Fentanyl Dealer Exposes Rehab Center Fraud, Selling Drugs To Patients, & Life On Skid Row

- The most of my life I've been addicted to drugs, it was a slow count down to my own death. - How many drugs would you have for sale at a time? - Anywhere from like 10 to 15. I see gun barrels, so I hop behind a van immediately, and I start hearing bullets fucking flying by whistles near my ear. The tires are popping. I literally thought at any moment I was gonna die. - 50 to 60% of the sober living's in treatment centers are body-broker in their clients in California. - And we're talking like hundreds of millions of dollars. - Oh, 100 to 100 million dollars a year, bro. It's insane. There is really hope. I think this shit doesn't end in death every time. - Anthony Santana is a recovering drug addict who used and sold large quantities of fentanyl on the streets of downtown Los Angeles for years. Anthony reveals what life is like as a junkie in downtown LA's MacArthur Park, the most infamous open-air drug market in California. He also exposes the widespread corruption of drug rehab clinics, who commit massive health insurance fraud without providing any real addiction treatment, and who in some cases are outright dealing fentanyl to addicts inside of their clinics. It's a fucking mess. Anthony is now a year clean and sober and is running his own business, providing marketing services to ethical drug rehab clinics. This young man is lucky to be alive, and I'm grateful he's here sharing his story. Ladies and gentlemen, straight from the pits of hell, it's Anthony Santana, right here on the connect with Johnny Mitchell. - The reality of what drug trafficking in America looks like today is what you went through. Like the old guard is gone. They're either dead or doing life in prison. - Right. - When we talk about like cartel members in the United States, I look at a story like yours, like the quintessential Californian who sold a bunch of drugs, but also is completely addicted himself the whole time. - Yeah, you know what I mean? I always say like it felt like such success, but I mean honestly was a slow countdown to my own death. Like I could see myself slowly dying day by day. I looked at myself in the mirror and like bro I completely couldn't even recognize myself. - I can't believe you're alive. - Yeah, and I just met you and talked to you for 10 minutes. Like you should be dead. - Yeah, 100 times by now. - No, for sure. I mean I've woken up in hospitals to my mom crying to me. Me myself like woken up in bed with my arm, couldn't feel my arm from sleeping on it all fucked up after trying to overdose myself. Like there's so many times and so many things I just shouldn't be here right now. But I mean I know I'm here to tell people what the reality is like of addiction and that there is really hope. Like this shit doesn't end in death every time. - It's really a year sober. - Yeah, how long were you using for? - I started using when I was like 13, I found Vicodin pills on my mom's cabinet. I started going hard with those and my addiction progressed until I was about. Pretty much I was using all the way until about a year ago off and on and I had one year clean in that whole spurt and maybe like three and two months every once in a while. But most of my life I've been addicted to drugs or alcohol. - Have you ever overdosed? - Plenty of times, probably like at least a hundred times. - Yeah. - All from fentanyl? - Fentanyl's annex. I was really addicted to Xanax the most. I mean that's what gave me like the most comfort in the environment I was growing up in and all the people I was losing around me and the traumatizing shit I was going through. Like it just felt like a never-ending trauma. So I just continued to use over and over. Like I never really stopped. - How do you get resuscitated from an overdose? Like were you given Narcan or? - Yeah, my last overdose, my grow actually was there. They ended in Narcan, I mean I think like nine times. - Yeah. - Wild. - Do you think that's why overdose deaths are down? Like there are overdose deaths are way down from fentanyl. Do you think it's because there's the availability of Narcan? - Probably the availability of Narcan. I would say I didn't even see that's the news to me. I didn't even know it was down. - Yeah, that's one of the things they're touting. Like you know with the administration is like wow, since we took over, we go so hard against these cartels. Look at all these overdose deaths are down. But I need to believe that's true man. 'Cause I was homeless like literally a year ago and I had seen probably like at least five people overdose a day around me on the streets. Like when I was full out homeless and we lost the u-hole and we're just out on the streets. I was seeing people overdose everywhere. So it was really hard for me to believe those statistics they put out when I really lived it. - Were they dying? - These are those? - People were dying, yeah. Dude, I saw somebody in my Carthor Park. Well, I've seen multiple people overdose and die, but just to show you how extreme a Carthor Park is, I've seen someone get shot in the back of the head and they literally stayed there for six hours. I went to go do some drug shit, came back and their body was still fucking there. Like people don't, they don't care about these addicts. What's over? My God. So where are you from? - I'm from the Bay Area originally, the East Bay. I just tell people the East Bay Area 'cause my mom had me at 17 and we just moved all throughout there. I don't live in pretty much every city. Grandparents lived in Oakland. My other set of grandparents lived in Palo Alto and my mom and me lived throughout Union City. Hayward, Oakland, everywhere, really freemont. I lived in every single city. - And your dad was not in the picture. - Yeah, he left me before I was born. So my dad was, he was in the Sinaloa Cartel and he was distributing drugs for them, going up and down the border. So he was really, he just left my life before I was even born. You know, really, he wasn't around ever. And you didn't meet him until years later. - Yeah, I had a meeting him when I was like, I want to say like 21, I was still selling drugs in East Palo Alto and the guy that I was selling drugs with, he would come in to go and distribute to me and the guy that he was getting from was my father. So I come outside and my dad's fucking there and it's crazy, like I understood immediately why my mom kept me away from him for so long. Like why would she ever want me to be around some of the selling drugs, you know, having hos around him all the time. He was with somebody that he was just, that was clearly just his hoe, not a girl that he respected whatsoever, the way he was talking to her at least. So. - Do you get a better, get a better price, huh? - No, for sure, I got a better price. - Yeah, after that, yeah, my life completely changed after that. I started to sell way more. I started to get his clients. He started to send people to me. So I started to get favors and he was trying to make up for all of the past, you know, so. - That was like his alimony. - Right. - He was like, I give you the better ticket. Give that shit to you for the low. - Yeah. - What were you selling for him? - I was selling for him Coke, weed. And then like I said, I grew my own network. So I never relied on one person. I probably had like 10 to 20 plugs for every single drug. Like LSD, Xanax, like every single drug. Mainly because I was addicted to all this shit. So I'd better never run out of it. But also I had plenty of people hitting me up all the time. If I ever ran out, it was an issue. A lot of people were giving me an issue with that. So I always made sure that I had plenty of plugs other than my dad. - Hmm. - Well, well, you're the best at. What sold the most the fastest? - Probably cocaine. The first time I saw cocaine, so I, I knew I was gonna make a lot of fucking money with it. I just had to get in front of an ounce. And that shit sold within like three days. I was like, I had never seen something sell that fast. I thought Xanax was going crazy. Coke was going crazy. Your people had like a mental addiction to it. It wasn't just a physical addiction, you know? So I feel like sometimes for me, mental addictions are a lot harder to break than physical addictions. You just have to get through that withdrawal. But for some reason, mentally people just couldn't break that cocaine habit. But I've seen a lot of people go to detox and stop buying fentanyl for a long time. But cocaine was consistent for years. - Hmm. So you guys started at like 15 years old? - Yeah, 15. - Okay. - So, and then you're slinging, tell us how you grew. - Yeah, so how I grew my scale was, I started going on Craigslist. So for example, like blue jeans, men, size 30. If you see that out on the face, or on Craigslist, that was probably me. Especially if it was a 510 number. Or if it was like randomized, similar, it's probably me. And all these like ads were just all me. - What does that mean? Blue jeans, size 30. What does that mean? - I'm selling blue M30s. - I'm selling a pressed fentanyl. Hit me up if you need that. And I was doing all sorts of codes. I was pretty much practicing SEO before I even knew what SEO was. - Right, so you're marketing literally doing online ads for fentanyl. - Yeah, and Xanax ladders. That's what Xanax was ladders. - Where do you put it? - Where in Craigslist do you put the ads? I wonder what category? - It would be under all sorts of different categories. Like for example, it would be men's clothing for that. A lot of it would be miscellaneous so that it could just pull up on anybody if they're searching something related to it. So me and my girl, I taught her that too. That's how we took LA over and got a whole network ourselves out there after getting sober, losing everything. We ended up getting right back on Craigslist. - So is that the way to market? Is that the most effective way to take over a town? - 100% to take over a town, find Connects. Like every time somebody hit me up on there also, it gave me the inclination that they were looking on there. Not just for me, they were looking at other people too. So I started going on there to see other people's ads and that's how I found other Connects. - That's wild, yeah. - Yeah, but I've always done it. used my survival instincts to survive in any town. Like I always knew that wherever I go, I'd be alright. Okay, so back up a little bit. You're 15 in the bay. Yeah, like tell us about all the different drugs you did, sold. Yeah, oh, so I got first really addicted to Vicodin. That was when I was like, probably like, I'll just say 15 from my mom's like, from my mom's respect. I got addicted to the drugs at like 15 and I started getting addicted to Vicodin. It really progressed when I got pretty much put in this situation where this girl raped me when I was 15. I was working at a BJ's and she took me over her house, put Xanax in my water. I woke up with her on top of me and I don't even know if I didn't even understand that it was right back then because it's a girl fucking me at the time. So that's how I just looked at it. Now I look at it like she definitely was raped me. She was like 20 something years old. I was 15. Um, but yeah, it got me fully addicted to Xanax. She ended up becoming my like Xanax pimp. She was pimping me out