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This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
And we're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
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Any new stand will provide an abundance of empirical evidence
for the Christian doctrine of original sin.
As Budler put it, I quote,
"It's impossible to glance through any newspaper
without finding the most frightful traces of human perversity."
Every newspaper is a tissue of horrors.
Wars, crimes, thefts,
luxuries, tortures,
the evil deeds of princes, of nations, of private individuals,
an orgy of universal atrocity.
In American papers like the New York Times, things get even more perverse,
with full-page ads for luxury items,
interspersed into the chronicle of human depravity.
The blank eyes of ponsi young women,
staring at you with diamonds from hellish African mines,
flashing on their fingers.
If you think this has more to do with the degradation of the modern metropolis,
than with human nature as such,
let's board a train in London and leave the city behind.
Here's Sherlock Holmes on the lovely landscapes of rural England.
It is my belief Watson founded upon my experience
that the lowest and vilest alleys in London
do not present a more dreadful record of sin,
than does the smiling and beautiful countryside.
You look at these scattered houses,
and you are impressed by their beauty.
I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me
is a feeling of their isolation,
and of the impunity with which crime may be committed there.
The impunity with which crimes are committed,
that is the devastation, this impunity for acts committed not only by criminals,
but also by those who make the laws,
abuse the laws, send nations to war,
decide on policies or perpetrate crimes against nature in the name of development.
On the American continent, which is far lonelier and vaster than the well-groomed island of England,
impunity as much greater territory at its disposal,
America has always had a problem with crime, maybe because it was born crime.
We believe in our better angels, we believe in the rule of law,
get meanwhile we have this ongoing strife between the law and its shadow,
between the sheriff and the outlaw, between sin and redemption,
and yes between punishment and impunity.
The guest who joins me in KZSU today knows a great deal about crime in America,
Scott Thomas Anderson is a journalist who has spent the last 17 years covering American crime,
the drug world, environmental threats, and the societal impacts of poverty.
He has been first and foremost a police reporter throughout that journey.
In addition to writing for the Sacramento News and Review,
Anderson is a fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism.
His work regularly appears in the San Francisco Chronicle and other publications as far a field as the Irish Independent.
Furthermore, Scott Anderson is no stranger to entitled opinions.
In 2022, he joined me in a two-part show on California writers.
Scott has also published an inspired piece about entitled opinions for the San Francisco Chronicle,
back in November 2021, and just this week he's published a second piece in the Sacramento News and Review on entitled opinions,
with the striking title, writer, podcaster Robert Harris and challenges AI, brain delusion,
the humanities deathbed, and fear and loathing with the love bots.
Check it out.
And you may also want to check out Scott's fascinating podcast series called Drinkers with Writing Problems,
and also his newest project, which is a five-part true crime podcast series called Trace of the Devastation.
That series opens the doorway to a shocking murder saga tied to his upbringing, his hometown, and his own family's past.
Both podcast series are available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify Scott. Welcome to the program.
Thank you. It's good to be back.
Yes, very good to have you back. And if it's okay with you,
I'd like to begin by asking what it's like to be a crime reporter.
You're exposed day in and day out to what Bud Leer called this tissue of horrors and the most
frightful traces of human perversity. How much does your job mess with your psyche? How much does it
keep you awake at night? Well, I can't tell you that I always sleep well at night. As we would
say in journalism, there's a couple good sources that you could talk to about that.
And it was other people around me, other people close to me. I think first started noticing that
this chronic long-term immersion in suffering and the reality of violence, and in some cases,
near unspeakable acts might be sinking into my core in some way. And that's something I didn't think
about when I was a young reporter and first going out to crime scenes and being in murder trials.
I think back then, I'd like to think that I had some amount of grit and that I could
handle anything that was in front of me. I understand now looking back that I was sort of
betting on the confidence of youth or whatever term is popular right now, toxic masculinity,
whatever, but betting on that to somehow shield me from these realities kind of clinging to my
interior life. And it doesn't really work that way. So well, the other thing is I didn't understand
what I was really writing about back then either. At that time, I thought I was writing about
individual fascinating and air quotes stories. And it's really writing a wave of these much broader forces
like unending grief and communal trauma and cases of personal disintegration. In those forces
are what people want to know about on some level, hence my job, but I've also found on another level,
they don't always really want to know. So I think my approach to crime reporting has evolved
a lot over the last 17 years as I've come to understand some of these things.
