look a heck of a lot like a Rolex. I've seen them. Right. But to get that into turn, oh, supply should be pretty hard.

Steve Martorano
Much easier for illicit drugs, right? Much easier.

Michael Gray
No, not necessarily. I mean, it's pretty hard for illicit drugs to so to get these counterfeit pills that go on the street, as purportedly, medical fentanyl that was stolen somewhere. It's pretty easy. To get that into CVS is pretty darn difficult. Pretty hard.

Steve Martorano
You know, I met easy on the street on the street, drug on the street.

Michael Gray
It's already done. It's taken over. I mean, I would guess...I kind of say it this way: I would guess that five, six years ago, if you bought a Xanax on the street, it was 99% sure that it was a true Xanax that was stolen from somebody and used by an illicit manner with a, but it was made by a pharma company in a very safe manner. Right? Did you buy one on the street today? I don't know what your chances are one in two, probably, that it's bad. And if it's bad, then it's probably one in five of those will kill you.

Steve Martorano
Exactly. Anyway, that's, that's really a microcosm of the bigger picture of the paradigm shift you've been talking about. We wanted to have you back to bring people up to speed because, as I said, it's sort of bubbled up into the mainstream consciousness. And that's a good thing. It's enlightening to hear you say that it's we're not nearly there yet. So people got to keep their eye on the ball. I would recommend this since it's a complicated issue. Your organization's website is a terrific resource for everything you need to know about fentanyl and the work that Michael Gray has his people do. So it's Fentanyl Awareness Coalition. Is that ORG?

Michael Gray
Dot org. The FAC -- the-fac.org. But I would also like to plug in another website where there's great statistical data that they do. One of our members is an organization called Charlie's Song. And that's my friend in the California internet. He's got a lot of great data that people can look at like he's got this number cruncher guy from, you know, Microsoft career who's done amazing work. And that's where I get a lot of my data from. I mean, he's cutting data in a way nobody else is. So I'd suggest that too. That's another great resource for really good learning materials. But Steve, if I may, before we wrap up, I can come back and answer your question that I didn't answer before. What's the solution? Right, and I took advantage to say that we haven't made the paradigm shift yet. So let's start...let's...let's keep ourselves focused there for the moment, but the solution is remarkably encouraging because of the nine out of 10 kids who are threatened the tenths of the tenths, we've been trying everything under the sun and the poor people at Retreat, give their whole lives to try to help this problem. And it's so vexing, and it's just interminable. They gotta keep funding that we've got to keep working at it. We've got to find those magic beans somewhere to solve that problem. But the other nine kids, it's just messaging and awareness. But at a level, and I got a whole thing I do on this. I know the price tag if our federal government would hand me $20 billion, I'd solve nine out of 10 of those deaths. I'm telling you. It's there. It's easy. It's a funding issue, and I have the whole plan worked out. We can do a whole other podcast on it if you like. But if somebody could ask me $20 billion, within five years, nobody is dying from this other than the addicted, and I leave it to others to figure that problem out. I can only figure out the solution for nine out of 10. And God bless all those people trying so hard to help that addictive community.

Steve Martorano
Well, Michael, if anybody or any group can push that rock further up the $20 billion hill that you guys. Thanks for joining us again and for bringing us back up to speed we will return to this topic because it's still killing people. Michael Gray. Thanks so much. Congratulations on the move. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Michael Gray
Thank you, Steve.

Steve Martorano
Those fellas down there keep wondering why they don't move. I keep telling them I'll be there as soon as they get the alligator problem under control.

Michael Gray
Don't worry about...don't worry about the alligator. There are lots to make up for it.

Steve Martorano
Or the iguanas fall out of the tree if the temperature drops below 40 degrees. Michael, thanks so much for joining us on the Behavioral Corner. And you guys, thank you as well. And don't forget to push the old subscription button. We need...we need your support. We enjoy that you follow us and like us. We'd love to have you as a subscriber.

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Steve Martorano
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