and just giving me Xanax. And um, and eventually I was like, fuck this. I'm not gonna fucking just go to this girl and continue to give her dick for Xanax. So that's when I like started going out on my own trying to find other dealers and then I started using my own smarts and getting on the internet. You know, the dark web was around at that time. They'll still a silk row, they'll stole all of that. So I had a lot of friends that were pretty fucking smart. I went to a private school for the last like three years of high school and I went to a school that was sponsored by an apple. So these people were always on their laptops doing all sorts of crazy shit, but some of these people were drug addicts. You know, so they were getting drugs for the low, getting really, really good drugs on the internet. So I started getting connected with them. So you're getting real Xanax? Oh yeah, people were getting real Xanax at that time. Still it wasn't until like my like junior year once everyone started getting hit with the fentanyl Xanax pills. At that time, it was like, you better hope you're addicted to fentanyl so you don't overdose. I was gonna say, so that was the era where fent first got introduced and that's where you saw the crazy spike in deaths because people didn't know they were getting it. Oh yeah, I lost so many friends. One of my friends I was selling, I was selling, I see I was always a nice dealer. I never really wanted to kill anybody. I never wanted to put anybody into position that I felt like I was in. So I really like a lot of my friends, I would stop selling to one of my friends Miguel. I stopped selling to him literally the next night. His mother found him in his room dead because he went to go by Xanax from somebody else in those fentanyl laced. So it's like, did you wish you sold to him? Yeah, looking back, I wish I would have just kept him in his addiction with me. Like, looking back, I wish I would have done that with a lot of people that I turned away in that same situation happened. That's so crazy. That just is the luck of the draw. I could have been you because you were taking Xanax tough. You're addicted to it. No, I was taking 50 a day. I was taking 50 bars a day. And if you don't think that is realistic, go ahead and try taking Xanax every fucking day. You'll get a tolerance like that too. That should happen to anybody. Yeah, that's insane. Yeah, that's insane. And that that's what progressed into fentanyl. Or did you take a stop on the road? No, apparently. No, dude, I just immediately graduated fentanyl. Okay. I went from viket and pills to fentanyl. How old were you when you started doing just straight fent? Probably like 17. Damn. Yeah. And I was in the bay still. Yeah. Bay Area still. I was in the bay all the way up until like 21-22. Did you go to the tenderloin or did you have like a good plug? No, I had a good plug. I wasn't going to the tenderloin bind from the Haitians or any of those people over there. I had like Vietnamese people selling me pretty good fentanyl. I had Arab people selling me like these Xanax pills laced with fentanyl. And then eventually I started finding out where all these people were getting it from. You know, so that's where I started to grow a bigger empire my own network for myself. Where were they getting it from? They were getting it. So a lot of people were going up to humble to get their weed. So that's where I was getting the weed for the good prices. A lot of people were going to stocked in to get Xanax and fentanyl for the low. So I started making that drive out to stocked in. Started getting a lot of friends from stocks and started getting a lot of friends for East Paul Walto. There's really like all these drugs are always in the hood. You don't have to go far. You just find your local hood and you'll find somebody that's connected deeply. And you didn't know your dad at this point. So you didn't have, did he ever get off into fentanyl? Or was he just dealing with coke? No, my dad, I don't know a whole lot about him outside of him, drug dealing, cocaine, a whole lot. I'm pretty sure in this time and age, the Cinalo cartel is open with selling fentanyl now. Ever since the brother started taking over, it's just been all fentanyl. So I'm assuming my dad probably got into fentanyl. I know we had a heart attack like three years ago. This dude literally is so insane. He faked his own death. To me, sent me a picture of him on a hospital bed. Dead. So I thought my dad was dead for like three years. And then about a year ago, he hit me up out of nowhere saying he's alive again. Like his dude, he's probably on so many drugs for like to tell your son and fake your death and then come back to years later. He's fucking gone, you know. It's crazy. I think most of the people that our career drug dealers are like your dad. Yeah. They're not like mentally unstable. Yeah. Yeah. They're not like myosombata with a on a horse when they're 75, you know, talking to politicians. Yeah. Yeah. Or mediating, you know, deals between politicians, you know, like old school, like like godfathers. I mean, most people are like your dad, your father. I mean, that's what happens. And like ultimately, I think the number one trend, even on your show is like this thing ends the same way for everybody. You either have dead in jail in a fucking facility, trying to get clean or like that's it. Those are the only roads to the end of this. So you're 17, you're doing fentanyl, you're selling LSD. Yeah. Selling LSD, Molly, Shrooms. I made sure when I was a drug dealer that I had every fucking thing. I noticed and I took, I really, I took my, my business model from McDonald's, like honestly, I was seeing how they had fucking everything on the menu that it was a one-stop shop. So I tried to mimic that with my drug dealing. I tried to make sure when somebody came to me for cocaine, I had something further come down. I had Xanax too. I had some weed to go with that for the girls you're with. You know, I have everything. So that's really how I was able to sell it to pretty much anybody and everybody. How many drugs would you have for sale at a time? How many different drugs? Anywhere from like 10 to 15? Seriously, let's go through. Sometimes different variations, LSD, Shrooms and by the way, different variations of both of these, ecstasy, DMT, Xanax, fentanyl, heroin, cocaine, crack, and then a bunch of research chemicals. Yeah, this is like definitely Bay Area smart guy kind of drug dealing. Definitely. You know what I mean? Yeah, 100% and I knew that I was selling drugs a lot better than everybody else and I knew that that's why I had a target on my fucking back all the time. I can't even tell you the reason I shake so much when I talk about this shit is because I literally feel like I'm living in it again. When I say I escaped hell, I really fucking mean that. I was always looking with my head turned around trying to see if somebody was fucking about to kill me. My best friends set me up multiple times. I didn't know who to trust out there. At one point, I was living in Airbnb's to Airbnb's because I don't even want people to know where I lived and somehow people still found out where I lived and matured up like most fucking insane. You had Shada plenty of times. Damn. Who are you selling to though? Like are you selling to like street people or were you selling just to like, you know, higher people? It was honestly a mixture. I didn't discriminate when I came to selling. You know, if you were coming to me to buy $10 every fucking every day, I'm fine with that. If you were coming to me, coming to me to buy $100, $10,000, it really didn't matter. You know, I'd make sure that I had the quantity for you. What happened when you got set up? So, I mean, there's been multiple times I got set up, but you know what I could tell you when I was fronting my best friend. I had a friend named Mike and I started fronting him drugs and I guess the number one mistake is fronting at anyone drugs, which I learned after. But, you know, it stayed the way it was supposed to for a while. I was giving him drugs. He was selling everything. I was giving him like I said that, you know, I had 10 drugs to sell all the time. I was given about six so that he had pretty much a party pack, you know, that's literally what he would call it. I'm so a party pack. So, I would give him that every couple days. And then one day after fronting him, literally a couple hours later, he hits me up and says he already got it off. And I had just given him a fuckload of drugs. So, I was like, there's no way this dude just got all these drugs off. In my head and in my heart, I know that I'm about to get set up. Everything in my gut told me like this dude's about to fucking rob me. I was like, but in my head, I'm like, this is my best friend, bro. I grew up with this dude. Like, there's no fucking way he's going to do this to me. But of course, I went against my gut. He calls me, he tells me he's on his way. I was living in East Palo Alto at the time and he tells me he's already driving over the bridge because I was going to tell him like, no, like don't come through. I'm busy right now. I was just going to try to stall him, you know, to try to hopefully give him some sense because I knew what was happening. And he told me he was already coming over the bridge. I hear the knock on my fucking door and he says he also brought his cousins. I checked my phone last time last second and he said, I hear, bro, my cousins with me too. I've never in my life seen him with any fucking cousins. So like, that was like the fucking set in stone that I'm about to get fucking raw right now. So I grabbed my gun and I grabbed my gun and he knocked on the door. I let him in. I packed a bag that had probably like 10% of what was supposed to be in it because I knew what was about to happen. And I was with the girl at the time. So I let her just stay in the room. I said, just lock the door. And I told her, I'm like, I have feelings in the bags of out of fucking happen. Just stay in the room if you hear anything. If you hear a fucking gun shoot, just get the fuck out of here if you can't. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Are you guys in therapy yet? You should be. I'm in therapy. And at this point, I could not live without it. It's one of my favorite things during my week. It's the thing I look forward to the most. It's like clearing all the toxic crap out of my head. And the therapist who I've been going to for years, I met on BetterHelp way before their response or the show, BetterHelp is the world's number one online therapy platform. They've got over 30,000 therapists to choose from. They got an average rating of 4.9 out of five for live sessions based on 1.7 million client reviews. Here's how it works. BetterHelp matches you with a therapist who fits your needs. And if you don't like them, if you don't get along with them, if you want to try somebody else, they will switch you at no cost anonymously and it's super easy. So there's no risk. And it's a lot more inexpensive than actually going to a therapist in real life. So I absolutely cannot stress enough how important mental health is. So do me a favor. Go over to BetterHelp.com/connect and see what they're all about. Once again, that's BetterHelp.com/connect for 10% off. You don't have to say yes to everything this summer, but find support in therapy. Sign up and get 10% off at BetterHelp.com/connect. Once again, that's BetterHELP.com/connect. So back to where we were in this room, they're standing about right there to me. And my friend Mike comes up to me and he's like, "Yo, he's like, so you have the drugs with you?" And I was like, "Yeah, I was like, they're right on the table. I was like, "Go ahead and get all your stuff." And he was introducing me to his cousins and one of them I already knew. And it was one dude that did not fucking like me whatsoever. So I already knew it was all bad. As soon as he came up to handshake me, his other friend came around and I felt the thud in the back of my head. So fucking hard. I knew it was like, it was either Zeus striking down on my fucking back of my head or he just fucking pistol at me. It felt like fucking, it was crazy. I never felt a shock like that before. But I stepped forward a couple times and I started laughing. I don't know why I started laughing. I didn't know what the fuck was going on. And I was like, bro, what are you doing right now? I was in complete shock. And that's when his friend started to ruffle me up from the back. I pulled out my gun and I shot his friend Caesar right in the leg and as soon as he got shot in the head, blood was squirt everywhere and they all started fucking running. So now I'm in my fucking house. Who got shot in the head? No, not in the head in the leg. In the leg. Shot him in the leg. And I'm fucking tripping out. Now I'm in my fucking house. There's blood everywhere. Gun just got shot. We're in East Pole. Also one of the most dangerous hoods in fucking America at that time. Like I was not a good situation. I closed the fucking door. I ran back into my room, locked every fucking door. The girl was still in there. I thought they're just going home, like figure out a way. She was like, no, it's okay. Like I'll stay with you. So she called me down. I sat at the edge of my bed just thinking about everything, bro. I was just thinking in my head, like how I shouldn't be alive right now. How you could've just pulled a trigger in the back of my fucking head at any moment. And that my best friend did that to me. It was a fucking lot to take in at that time while I think you got like somebody like sprayed at you. Yeah. No, that was even that was even fucking that was even fucking worse in the Bay Area. I'll tell you one thing. It's not really gangs. It's a lot of people just trying to make money together. Like it really isn't like LA. It's not like everywhere else. It's just people in groups that grew up together trying to make money together. And if you didn't grow up in that group, just know that if you somehow mingled your way in there, you're disposable to them. Okay. So I was disposable to a lot of people because I didn't grow up with a lot of people. I always networked my way around people. Never really settled into anybody, you know, any friend group. So I always knew that I was always disposable to people. So that's how I got set up. So I, somebody hit me up on Snapchat. And they told me they were referral from another girl. And it's all like, okay, I was constantly getting referrals from people. So I thought this wasn't weird at all. So she tells me that she wants a eight ball of coke. So that's perfectly fine. I got a new eight ball of coke person. They're going to be on that every single day probably. So I was excited. Walk down the street. And for some reason, I didn't bring my fucking gun. For some reason, I always brought my gun with me. And this time, I just fucking walked down with the eight ball. Like I was fucking nothing was wrong in the world. And I used to know also. Yeah. East poll also on Purdue street. If anyone knows where that is, it's right off of the, the Dunbar and Bridge literally right off of there. So I was in like prime time to sell drugs. I was literally right off of the bridge. And I'm walking down my street. And I see a AMG Mercedes start to pull and all tinted windows. I was like, Oh, fuck, like I'm from the East Bay area. When a car pulls up to all since it windows and starts to slow down on you and you're expected to sell drugs, something bad is about to happen. So I immediately see them roll down their windows. I see gun barrels. So I hop behind a van immediately and I start hearing bullets fucking flying by whistles near my ear. This shit was fucking scary as hell. I literally thought at any moment I was going to die. And luckily, like right across from me, this old Mexican lady starts screaming in Spanish. I don't know what the fuck she said. But whatever she said is scared them. So they all hopped out of the car ran up to me, started pistol-lipping me. And that's where I have this big scar right here. And I don't really grow hair right here. But uh, that's where that happened. I got pistol-lipped right there. And uh, I got so dazed, I didn't really know what the fuck was going on after they pistol with me. It like almost knocked me unconscious. And uh, I woke up to the ambulance. I was in the back of an ambulance van and the police were like, who did this? Like what happened? I was like, bro, I just got fucking pistol-lipped. I don't know what the fuck happened. Did they fully think coke on you? The cops? No, no, no. I threw the coke when they hopped, when they got out of the fucking car, I just threw everything because I thought they were coming for that. So I was like, bro, just take it. Rather than be that to my life, you know. So yeah, the coke wasn't there. All that was there was a hundred shells. Damn. Yeah. Why were they trying to kill you? I ended up finding up after the guy that was hitting me up on Snapchat. It ended up being a guy. I wasn't a girl. He thought I was like trying to get at his girl. That was literally it. Wow. Like my life was almost fucking taken over somebody thinking I was trying to get at their girl. At that time, I even had a girlfriend and I was like, it was beyond me why that situation even happened. I still don't even understand to this day. But there's plenty of times like just like that when I was in an Airbnb moving, fucking Airbnb to Airbnb. One day I was coming outside to go buy some drugs again and this girl that I was buying drugs off of, she was in the car and she was talking to some dudes in ski masks right next to her. And I was like, who the fuck are they? She was like, oh, they're here looking for you. They're here with you. And I was like, what? And immediately, they let off the back of her window, fucking shattered. And I like looked down at my feet and I see a bullet go straight through. And I was on so much Xanax at this time. I was so fucking just in a fucking cloud. I just walked straight to my Airbnb door, walked straight to it, opened the door, even pitting in the code to fucking, you know, open it, opened it up, closed it. And I just sat in there like, oh, what the fuck is my life come to? Like, we've serious. I was like, it was just like so many situations like that happen. And I'm like, oh, you understand. One thing I do have to tell you, those like probably the most turning point in my life, I was living with my best friend Connor and he wanted me to go buy weed from him. And I went to go buy weed for this dude. And the dude that he was buying weed from was this guy named Sonny. And this guy is a known douchebag in the bay. It just always known to scam people, known to fuck people over, you know. So this guy is in front of me now. He has a bottle of Xanax juice. And he's like, you know, he's like, do you want some of this? And I'm addicted to every jarg at this time. I'm 17 years old. So like, hell, yeah. So I down it. Next thing, you know, I'm getting dragged in my car. I am completely unconscious. Next thing, you know, I'm having just like flashes of what's going on. I'm flashing it. And now I'm in the car, open my eyes again. We're going straight out of brick wall, open my eyes again. The whole entire car is fucked. I like down on my body and there's just blood everywhere, shards of glass, all my body. And I close my eyes again and I wake up in a hospital three weeks later, after being in a coma. And I ended up having like 14 drugs in my system. Fucking they had to pick over a hundred shards of glass out of my chest. My whole chest look like leopard skin for a long talk. Yeah. For what? Over what? That's another thing. I don't fucking know. The Bay Area is so fucked. People just fuck people over to fuck people over there. Like, there's no like loyalty to anybody out there. There's no brain thought to anything that people do when they're in addiction in the Bay Area. The drugs that they got us on there are so fucked that people are fucking each other over. They're getting deeper in their addiction. They're just terrible out there, man. Yeah. It seems like it's the West Coast version of Baltimore where it's just K.O. I heard. Yeah. there's like really no structured drug dealing anymore. It's, and there's so many different kinds of the craziest drugs. - Yeah, and you say that it's interesting. Like there is absolutely no structure there in terms of the drug dealing. Like there's no organization running it all. There's no, there's just a bunch of people making a lot of fucking money and hustling in groups. - What are they hustling now that weed is legal? Are people still trapping weed in the bay or? - Oh yeah, yeah, how? Yeah, people are still, dude, it's crazy. I don't even understand why people, some people would rather go to a street dealer and buy their exotic weed than go to a dispensary. 'Cause people have in their head this belief that this street, dude, is not spraying anything on my stuff. They're not a corporation, they're not. Bro, that dude you're buying from the streets is spraying it with all sorts of shit, putting it in my lower bags, you know, like, he's doubling up on his money. They're just as scammy as the corporations, but for some reason, people still buy street weed there. - Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah. - Well, you were even selling weed. - Yeah, exactly, and bro, do you know how many times? I would scale people's weed in the same fucking scale that I just scaled cocaine. And people have literally fucking flowered up cocaine weed now. Like, bro, I was not in any way regulating the shit I was doing, but people still came to me to buy weed. - Right, instead of a dispensary. - That's crazy. Yeah, that's where you hear like, oh, they're putting cocaine on the weed. Like, they're not on purpose, but on purpose. That economically, why would they give you a bonus? - Exactly, here's some more expensive drugs that you didn't pay for. - Right, that makes sense. Do you think like a lot of coke gets fentanyl on it from that? - Yeah, from dealers like you, that are just like half full of different drugs and they're just using, there's no-- - Yeah, it's just, it's just like, yeah, it's very tedious to have like five scales for five different drugs or, you know, 10 at that time. I mean, obviously you're not scaling everything like LSD on a scale, you know, certain stuff, but yeah, I think that a lot of the times, yeah, people are reckless with the way they deal drugs. - Did you ever like get up to selling weight? - Yeah, 100%. When we came out here to LA, me and my girl, I thought I reached like a level of selling drugs in the Bay Area, that was