So you've been doing it for 17 years and you've had a number of connections to crime in your
own past. No, before you became a crime reporter, we'll talk about that shortly in our show when you
kind of yielded the fruit of your most recent podcast series on the trace of devastation. It's
about a serial murders and so forth. But let me inform our listeners that between May 2010 and
October 2011, you spent 18 months as an embedded reporter with California law enforcement agencies,
right? Yes, you were partnering with officers on night patrols, accompanying detectives on
warrant searches and probation sweeps, observing SWAT operations and spending hundreds of hours
with attorneys and victims advocates in small town courtroom. So during this time, you travel,
you know, it's a different rural communities across the United States. And the result was your
nonfiction book shadow people how meth driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America.
Can you tell us what that experience was all about in granular detail, if you don't mind?
Well, and why this book that you published about it was was such a, I don't know,
sensation is the right word, but it certainly got on a lot of people's radar.
It looking back, it's so strange in retrospect. So I was the first five years I was a crime reporter.
I was covering the California central gold country, specifically Amador and Calaveras counties,
which was where I grew up. I grew up on the river border of those two counties. And I covered
both in my first five years as a crime reporter. And I just happened to be working for 160 year
old legacy newspaper, gold rush era newspaper that had a publisher who did something a lot of
publishers would not have done for newspaper that size. And he basically funded a full time crime
desk. He saw that there was a lot of interest in those kind of stories and that kind of coverage.
And we had a meth epidemic that was destroying the community at that time. So between those two things,
he allowed me to be a full time rural crime reporter, which I think is rare. I think it's really rare.
And the reason I think that is a few years in, I was able to fly to Washington, DC, sit down with
a bunch of funders at a think tank and convince them to fund this national project on how
meth addiction drives crimes against the innocent and crimes against other people in rural communities
all over the country. And I have to say, when I had this meeting with them, I was competing against
journalists from much, much bigger newspapers, much better known publications. It's orders of magnitude.
No one had heard of me outside of three counties in Northern California. No one had ever heard of me.
They knew nothing about me when at whether I was any good or not. But because I had been living in
courtrooms in Amador in Calaveras County, I was able to tell a really detailed, I think compelling
story to these funders about the shock and awe that this meth epidemic had brought to a once
bucolic and fairly peaceful place. And these communities were on the verge of dying in a lot
of respects, not just from the meth, but also boom and bust economies and the hollowing out of
rural America's livability. But I mean, all of that together, they decided to fund this project. And
again, I somehow beat out all these reporters from much, much bigger newspapers to get that grant.
Even more surprising thing in retrospect, when I today in 2024, when I tell other journalist
or cops that I was allowed to be embedded with law enforcement for 18 months,
it's almost impossible to believe now that I was even ever allowed to do it. And it would never be
allowed to happen today. Like that project couldn't be done today. And why is that? I think there's just
too much distrust between generally speaking, I think there's too much distrust between law enforcement
and journalists, even though, you know, someone like me has a really long track record and a
certain professional reputation, I just don't believe anybody would ever allow that project to happen
now. And it's worth mentioning it was rare even then in the sense that I think I'm one of
only two reporters and in generations that's done it. I know David Simon did it. I think in 1989
in Baltimore. And then I did it between 2010 and 2012 in Northern California. I don't,
I could be wrong, but I don't know of any other reporter that's done it, but besides the two,
was there a specific base for, yeah, you're embedding over the place? Well, I was on a rotation
between seven different law enforcement agencies located in five different counties. And part of the
rotation was just so I could see different neighborhoods, different areas through the prism of
mostly nighttime patrols being in cars during nighttime patrols for the entire shift is if I was,
you know, just the officer's partner. And that was one of the ideas, but also I didn't want any of
these folks to just get tired of me being all around all the time. So on a rotation,
they wouldn't just get sick of me every night, you know, being there. But over the course of 18 months,
I feel like I just became part of the furniture for their lives. You know, there were a lot of times,
I think they even forgot I was there other than as, you know, we're different tribes, but I mean,
we were pretty close for a while. You got to know some of them very well. Yeah, very well.
So there's a lot of controversy surrounding law enforcement and officers. How many
cops are what we call the bad cops as opposed to the ones that do the quiet, unsung work of coming to
the rescue of people in danger or in severe need. Yeah. Yeah, this is a conversation. I have a lot
of difficulty with sometimes with my colleagues because I just come from a totally different
perspective based on that time being embedded with them. I did over a thousand hours of ride
a long time for that first book. And then I later did 500 more hours for my second book. So
to answer your question. And you know, of course journalism is about being a civic alarm system.
So I'm not going to be an apologist for bad policing when it's real or those instances when
recklessness and terrible tactics lead to tragedy. Those things are real. Those things happen.
But I think people in my profession in the last six or seven years have will fully misled the public,
at least where I work in California, will fully misled the public on what the nature of law
enforcement really is. Now, look, when I was in those patrol cars at night going out to scenes,
going out to domestic violence calls, going out to child abuse calls, going out to runaway calls.
The officers that were bright and careful and committed, I knew them for what they were and the much,
much smaller number of officers who were lazy and not in the right frame of mind and dead weight
on their departments. I knew them for what they were too. And I can sit here and tell you that
there's a lot more cerebral, least stunted and mediocre journalists than there are bad cops.
That's just how I would explain it. The job is so difficult. People have no idea. They have no
idea if they haven't seen it in real time. It's just walking into one volatile situation after another
where there's silence and then the roar of chaos. And that's your life on a daily or nightly basis.
And you have to make these life and death decisions and a split second in some cases. And most of
the time, thanks to better training and better tactics and better experience and better equipment.
And also some of the things through the reform advocates have brought to it like body cams with all
of those pieces of the puzzle. A lot of times those situations will split second decisions end up
being the right ones most of the time. But journalists cherry pick the most extreme examples.
They don't share the actual statistics. And they just paint this narrative. And that's just kind
of how it's been less six or seven years. And there's such a disproportionate in, let's say, media
power, journalists have the word. And therefore they have the attention of the public.
Yeah. And the police do their job, but without having any kind of microphone to communicate about that.
Yeah. So it really depends a lot on honest journalism to be a crime reporter, I would imagine.
I think most of them, and this goes for the prosecutors and the defense attorneys as well and the
judges, most of everybody working in the criminal justice system, especially the police and deputy
sheriffs and probation officers, parole officers, but everyone working in that system. My experience is
most of them just want bear and accurate reporting. If you can go above and beyond that and do
really in depth reporting and get into the very complex mechanisms of the criminal justice system
and the complex mechanisms of a very challenging homicide investigation, if you can do that
even better, they love that. But most of them are not trying to be lionized or turned into public
heroes or community heroes. Most of them just want fair and accurate reporting and and not lazy
reporting. Just the same way we don't want lazy service from law enforcement. They don't want lazy
reporting. It's these 18 months. What was your activity where you're just sitting in the backseat
and observing where you're taking notes, taking notes, taking pictures, I always wore a press badge
always, but you'd be shocked how many people who were getting arrested didn't read it. They looked at
it and then assumed I was either law enforcement or maybe a health inspector or somebody from the county
and there was just a lot of the folks that were getting arrested would just talk to me as if I was
one of the officers just in conversation. And then if I actually really wanted to interview one of
them, then I would make sure they knew or the officer would make sure they knew that this is a
journalist. He's writing about he's writing a big project on meth. And that's why he's here. You
don't have to talk to him if you don't want to. And the vast majority of them would talk to me,
the vast majority. I can only remember a couple instances when somebody didn't want to talk,
which is fine. But what did they want to talk about? I just want to know about their lives,
what was going on. In some cases, I'd be asking about what's happening on the street,
you know, depending on what the dynamics of their neighborhood were and how the the meth trade was
unfolding in their neighborhood. And none of them are going to, you know, give people up to the officers or a
journalist because that's called snitching in their world. And it's sort of the ultimate sin. But
just if you're trying to have a conversation with them about what is the rhythm of things,
what's it like out here, what's your experience? It's almost like asking anybody else at their job,
do you like your job or not? What's hard about your job? What's not hard about your job? It's up for me.
It's it's meth dealers. And on cases where we show up and one of these people had done something
horrible, like oftentimes just, you know, beat the living hell out of their girlfriend or wife
or whatever. I'm not interested in talking to that person. They can put the bracelets on him,
throw them in the backseat, good renance. But a lot of cases people were getting arrested for
trafficking meth and substantial quantities. And yeah, I would try to have conversations with them.
And that was really helpful, really helpful.