really crazy. But when I went to LA, those people are addicted to drugs on a whole another level. Those Craigslist ads that I was talking about, they went crazy in LA. I was having like 10 people hit me up a fucking day to buy fentanyl, Xanax, meth. I didn't even do meth, but I started getting meth just to fucking sell it. Like, I was selling drugs that I'd never even thought would make money before like that. Like, meth was always me a dirty fucking drug that was just cheap and didn't make money, but for some reason LA, if you had it with your fentanyl, you'll always make money with those two together. - fentanyl and meth? - Yeah. - So they're putting fentanyl in meth? - No, no, no, no. Selling them out of the package, do you get it? You get a eight ball of this, eight ball of this, whatever you're maybe, you know? - Right. So do you have fentanyl addicts that also do meth? - Oh yeah. - Dude, how does that work? So you have a downer and then the craziest upper? - No, I was smoking crack and fentanyl. - Like, these things go together. It's like a speed ball of the new generation, you know? - Right. - It's like the new generation goofball, whatever you wanna call it. There's so many terms for it, but you know anything. - So you smoking crack. - Crack and fentanyl. When I was in that senior home selling crack, I didn't even tell her to do about that yet, but when I got into a senior home in L.A. - A senior home? - In our living home? - Yeah, a senior living home. So when I was in L.A. selling drugs, I guess the best place to start is the beginning. So we were living first in an apartment. I had relapsed after going to L.A. and staying clean for a long time. A year, a long time to me. I relapsed and I started getting full fledged back into drug doing. Things were going good for a while. We were making good money selling ounces after ounces. Like, I'm talking ounces of fentanyl every three days. Like, we weren't just selling a couple of grams here and there. You know, we were going through it quick. So at a certain point, the L.A. fires happened and me and my landlord got into it. They're ended up getting fucking bedbugs in my room. I don't know if you ever had bedbugs, but they're fucking hell. So I ended up just completely living in my car now. And the L.A. fires were happening. I ended up getting evicted. And now me and my girl are living in a U-Haul. And we're still selling drugs at the same level we're selling at. But we end up meeting these people in a senior living home. This guy named Mike, he was a Vietnam veteran and he was doing meth so fucking much. And he liked fentanyl a whole lot too. So when me and my girl eventually got kicked out of that U-Haul because eventually that happened. And they were like, get the fuck out of the U-Haul. We need this back. They ended up sending somebody. They had GPS on the U-Haul. So we could only stay in them for so long, you know. But we ended up getting into this senior living home with this guy named Mike. And that's where our drug dealing took off. So there was about A to 100 people in the senior living home that I was selling to. And they were all doing meth, crack, fentanyl. I didn't have to leave. I just literally had to walk down the fucking hallways and give everybody their fucking shit. It's like living in the projects. Literally, bro, but it was such a nice senior home. That was the best part. It was in Seamy Valley. If anybody knows who that is, or Sun Valley, sorry, Sun Valley. Yeah, it's out in the, yeah. Sun Valley's kind of ghetto, but it's whatever. It's just a suburb. Yeah, yeah. That's crazy. So you know how boomers, they used to always say, people used to always say, yeah, when I turn 80, I'm doing heroin, fuck it, dude. No, they really, they're really hard to. Yeah, they really were, bro. It was crazy. And these people were like established veterans, like, you know, decorated, like, it was crazy, bro. Oh, so most of them were vets. It was a veteran's here home. Okay, that makes more sense. So these are all like Vietnam era guys that have super PTSD, ridiculous PTSD. Yeah. And they're smoking fucking fentanyl, and they're like, I think crack it. All that. In their, like, little hall, like, even a little apartment. They really got into PCP hard. Once I introduced that to them, oh, it was game over. They fucking love that shit. People were drinking milk, doing weird shit in the hallways. Like, it was a weird fucking senior home, bro. Drinking milk? That was the, for some reason when they were overdosing on PCP, that was what would give them to fucking calm down. Wow. And their money's good. Money's great. They're getting it every month. So why are you still homeless or living in a, at this point, I'm still homeless because I'm so deep into my addiction. I don't, I don't have the sense to put my money together to get new in apartment. I just have my sense to put enough money together to get the next load, and then to get the next load, because I'm living in this dude, Mike's house. Why not just stay in here and trap it out? That makes sense. So you make a bunch of money, but then you just spend it again to get high. Exactly. I was so deep in my addiction, bro. And they're really looking back. I definitely could have just set a couple thousand aside to get an apartment. But I'd much rather just buy a couple more ounces and get that off. How much do you think you were doing yourself? Like, what a day? Like a day? Anywhere from like three to five grams of fentanyl. And then when it came to the Xanax, I was like, during these past years, was like 20 to 30 Xanax's a day. And then when it came to the crack, like me and my girl were sharing an eight ball and going through that. So half of an eight ball each. And you would do heroin or you do the fence? Excuse me first. I would do them together, bro. I like putting them together. I would get a dab rig and I would put both rocks together. I'd get a fentanyl. I was gonna crack rock and put them both together and just go down on it. And bro, I would get super fucking high. But at one point, I realized that none of this shit was gonna overdose me. I had reached a point where like every batch of fentanyl that I used was not enough. Like I had reached a point where I knew I was just gonna watch people die around me, right? So it was the opposite problem. Yeah. Like you weren't worried about OD and you were worried about just getting enough to get well. Yeah, like making sure it was strong enough. Exactly. There was, and that was the problem, bro. I couldn't find a batch strong enough. That's really like what started to get me to a point where I was just miserable all the time. I was just always in withdrawal. I was always feeling shitty. Me and my girl, the worst time that I had in my addiction was me and her had just got arrested. Just got let out of fucking jail for possession. We were sleeping in our car. That's when we lost our car and how we ended up in a U-hole. They arrested us and I'm outside of a Burbank. We got arrested in Burbank. You're familiar with LA, right? Yeah. Yeah, so Burbank police are fucking assholes, dude. We got arrested. They took our car through us back out and I was sitting under a stairwell freezing cold with drawing, looking at my girl and I was like, we gotta get clean. Like we can't keep living like this. Like this shit's not gonna end well. It's either gonna end with my girl fucking dying and me living the rest of my life carrying that. And that's pretty much it. Or us getting fucking clean and trying to figure this shit out. So for like the next three months, we did everything we could to get into a treatment center or a shelter. But one thing I realized in those three months is that LA does not give a fuck about their homeless people. No, they definitely don't. But also you were doing something called body brokering, which is super fucking crazy. This is like fraud on another level. Can you explain what that is? - Yeah, so I personally wasn't involved in body brokering. I never got body brokering myself. The people all around me were. So what body brokering is basically is they're just gonna, so say Johnny you. So let's just say I just met you and I see that you have somewhat of a drug problem. But Johnny, you know, you can go to treatment for 30 days and I can give you 30,000 dollars with that New York shit policy you have. And that's all you have to do. Just go to treatment. I'll even give you a weed pen in there to get high. You'll be all good, bro. Just stay in treatment for 30 days. I'll give you 30,000. dollars and that's how that goes. Wait a minute. I'll give you 30,000 or your insurance company. The insurance will pay the detox center and that detox center will pay me and then I will pay you. That's how that goes. So the detox center is in on it. Yeah, they're 100% all the body brokers that are working with treatment centers. Those treatment centers have open knowledge that the admissions person is doing that. This episode is also sponsored by CashApp, the only way that I send and receive money, probably the only way that you send and receive money too. But did you know the CashApp is way more than just a money transfer app. You could do a lot more for your money, make your money work for you. Check it out. If you direct a deposit at least $300 in paychecks each month and use the CashApp card for purchases, you can earn interest on your savings. No hidden fees, no minimum balance requirement. Also, you can hit your savings goals even faster by turning on roundups on your CashApp card. 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CashApp green features savings, direct deposit roundups, overdraft coverage and discounts provided by CashApp, a blocking brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Okay. So if the treatment and the money gets split up, obviously. Yeah. Like if the insurance company pays the detox center 30 grand. So I can do if I can try to do the math for you. So they get paid anywhere from like, anywhere from like 300 to $5,000 a day. What day? Yeah. A day. So the money goes pretty fucking up. So I've seen some treatment centers get paid over a hundred thousand for one policy. Okay. So if you're in there for a month of five grand a day, that's $150,000. That's what I'm saying. So and then they'll give a percentage of that to the body broker. They'll give it's like for a New York ship. I know just because I worked for one of the like biggest body brokers in like LA. I ended up leaving our job because he was so fucking filthy. I couldn't change this dude. But I knew from him how they were paying people out and a New York ship policies were $25,000 to any admissions person that brought them up. So it's $25,000 cash off the record and nothing. Right. And then how much do they pay the actual addict? The actual addict. They'll give them anywhere from like five to $10,000. They'll give them just chump change. But you're paid, I mean, $10,000 from 30 days for an addict. All they have to do is just stay there and then they have $10,000 to go out and get. And it goes higher than that. My friend Tommy was getting paid like $15 to like $25,000. My friend out here, his name's Lucas. He's one that actually was involved or not involved. But like he saw a lot of the body broker and he got body broker himself. He told me just last night he got paid 30,000 the last time he was in treatment. For 30 days. Yeah. For 30 days. So a thousand a day. Did he stay clean after he got out? Oh wow, it actually works. It works for him. But that's a rare fucking case, bro. No shit. That's like 0.001 out of 100. So do you think addicts will just do that to get money every now and then they'll go to a body broker and say, Hey, I'll go live in one of these sober living houses for a month. Yeah. Plenty of them do. I would say like anywhere from like 50 to 60% of the sober living's in treatment centers are body brokering their clients in California. And we're talking like hundreds of millions of dollars a year to millions of dollars a year, bro. It's insane. The money that's getting funneled in through all these treatment centers is crazy. You guys think hospices are crazy? Look into treatment centers. It's a whole nother ballgame. Okay. And who owns these detox centers, mostly? I mean, bro, it's really hard to say. Like I told you, it's like I've seen every race involved in this because I mean, I've seen Rico. There's a Rico case going on right now with this guy named Pablo. I don't know why he is. I think sometimes I've never released him maybe, but even with the name Pablo, of course, that's his like certain or fake name. But he's involved in a Rico case right now. And yeah, it's it's everybody, bro. There's just all there's there's no specific race involved in this. But I mean, like, it's just individuals, just entrepreneurs or is it big companies? Oh, yeah, I got you. No, no, it's big companies for sure. Like I think the insurance companies are in on it 100%. I think they're allowing for all of this fraud to happen because they openly know, like for example, for a long time, they weren't really buckling down on ID verification. So people were just going on Canva making up fake IDs, you know, just and then sending that to them and they would accept that as ID verification. So the insurance company, it's pretty easy to see when an ID is fake. So I mean, I think if they're approving it, even the insurance companies are in on it. For sure, you know, and then they can just charge more on their policies. Exactly. They charge more on their policies. The treatment centers, of course, around on it because they're getting paid, they're getting paid the most out of everybody, honestly. And LA that's pretty prevalent everywhere. People are getting paid to go to treatment. And that's how a lot of people end up dead or end up homeless in MacArthur Park because they end up running through all that fucking money there. So easy to spend a couple thousand. Okay, so tell us about MacArthur Park and in Los Angeles, just outside of downtown. Yeah, so whenever I always would use Craigslist, but one number one thing that I knew is MacArthur Park for sure had drugs. And there were times when like five to 10 of my dealers just were dry. There were dry spells in Los Angeles a lot. It always had to do with the border closing, then tightening out like some fucking shit happening out of our control. But when that would happen, I would go to MacArthur Park and I would pivot to selling Xanax more. And I would go up to those ladies, all those ladies that you go, you just seen the raid that just happened. No, but tell us for people that aren't familiar with Los Angeles, just to describe the neighborhood in MacArthur Park. MacArthur Park is pretty much a giant park that's just littered with homeless people using drugs. It's an open drug market. You can walk there by Xanax fentanyl, anything you want. Yeah, it's people talk about Skid Row in downtown LA, but MacArthur Park's actually like, you go there and you can't even believe you're in the 21st century. No, legit people are shooting up right in front of you. Yeah, openly like you see people overdose nodding, throwing up. Like I said, I saw someone get shot in the head and they just had their body lay there for like six hours. Crazy. So and yeah, but a lot of that is actually controlled when MS-13 was big. I think they had a lot of control over those those cart people because you know, it's like a Salvadoran. It is. Yeah, it was the Salvadorians. Yeah, and so it's I mean, you look like you're in the old El Salvador. Yeah. You know, like it's just people selling papusas and fruit ladies and shit like that. Yeah, I know it is. It's crazy. Yeah, but it's but I think it's gotten worse even since the time that I used to like I used to manage when I worked in property management. The company owned buildings in MacArthur Park. And like God, you dude, you couldn't even let you couldn't even trust the guy, the super of the building because it turns out he'd be like selling like pimping out like $20 or like street prostitutes to like, you know, junkies and shit like out of a vacant apartment. Yeah, shit like that, you know. So you're but that was the place to go when the fentanyl dried up. Yeah, that was the place to go if I ever just needed drugs really quick. Like if any of my dealers were lagging on me and I needed drugs quick, I knew I could just walk down that strip and with the little, because I'm a Nulsaba kid. Like, I don't really know Spanish whole lot, but I knew the words to get drugs like the namazanex, you know, the namaz fentanyl, whatever I needed. And they just based on my little accent. And I guess the way I look, I don't look like a fucking cop that they would always give me what I wanted. Who would be selling it? So it would usually be an old lady or like a Mexican dude anywhere from like 20 to 30 that look like he definitely never touched drugs in his life would be the one that you're talking to and you would be asking them for the drugs. And they would look at the other person, be like, yeah, you have it. Yeah. And then they would grab from under the counter. They'd usually out like a box or sometimes a box of fruit and under the fruit or under whatever stuff they had would be the bottles of Xanax, bags of fentanyl, whatever they had. Yeah. It's really out there that much in the open way out in the open. Like you could literally just grab one of their boxes and run and I guarantee you'd have a lot of drugs on here. But you'd obviously get shot, but you know, like they're just open. Wow. So that really is like cartel controlled. 100%. That's like one of their points of distribution. And yeah, the LAPD's been known about this shit too. They have a nobody knows. I don't think many people know, but there's a police station probably like two minutes from a quarter park. Yeah. So they know what's going on there. Well, they just did a big raid. Yeah. So every now and then they do try to clean it up, but they'll be back. They'll be back. Yeah. Because there's so many users that are there. So obviously there's a problem. Yeah. There's going to be people seeking drugs always. So they're There's always going to be someone there that's going to want to take advantage of that. Yeah. Yeah, I argue with people about that. That's how you actually eliminate the problem is you arrest the drug users, which I know sounds harsh. No, I understand, though. I mean, as a drug addict, what got me clean was getting arrested. It was actually facing some consequences, seriously. We want to just let people not have to just let people get off easy. That's not the way to do it. If you need people to go through a structured treatment program, you need people to have to abide by some strict fucking rules to learn how to actively or how to productively conduct themselves in society. There's a lot of these people like myself, for example, I was homeless for over a year. I have a roof over my head. You could imagine the manners I had the way I was talking to people, the way I was acting. It was completely beyond the person I am today. Yeah. You're out of your mind. You're like a walking corpse. 100%. I do a smoke and crack every day doing a final like I was not the person that's talking to do that. What do you think you spent on drugs? Just like a month when you were in your addiction. Just on myself, probably like anywhere from like five to like $6,000 crazy. So an addict who's getting out of a detox center that he was paid to be in, he could go down and blow all the money he made in a week, Emma Carthor Park. Oh, easily. My friend Tommy does it every fucking other month. I have a lot of friends that do it every other month. So Xanax is like, sounds like the biggest next event in all. That's what like people go to that like opioids. Yeah. How are these street dealers or these carts help people? How are they getting access to Xanax wholesale? Like that much product. I mean, it was pretty easy for me. Like the way I got access to it was through the people at MacArthur Park. They would sell you as many bottles as you wanted. You could get it anywhere as low as like $110. For how long? For 90 pills. 90 pills in each bottle. Wow. Yeah. So it's like $1.25. Really? Yeah. You're selling them for five bucks and you're just adding that on to the other drug combination you're selling people. Does that come from Mexico? Yeah. A lot of them were the farmer prams. The what? They're called farmer prams. So it's basically a Mexican Xanax. They'll be in like white bottles with a white cap. Everybody that has used Xanax and has addicted to Xanax knows exactly what that bottle is. Because nobody talks about that. People assume Xanax is like you get it from a dirty doctor in America. Yeah. So you can actually get quantity from Mexico. Quantity from Mexico. The only thing that I understood is that there's no regulation in Mexico when it came to their pharmaceutical drugs. Because I was taking some that felt like 20 milligrams of Xanax in it. And then the other one would be like a dud. You know, so that was one thing that was a little off about those. But. Yeah. Americans' hands are hard to come by at a certain point. They started banning them everywhere and all prescribing them to people because they knew people were getting addicted to them. But it's like you already got people addicted to them. So it's like. Right. You know. So people's turned to the streets and was the fentanyl that they had down there? Was it mostly in powder or mostly capsules? No. Fentanyl, I get it. So it depends. If you want fentanyl in a capsule, I can get you in at M30. Which is like basically a fake blue oxy, you know. So that would be one version of fentanyl in a capsule. Another version of fentanyl would be just a straight rock. And that's mainly what my biggest seller was in LA. I would sell rocks of fentanyl because a lot of people like to dab and you can't really dab powder. Right. You know. So it would be rocks of fentanyl. Okay. So that is the pure. That's the purest form. The purest form you could get it in. Yeah. That's why whenever I sold fentanyl, I tried my best to make sure. I only got rock because I knew that powder was cut every time. And so you buy it in like an ounce? I'd buy ounces at a time. Multiple. Already rocked up. Yeah. They would already be rocked up in a bag. Okay. And who was your connect? I had multiple. So like I told you, I did the same thing pretty much that I did in the Bay area. I brought that to LA. So me and my girl, we got on Craigslist. We started looking at everybody that was doing ads relatively close to what I was doing because I knew other people were doing it. I wasn't the first to ever do it. So we started going, finding a bunch of connects. I