It's most of the crime surrounding meth due to the traffickers or to people who were under the
influence of it. Well, it's both people who are under the influence of meth sometimes
experience what's called meth psychosis. This often happens if they haven't slept for days
and they haven't been eating. It's not uncommon to find these folks have, you know,
been up for a week and putting nothing but methamphetamine and diet Coke in their body. And they
may be just to begin to hallucinate. And they can be really, really dangerous if they reach that
state of mind because they're having a full, basically psychotic breakdown and they're experiencing
all forms of delusion. And it can make an otherwise not violent person extremely violent.
So I mean, people in a state of meth psychosis, I've seen everything from a father,
stabbing his baby daughter to death with a pair of scissors because he was hallucinating to people
just going crazy in public settings and just attacking random civilians and, you know, trying to
rip their hair out. I mean, it's nuts. What it can do is somebody reaches that state of mind. Now,
most meth addicts are not like that. When most meth addicts, when you encounter, you know, they might
be really, really tired or really, really spun and hyper, but they're not violent.
Meth psychosis is like a terminus point you get sometimes when you've been doing too much of it for
too long without sleeping. So the other ways that drives crime is, okay, so we have gang dynamics,
gang cell drugs. They sell methamphetamine. They sell cocaine. They sell heroin. They sell fentanyl.
And in Sacramento, where I work now, some of our gang warfare is over the drug trade,
but much more common in my experience is people they get amped on meth. They allow personal
beefs with each other to escalate and then, you know, some insane act of violence will occur.
A lot of meth murders I've covered over the years are they're not random at all. They're often
deeply personal, family member, a best friend, spouse. So, you know, again, there's all these
different ways the drug can make people dangerous, but it feels crime, it feels violent crime
through the drug trade and gang warfare in the drug trade. And that can be everything from
motorcycle gangs to your, your traditional bloods, crib gangs, your traditional
nortennial, sereno gangs. So all these gangs have like unbreland network. So, and then separate from
that. But I mean, the whole point of my book was just to talk about the crimes nobody ever thinks
about with meth. Because to me, the real story of meth in America is a story of child abuse,
child neglect, domestic violence, elder abuse, rampant, uncontrollable amounts of property crime that
just began to degrade a community in a neighborhood because it just whittles away your quality of
life when there's constant property crime and it never stops. So, does the dominant drug always
get worse and worse? Because meth came on the scene and before that what we were in a regime of
cocaine and crack. And now there's opioids, it's the meth epidemic still. There's parallel epidemics now
about 2014, as I remember in my own professional experience, we started seeing heroin swing up
again. heroin has ebbed and flowed in its popular use in American history. But in around 2014,
we saw a massive spike in heroin and opioid use. And that started causing a lot of deaths. And then
it's morphed into the fentanyl epidemic, which is causing death on a scale that I've never seen in
my whole career in terms of overdoses. Is it equally criminal? I mean, does it engender the same
amount of criminality or less? I would imagine less just because it's a downer rather than that.
The way I would think about this is in the media is really fixated on heroin, opioids, and fentanyl
right now for a good reason. It's causing so much death. It's causing so many private family
tragedies. It's causing so much pain. That's so you have that on one burner and on the other
burner, you have the fact that there's more meth use, I think than ever. And that's fueling just
a ton of property crime. And in some cases, a ton of violent crime. Meth is so cheap and so easy to
get. And it's so ubiquitous. It's everywhere that where I work, meth's all through the homeless
camps, meth is, you know, snuck into jail and prison facilities, meth is, there's meth houses,
which is the main place people use it. And then they go out and burglarize everybody else in their
neighborhood. And they do identity theft, you know, the steel mail and try to do identity theft. There's
huge identity theft rings that are all based on meth use it, getting more meth, buying more meth,
selling meth. So yeah, they're sort of parallel epidemics. They affect society in different ways.
I can't say I'll let the listener decide if they think one's worse than the other.
In 18 must, were you getting at all demoralized about the fact that every day was like the same
old story with the cops going to do their cleanups, but that nothing is changing, that there's an
essential impotence to law enforcement when it comes to drug use and that you just have to get
used to it. Yeah, living with a certain quotient of this every day, despite all the best and hero
efforts of the peace officers. Yeah, and the victims advocates and the substance abuse treatment
specialists and, you know, the various rehabilitative experts that work in parole and probation,
there's a lot of folks that are on this front line. The faith community and a lot of these towns
are part of trying to stop it to answer your question. I would never use nor endorse the term
war on drugs after what I did and saw and wrote about. I think the justice reform advocates are
right to find that term, a term of lunacy basically, wars are fought in one by force of arms.