started to find people that were giving me ounces of fentanyl for like 600 bucks, 500 bucks. We started getting really fucking low, you know, and I'm selling ounces of fentanyl for anywhere from like 50 to 100 dollars. I mean, Graham, I'm sorry, Graham's a fentanyl for anywhere from 50 to 100. Wow. And I could bust that down. I can sell them. You know, break it down however I want. Yeah. I'm making good money so I'm saying. Yeah. Kill it. You can triple or quadruple your money off an ounce. Yeah. 100%. And then I got to do it for like a couple of times a week at a certain point. I just quit my job completely because I was doing admissions for a treatment center. And that's when I started to relapse after my dog got ran over in front of me. I completely lost myself again. And I got addicted to drugs and yeah, that's when I, we started to push fentanyl again. And were you just working off your cell phone or can you go down and like hustle on the street? No, I was mainly just on my cell phone, man. Really? Like, I wasn't having to be on a corner ever. My whole life, I was never a corner boy ever. Yeah. Always just on my phone doing it the smart way online using a signal. You know, like I lived in an era where you could be completely off the grid if you're smart, you know, off the grid or completely on it. Yeah. Yeah. Um, are they selling drugs on Snapchat still? Well, I'm all, you definitely, there's still some drugs on Snapchat, but that's not where I was selling drugs. I was selling drugs through signal. So I would give people my signal number on the Craigslist ad and I was getting hit up all the time by people, but I would always verify, verify them. I would tell you to send me your ID with your face on, with your face next to it so that I know you're not a cop and I know you're real. That way I could just search your name, see if you have any warrants. I would always make sure anyone that I sold to that you don't have any sketchy warrants out because that means you're trying to get that warrant clear by fucking me over. I would always make sure that you don't have no criminal past that maybe you might have been a fed in the past and you're trying to still to continue that career. You know, I always made sure that the people all selling to were vetted and I saw my girl that see verified them on a computer. Oh, yeah. What system do you put it into a ton? I would use, I would use a ton of different, there's a ton of different things on Google that you can use a ton, a ton of people identifiers, but mainly I would just look up their first and last name where they're from and put a criminal case or a criminal court. And I would just keep looking up words and key words to see if I found anything related there were multiple people, there was one guy found out with actually a fed, so I fucked with him and I sent him to like 20 different spots and actually didn't even have a selling door. So I love it plenty of times I would like, yeah, I used that that verification method and it kept me out of jail, bro. So you never got caught up on like a buy bust selling selling drugs to a cop? The only time that I ever got caught up was when we were homeless, just having drugs on me, never selling. Yeah. But when I was in the Bay Area, we got our, I got my house rated at probably like 21 years old. I was living in East Paul Walto and I was selling drugs heavy out of there. It was what I was doing with my dad and I don't know if it had anything to do with him, but it was somewhat shortly after meeting him. My house got rated and I don't know if he was getting tailored or something, but luckily I was down the street and my house actually had nothing fucking in it. I never kept drugs inside of my house in large loads, just what I was using. So they rated the house. I actually didn't even go back to that house ever again. I saw I get rated from down the street and I left all my shit there and I went to my mom's house and then that's when I ended up driving L.A. to get clean. Wow. Yeah. Did you say you worked for the biggest LSD dealer and San Francisco? The Bay Area. Yeah. For sure. This guy named Noah, anybody that has dealt psychedelics in the Bay Area, truly you, you have to know. If you don't, then you didn't truly self fucking psychedelics there. This dude, and he's the one that I told you guys dad was a pharmaceutical executive. So he was using all of daddy's money to fucking funnel LSD DMT and he helped me unlock parts of my fucking brain that I couldn't even comprehend without these drugs. What? Yeah. I was ready to kill myself at a certain point when I first met him after he got shot in the head. And I told him I was like, bro, I'll protect you. But just so you know, I'm mentally unstable like crazy, like I don't really see any value on my own life. Me and him got really personal with each other and he gave me DMT to take and I took it and it changed my fucking life for the better. Yeah. Rehab probably helped more than DMT I would argue, but he'll know for sure for sure. One step at a time. Yeah. So he got shot in the head. This rich kid. Yeah. Yeah, he got shot in the head dealing in Oakland. He was selling weed to different people. And he went to Oakland to go sell a large amount of weed by himself and the guy pulled up right to the side of his car and shot him right in the head. The bullet went right here and went out like through his cheek. Yeah. Through his cheek. Is Oakland still dangerous like that? Oh, yeah. No, Oakland people like to say is gentrified, but they're still the same fucking scamming, backstabbing type of people there. Like it's still the same type of shit going on there. Yeah. That's wild. Let's see could this guy push dude, he I saw him pushing like tens of thousands of tabs at a time. He was shipping these out to LA. There was like pyramid ones with gold flakes in them. Like he was making all sorts of crazy designs and sending them all throughout the world. Honestly, he was selling them everywhere, sending them through the mail. Yeah. Wow. Wow. How much where do you get that? The diagonal quantity. Yeah. Was he making it? himself. Yeah, he was making it himself. So even the DMT he was making himself, this guy was a wizard in the lab. So that's why I was really just there to make sure nothing happened to him. Again, and also the drugs that he would always keep there were safe. Okay, so tell us about an LSD lab. Um, so, I mean, it was just in his garage, bro. Really, it wasn't anything fancy. Yeah. He was just in his garage pressing, uh, putting chemicals together with beakers and all sorts of scientific shit, but I didn't really understand. Do you think he was getting chemicals through his dad? It's very possible. His dad would come in the garage very many times and has said nothing about this thing's going on. He would see me packing capsules of Molly, like doing all sorts of shit. And you wouldn't say nothing. Wow. So, but his dad was like, a, he's like an Indian dude that didn't really speak a whole lot of English. Uh, you should have led with that. The Indian part that would have now we now we believe you. Oh, yeah. He is a sketchy dude. Yeah. Yeah. And their big time drug dealers, like not just on like a scientific kind of niche psychedelic level, like they own the trucking companies that, oh, dude, they lost the drugs. They own a lot of shit, the Indians. Yeah. In the East Bay, especially. Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. So you're packing Molly. You sold a bunch of Molly. You said? Yeah. So we were packing them. He was like really someone that was putting me on too. Like I was protecting him, but he was putting me on. He got me a car. Uh, he got me a load to sell every single day. Like I always had everything I needed to sell. He really just told me he was like, you find the customer and you find what they need. We'll get it to them and we'll split it together. So me and him just became like best friends for a good while and just sold drugs together. I made sure he was okay. And I think he really just needed a friend after getting shot in the head. You didn't really need someone to protect them. And he was just, it were you carrying a gun like, wait a minute. Did you ever shoot anybody throughout my whole life? Yeah. Yeah. I've shopped. I've told you I shot somebody who went on. I was protecting myself when they tried to rob me. Right. Right. Well, yeah. That's true. That's to any other times. Um, when I was younger, there's, there's just been many times in my life where I've been put in situations where like I just to say I was just too dragged out to really comprehend what I was doing. And yeah, I have hurt people. Yeah. But a lot of it had to do with me being on drugs a lot of the time. You know, I could say like everything that I did bad in my life, I truly do regret. I truly am immortal for and I'm doing everything I can to data to make things right because I know that some people can't talk to their sons anymore. Some people can't talk to their best friends or family members. And I know what that pains like because that happened to me too. And I deeply regret everything I did in the streets. But that's exactly why I'm doing everything I can today. So you saw and knew a lot of people who died. Yeah. Mostly from drug overdoses. Drug overdoses. There was a lot of shootings in the Bay Area though too. A lot of people got shot and killed. Two of my best friends right now, Rico and Dante. They're both in prison right now for murder charges. They shot some football player at San Jose State University. Yeah. So I saw violence everywhere. My best friends would always go to jail or prison because they would always be involved in stuff. And luckily, I always had good friends to not involve me in their court cases. Yeah. People don't, people forget because it's become so associated with like Google and Facebook the Bay Area. But it's hood is fuck and many, many little pockets of San Francisco and the East Bay. Oh, yeah. It's ghetto is hell and some areas, right? I wouldn't like it's really just they glamorize the Bay Area a lot, but there's a lot of parts that they don't give a fuck about and just let just go. Yeah. It's really sad because like a lot of it's just really sad because me as an addict, like I've been in so many situations where all I needed was just somebody to put their hand out and you know, offer some help. You know, because there's so many times where I would have been glad to have been given like the smallest amount of support in my addiction. So you don't think you got that? You don't think the state provides that? No, but like I told you the last three months in my addiction before I got clean, I was actively trying to get into shelters in LA, actively trying to get into the state ran facilities. They all had to wait lists. They all couldn't take me for some reason. There was just always some reason that they couldn't help. So I mean, and then me also seeing people on the streets also getting denied. I didn't really understand who was getting help at all. So I don't understand that. Like billions of dollars have been pumped into the homeless industry in California. Why is there a wait list? There shouldn't be any wait list. There's so much housing that's been built. That's what I don't get. Yeah. No one that's honestly what I've been trying my best. I've been trying my best to reach out to like mayors and people that are trying, not mayors, people that are trying to run for a mayor in LA like Spencer Pratt. I try to reach out to him to see where his head was at with the addiction because they all talk a lot about addiction. They all talk a lot about treatment, but none of them really have offered an actual solution that really seems like it would work to me. You know, like a lot of them think that like, for example, Spencer Pratt, he talks about wanting to help addicts a whole lot, but he also talks about how they're unhelpable that the ones that are under the tunnels are just going to stab you in the neck. So it's like, what is it? Do you want to help or do you not? Well, on the one hand, he's fear mongering because the streets have become very unsafe in certain parts of LA. I get that, right? So you need to have law enforcement intervened. But at the same time, you've got to try to figure out a way to actually help these people. You know, most of them that wouldn't be criminals if it weren't for their just insane out of control addictions. You know, you've, so if you've lived and if anybody's lived in LA, those overpasses that you drive over every single day, if you just go under them, there's a little pocket and literally a door and there's homeless people living in every single one of them trapping out meth doing meth. Like, it's crazy. Like there's a whole underworld in LA. It's fucking crazy. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. And like the politicians just stay being trash. You know, like, you got to get California needs almost like a dictator, but a benevolent dictator. Yeah. And he's like a naive bouquelet type guy who's the president of El Salvador. Like he needs, there needs to be a guy who like speaks to everybody, but is not going to bow down to Zionists. Yeah. And the Jewish lobby, which can't be understated how powerful they are. Dude, you know, and of course, all these other lobbies, too, it's not just them. It's, it's a whole gigantic mess of different industries that are just taking taxpayer money and putting it in their pocket. Yeah. And the problem just keeps growing. You know, um, yeah, but it's pretty insane to think about. You kind of lived in that, that jungle. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I've been trying to tell my story for so long because I really think that a lot of addicts that are living in LA right now just like Sino hope that they look at these treatment centers and they see that they really don't care about, they don't care about us. Like when I just left sober living, um, you know, I just left sober living probably like a week ago. And when I left like, I didn't get no congratulations from the owners or anything like that. Instead, they were just absolutely angry that I left without telling them. And it just tells you that these people don't care about your success. They care more about getting money in their pockets. So they would rather have you fail much rather that way I stay in treatment longer and get somebody gets paid more. So tell us about those treatment centers like there, how do they actively set people up to fail? So they don't let you get jobs. They don't let you work a lot of the time. They make sure that, um, they just provide a lot of inconveniences. This is the best way I can put it. They provide a lot of inconveniences to make it almost impossible for you to get in a position, to get an apartment, to get to the next step in life. And like, that's what I mean, I'm not trying to even bag on the owners that I just left from the sober living. It's just more like a lot of these people have to change their perspective and understand that look, if you're really so focused on the money, then be focused on making your client succeed because that'll bring you a lot more money. It'll bring you a lot more people a little attract a lot more people seeing a successful treatment center. That's pumping out clients that are getting their own apartment, starting their own companies. Like, bro, I was homeless 12 months ago and in these 12 months, I've started a company. I've got seven contracts with detox centers. I've been able to, you know, get my own apartment. Like, I've done a lot of like good things and that's possible for anybody. It's just it feels so impossible when you're getting constricted by the, like, in-genuine rules that sober living places to supposedly help the clients. So they want to break these people so they start using it again and come back? Yeah, they break you down slowly. Yeah, it's so, but you're working with them now. You started a, I mean, it makes sense. You've been marketing online for a long time. Yeah. But now you're doing, now you're working with detox centers. Yeah. So now I, so yeah, so I said, I started a business marketing company. It's called Santana LA outreach solutions. So what I do is I do web development, SEO, I do social media marketing. I provide everything possible to show people what treatment is. And on the websites, I try to go really deeply into explaining addiction. What it feels like to have dual diagnosis. So what it's like to be addicted to cocaine, while also have depression and anxiety, you know, all of these things because I think the number one thing that I struggled with and my addiction was having my family never understand me, you know, or people just never understand me And I think that's like one thing I've always noticed is like People never want to understand that dude that's homeless on the side of the road How he really ended up like that and how he's continued to stay like that. Yeah, I always think about that I look at a guy who's walking around in booty shorts and a fish net stalking. I'm serious. You watch all you tall jack black guy But he's dressed like a woman just walks up and down barefoot outside this Outside of the studio every day, and I wonder Yeah, that guy started out. He didn't just it wasn't just born that way. Yeah, like he started out as a person He has experiences. He has a past like how does it how does it we add up to that, you know, it's crazy, bro Yeah, and like yeah, that is honestly, you know one thing I always used to joke about When I was in my addiction and like people would be Swacked out on crack. I'd be like dude everything that dude's doing right now makes complete sense to him Like you know the guy that you just talked about that everything he's doing putting on that little two to whatever it is That should make sense to him in his head That's how fuck to these drugs are like they make you think that what you're doing is actually what you're supposed to be doing Yeah, you got a bunch of boils on your leg. Yeah, I don't know if the camera can see it That right here was from fentanyl. Mm-hmm. How do you get that so look? I've never been a fucking picker in my life. I got this shit all over me There was a drug going around in a lot of the fentanyl like for quite a long time I know a lot of people know it from Kensington the flash-eating zombie drug They started putting that in the fentanyl in LA again I know that it was in a lot of people's fentanyl because like I said I had like 10 to 15 dealers at a time, bro So I'm buying from everybody to see who's fucking fentanyl is okay. Mm-hmm. Nobody's was Everybody had the same shit in it, and that was what you were using. Yeah, it was trink Trink, okay. What is trink trink is what you see about on TV the flash-eating zombie drug It's completely just think of fentanyl, but a hundred times stronger without the actual enjoyable feeling at all. It's just completely like you're just out You're zombie now and you just can't function whatsoever like I had my girl on trink a few times because me and her were both smoking fentanyl And I saw her and she couldn't even move her fucking eyelids if she wanted to Hmm, like it just completely disables people and then the worst part about her is it does things like this it completely just shreds your skin and It was scary, bro at times. I thought that I would have to like amputate my fucking leg if it continued It was that bad. I saw some dudes that were drug dealing a fentanyl He literally had an entire bandage wrap around it because every time he touched it water would press out That's how fucking bad addiction gets Yeah, that's fucking it was not really saying dude. Yeah, that's insane. I Mean, it's just it's like hell on earth in those places. It really is like I think back to There's one guy named rave and then I was selling with ounces of fentanyl That's the dude. I just told you about with the leg. Oh my god. This dude was like 300 pounds selling meth fentanyl for like Dude, he was well connected really well connected in LA actually He would have like a little kitchen and you would just see like I'm not even can't like breaking bad Shards of fucking ice just in trays like this Like this guy was plugged to the fucking and if anybody knows about like the Asian prostitutes in LA Those were the ones that he was selling to and providing drugs to okay It's the ones on figure row. Yeah, yeah tell us about fig people that don't know about the blade Basically fig is like what the blade is anywhere else like in Vegas where everyone's Prostituting themselves. There's young women though. It's really unfortunate a lot of these women are like under 18 Like there's not it's not like I mean there are also older ladies too, but a lot of like fucked up shit's going on there and Yeah, figs just to place where women go to lose their dignity lose their souls and it's the host roll. Yeah, and those and those hoes are Using drugs all on drags. Oh, I mean you would have to How could you possibly? Yeah, I mean like just think about what they do every day sucking like 20 random dicks a day Well, I couldn't even do one like holy shit, bro. I could do a couple It's gonna be swimming you got a little more heart than me, but yeah, I'm just trying it makes the time go by, you know damn Oh, that's so sad. Did you see like did you hear about like human trafficking? There must be some of that going on Yeah, there's a lot of so you know what's actually crazy is the guy Raven that I was actually dealing with There was a part of him that I just kept turning my head away to like he kept talking to me about how those Asian prostitutes that he was selling to were actually like he was their pimp They were coming to him and giving him money and I knew the type of guy Raven was like he's the type of guy to definitely rape girls against their will So eventually I had to get away from that dude because I just knew that evil he was doing behind closed doors You might not be doing it in front of you, but he let out a lot of words that I understood what he was doing in the back Like they were definitely actively human trafficking people Yeah, like and what does that mean exactly like? Keeping him drugged up keeping them drugged up to where they don't even understand that they have more value to life than just Giving their body out and giving it the entire profit to somebody else It just makes no sense to me Well, it doesn't make sense to me the only time somebody could possibly Continuously prostitute themselves and give money to somebody else. They have to be drugged up to do that. This is illogical Again don't us out in sensitive. That's also a bad ass pimp school, but this is not like Oakland you fucking you know