Addiction is a cancer of the human spirit. One is not going to beat the other. So now that doesn't
mean I think you can do full on legalization of hard drugs, you know, so to speak, Portland has
experimented with that. And there was just a report from the New York Times last week that huge
by polling huge amounts of citizens regret it because the way it was described by that New York
Times reporter, certain parts of Portland are a hellscape. I would encourage your listeners to go
check that reporting out. So while I don't think the war on drugs is a real meaningful thing and I
think that mentality that we had in the 80s and early 90s that we had a war on drugs was really
destructive. And it caused a lot of unnecessary harm to a lot of neighborhoods and communities
in certain specifically in certain cities. But I also think you, the way law enforcement
factors into it is and the the more intellectual officers know this, they know it's not a war because
they know if it if it was a war, they would be losing. So most of them don't think about it like that.
It's crime containment. These addictions cause a certain amount of crime that affect other people
and the best they can hope for on their best day with whatever resources they have at their disposal
is to keep that crime as contained as possible and stop it from affecting as many people as they can.
But yeah, you can't stop it completely until we figure out some way to address our failures
at treating addiction in this country.
Forgive my naive table. What is the difference between meth and speed? Speed's just another word
for meth because speed's been around a long time. Most people when they say speed, they mean
amphetamines and pill forms. So when I hear the term speed, you know, mostly I hear that in
occupational settings, restaurants, truck driving, you'll hear people that are taking amphetamines
referred to it as speed usually means they're taking pills. Whereas if somebody says math or
other so many names for math, but crank is another one that's been used forever.
Dope. Like when people in the drug world say dope, they're not talking about marijuana. Dope is
math. But so I know that you haven't watched breaking bad. I asked you about that because this
breaking bad came out during this period, essentially, when you were embedded and when your book came
out and it brought a lot of attention to with the at least a drug trafficking aspect of the
epidemic. And of course there you have the story of some chemistry teacher who found a way to
produce this super pure kind of meth that was much in demand. But if it's meth is just another
word for speed and it's that cheap, it's at all realistic that there would be huge sorts of
cartel wars over this purest form of meth and the crystal of it and so forth. Well, most meth is
I started writing shadow people right as the era of what we call the mom and pop meth cooks,
the kitchen sink meth cooks. Like they were in their twilight when I started writing shadow people.
I started writing in 2010 and what had happened is 2006 and 2007, we passed all these new federal
regulations on a federal, which is a key precursor to making meth and federal mean and became very
difficult for your average person to cook meth at that point. There was still a way to do it if they
did what's called smurfing where they got a bunch of people to go out and get small amounts of
a federal and bring it back and then they would have enough to cook some batches. It wasn't
efficient way to make meth and it would really only be for somebody to keep their status as a
meth cook to do it because you wouldn't be making enough to really sell to people and pay for your
time and investment in that. So what happened was the Mexican drug cartels took over the meth trade
and they can make mountains of the stuff in Mexico. They have access to as much of
veterans they want. They even have made meth with the old original precursor, which was propone
known, drug that's almost impossible to get now. So they've made meth different ways,
but they make a ton of it and they trafficked it all through the United States and we found
meth shipments, huge meth shipments from the cartels and the most rural places I've ever been to
in my career, such as Forsyth Montana, which I went to when I was working on shadow people.
There was pounds and pounds of cartel meth intercepted in that town and that's a town that's
you know, 100 miles from anything in eastern Montana. So when we passed all those regulations, it in
one respect, it did what was intended and that was to knock out all these really corrosive and
toxic and polluting meth labs that are horrific for the environment and a community and so it did
that, but it also brought it also gave the Mexican drug cartels a stake in parts of the United
States that they didn't traditionally have trafficking patterns in. That makes sense.
Yeah, it does make sense. You said that meth opiates it that they're like a cancer of the
spirit of the spirit, but that spirit perhaps has to have been demoralized, greatly demoralized through
economic conditions. And as you said, you know, the hollowing out of a lot of rural areas in America
and this great demoralization, which is really behind the Donald Trump phenomenon to a great extent.
And I think that on the coasts, we tend to downplay the extent of the devastation of rural America
in terms of the spirit of it, because I don't think that you would get an epidemic of a drug like that
if the communities themselves were healthier, the economies, you know, less corrosive of people's
sense of their own dignity being compromised through the loss of jobs and of incomes and so forth.