Like Willie dynamite kind of Yeah, no, this is an old white guy. It is probably like fifties and just super grimy has plus all on his leg And these girls are coming to him to buy drugs and rub it all upon him like he's fucking Hugh Heffner because he has drugs and that's the reality of what LA is is grimy as dudes in power just getting a bunch of Mm-hmm That's and the law allows it. Yeah, and I think that's why so many people like coming to me and my girl to buy drugs Because I always had my girl with me. They always knew I wasn't gonna be on a weird shit So girls would love coming to me because I always had my girl with me who yeah who are the customers like if you're selling The griniest drugs meth fentanyl Xanax. Yeah, who are what's the breakdown of like a typical customer? You know, it's really I just think in all my customers right now and like There's a bunch of random ass people dude. It's like all walks of earth one thing that drug dealing Tommy is they don't discriminate And if you really are drug dealt drugs, you know that there's all sorts of people that like drugs Things housewives tech guys business owners. There's a bunch of dealership owners in LA that I was selling to Dealership. Yeah, like people that own dealerships car dealership. Yeah, car dealerships like a lot of them were on coke Yeah, yeah, so there's just all sorts of walks of life. Yeah, I know like the coke is more High-end that's a little more acceptable. You kind of get normal people to buy the coke and the pills and ship But like I'm trying to figure out like fentanyl like are the youth What really worries me is like the youth the 17 20-year-olds that have already given up you know Yeah, it seems like that's increased a lot with your generation and with the with the kids even younger than you Yeah, there's actually a kid named a Houston that I was selling to if he was like 17 bro and homeless on the streets I used to pull up see I told you how I don't discriminate on selling to people He would come to me with like $5 sometimes and I would come out so he wasn't sick But it just showed me that like this country does not give a fuck a 17-year-old is on the streets has no parents No family taking care of them not even from the state. He's from Oklahoma But he got body-brokered out here And now he ended up on the streets, but Point being it was just so sad for me to see fucking 17 year 17 years old on the streets homeless No parents no family no support nothing but just the love from a drug dealer right so You know like being his drug dealer. I tried to show that kid a lot of love and I tried to do that to all my customers Lake because I noticed like the one thing about selling drugs is it takes the soul out of everyone you sell to Like regardless of how much you like them and how much you try to talk to them and keep them in a good head space like everyone You sell drugs to will eventually lose themselves Yeah, and you're also on drugs losing yourself right that's why I know yeah, it's like just this cycle It's like drug addicts. They're just passing Drugs just close to it. Yeah, like there's very I mean, I'm sure there are a few Mexican cartel guys That are bringing it up. You'll never see there. Yeah, you know, it is an organized gigantic multi-million dollar operation. They're giving it to their lieutenants who are breaking it down and giving it out to The guys yeah, they have drivers. They have drivers Yeah, they never the guys at the top they never actually meet the people They always have drivers to meet you in random places Who are your connects? Are these Mexican guys? Yeah, those mixed so the top top people that I was dealing with when it came to like getting ounces And ounces of everything it was Mexican guys that were just meeting me at different places They always had drivers. They would text me, but the driver would meet me So you never met. Yeah, I never met they always kept you super low key made sure that Everything was completely organized. That's where organization was and I saw that they value the The way I worked because all I was was just I'm buying from you and moving on like we're not going to talk I don't need to know anything about you and you always I know anything about me. Yeah, cash is straight Not anything else. So we kept shit super low key. I kept that going for Quite a while because that's when I was in the senior home So shit was moving really fast and Yeah, even when I went to detox. I still have them hitting on my phone You know you in a year or later. I still have people hitting on my phone to get drugs So it's gonna be a while before my past actually Stops haunting me, but I think that's why I really wanted to tell my story here today is because You know, I do want to leave all of this shit in the past like I hear a lot of people Try to escape this life and it just never ends it feels like but I cleared my warrants. I have my criminal history behind me Hopefully I never get back on drugs again. What was the key to getting sober this time? I would say the key to getting sober for me this time was Feeling enough fucking pain to be done Like seriously like I had to just feel enough pain to be like I can't go through this shit again You know like every part of me was broken and I the only thing I had was God at one point I had it was never really a believer in anything, but I Know that it was a power greater than me that got me out of that fucking homelessness That got me out of that fentanyl addiction crack addiction like all of these things I don't think I could have gone through alone But let me at the same time. I'm incredibly proud of myself for doing it. Mm-hmm As you should be. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you Well, congratulations with your business. Yeah, yeah, I know 100% man, and you know one thing also is like The hardest thing for me was about getting clean Which is not knowing the resources that were out there So like my biggest goal was starting this company is like really pushing out that ethical treatment is available There is treatment where you don't have to go and get paid it to fuck up your fuck your life off over again When you go to these 30 day treatments, you will actually be cared for there will be groups ran You know like these people actually give a fuck so right now I pick seven treatment centers that I like Truly care about and like if anyone needs treatment. I'm on Instagram at Los Angeles outreach and If anybody needs to get clean, please like reach out to me because that's like my biggest mission at this point since I got clean was to help other people because Bro, I know the fucking pain is so deep, and I understand why so many people just choose the easy way out Because it's like it should breaks you, you know in every way Well, we'll definitely put a link to that and you know help you advertise and market that the best we can thank you man, I appreciate it. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting because I never I don't personally like understand The draw to doing drugs. I was always scared of drugs even like way before fettin' all like even coke. I was like, man, I don't know You know, I was I don't get it wasn't until I started doing this podcast to talking with people. I actually honestly still don't get it. I I just Walk around just a little depressed just like all of us, but I never turned to drugs because Yeah, see the inevitability of it just Collapsing your world. Yeah, so you know that like little feeling you said of like depression that you feel Imagine that being so overwhelming that you can't even breathe. I guess like that's what it feels like I think as addicts some of us just like feel things so fucking intensely and Genuinely You have to just the way I stop becoming an addict Every day was just stopping a fucking victim to my feelings, you know Stop using my feelings that are so overwhelming as an excuse to use because just like you said you feel it and you go about your day and you're fine You know, so yeah, just don't let it be an excuse You know that's the number one thing that will help you stay clean is not making excuses for yourself. Mm-hmm Yeah, that's a good point like and but even non addicts can use that advice, right? Yeah, like don't like you feel something, but it's just a feeling. Yeah, it's just a feeling It's not actually not actually who you are. You're just experiencing it at this moment. Yeah, so not being so attached to how you feel Identify with your feelings. That's exactly. That's beautiful. Yeah, I that's a nugget That's a nugget that we can all use 100% yeah, yeah, 12 steps is rule. I love 12 steps. Yeah, I go to the eating sometimes I don't even drink, but like sometimes I will just go to meetings because I had to do tons of that when I was locked up And so I kind of like having a stow for it, but it's a great way to just it's like a Bible for living No, genuinely I really wish that like I have some family members that aren't even addicted to drugs But I wish they would go through that just to find a find it in themselves to be able to accept their past more And be able to accept the things they did because genuinely like you said that 12 steps is for anybody It's not just for drugs and alcohol. It's just to be a better person and live a better life Yeah, did you reconnect with your mom? Yeah, my mom actually she just recently had a stroke two weeks ago But I went to go visit her in the Bay Area Like I said, she had me at 17. Those my best friend. I love my mom so much And I want to go visit her. We got to reconnect. She has three sons now with my stepdad So I got three little brothers. So my yeah, being a big brother now is crazy, bro It's sobriety is insane. This new life. This is something that I never really imagined. It's like a One thing that I realized is like whatever plans you have You're the universe has plans a thousand times better for you in store If you just if you just walk the right path and just have good intentions and do the right thing So you from you started using at 13 and you were pretty much high until you were like 27. Yeah Yeah, like brief periods, but brief periods, bro I'm not even a call it sobriety really. I was always just fucked off and using and finding some excuse to cope with life with drugs, but genuinely I will say there were a lot of times that That I started to lose hope, but I'm just so glad I kept going man. Yeah, so glad I kept going Yeah, dude while I'm glad you came out here today, man. That was a fucking that is a crazy life story for such a young man Yeah, I know glad you made it out. I appreciate it Thank you for having me on and just thank you again for giving me an opportunity to hopefully give addicts Like some hope that you know, you don't have to fucking continue to use drugs continue to go down that path There is a better way of life. Well, you will you did so Anthony. Thanks so much, man, and go check out You can reach out to people can reach out to you or they can you can give recommendations for the detox centers Yeah, the ethical detox centers exactly the ones that Los Angeles outreach And you could find me on there contact me DM me and I'll be ready to help you. That's what's up Don't find him on Craigslist. Yeah, I know why you go on Craigslist somewhere That's that fucking so crazy, man. All right you guys. We'll see you next time. Take care. He's out