Yeah, when Trump was elected that night, I was surprised. But when I went to work the next day,
my colleagues were in a state of utter shock and disbelief, almost like an out of body experience,
and by that time, I was starting to at least see what he had capitalized on because I'd been to
places like Sterling, Illinois, and I'd seen the rust belt apocalypse up close. And when you see
the condition of these towns, then you can understand how we have what I call cultures of hopelessness
and cultures of hopelessness, they breed violence, they breed addiction, they breed tragedy.
And so obviously, I travel to a lot of rural communities all over the US. And one thing a lot of
them had in common is they were struggling for sustainability, they could not keep their young people,
they had essentially a brain drain of young people who, in many cases, wanted to stay,
but just could not make a living. There were no jobs, even in the traditional industries that
sustain those places like ranching and farming and things like that. So these communities are
almost feeling like they don't have a future. And so in context of that, it's not surprising that
many people in those communities want to self evaporate on some level. And the same is true in
urban settings, because now I work in the capital of California, the capital city. And we have
neighborhoods there that were subject to redlining and intentional forms of economic racial
segregation over generations. And they've felt the punishing effects of that. And they're dealing
with that same kind of hopelessness in those neighborhoods. And they have these gang problems.
And most people in a neighborhood with gang problems have nothing to do with the gangs. And they
just want to be safe like anybody else. And so imagine the amount of stress they live with
when violence, serious violence, serious gunfights could just erupt at any moment in their parks
in front of their businesses, in front of their barber shops, in front of their stores.
You know, imagine the kind of stress that causes. And I think a lot of this has to do with a certain
aggravated form of capitalism,
and they can go in there and in my intro, I spoke about different kinds of crime. And sometimes
the crime is part of the law perpetrated by the forces of law or by policy makers. And there are
ways in which the impunity that I was speaking about applies to institutional forms that are
completely indiscriminate when it comes to, if not, directly engendering this kind of culture of hopelessness,
then being complicit with it through decisions that are made far away in governmental administrations
that deal in abstractions rather than with concrete realities.
And they deal in political wind because I've talked to reporters that have been doing this
longer than me. And I've talked to law enforcement officers who have been, you know, doing this,
you know, in some cases since the 70s or before that. And one thing you get is this picture of,
let's just say there's a pot of money to work on all the addiction and crime that comes with it.
You know, just think of that pot being slid on to one side of the table for a while,
which is law enforcement. And then the whole pot gets slid to the other side of the table,
which is treatment and intervention. And then after a while, crime goes way up. Everyone gets
pissed and starts screaming at their elected representatives. They slide the whole pot back over
to law enforcement. It's happening here in the Bay Area. Right. And so you need both, you need
both. You need that crime containment from law enforcement. So your community can have safety and
some kind of quality of life. But you also need, you also need a lot of investment in treatment
specialists and criminal rehabilitation, youth programs in some of these neighborhoods that are
where poverty is just destroying everybody. Youth programs not only can keep those young people
from going down the path of addiction, they can keep them from going down the path of gangs.
You know, I mentioned there was another journalist writer who wasn't better with law enforcement
long before me. That was David Simon. I believe he has said that the American drug trade is essentially
a form, an inverted form of capitalism. And so when someone can see a ladder down the road,
but they're not allowed to climb up that ladder, if you offer them a different ladder,
it's hard not to take. No, I couldn't agree more. I think that there are a lot of criminals
on boards of companies. And the politicians whom they buy off, and I'm willing to believe that
they're not even aware necessarily of the crimes that they are at the origin of. Well, or if not as
individual, certainly the system that the economic system that they operate within and of which
they are the beneficiaries randomly, luckily the beneficiaries of it. Well, of course,
in contact with justice reform advocates all the time. And they, you know, they talk about
this different tiered, these different tiers of justice system in America. And they're right in the
sense that there's absolutely different tiers of justice for different Americans. I think it's
class and economic base because I mean, the fact that the Sackler family is not in prison right now
is what I would point to. Can you tell us who that family is? They are the family that
according to civil court findings and multiple investigations from attorney general offices in
multiple states. They're largely responsible for the opioid epidemic. They intentionally marketed
opioids incorrectly when they had data knowing that they shouldn't. And that they misled doctors,
they misled health professionals and about the dangers of these drugs. And they let this
grim reaper of death out of the bottle that nobody's been able to put back in. And, you know,
there's been multi million dollar, maybe more. I would have to go back and look, but multi
hundreds of billions of billions of dollars that they've been found liable for all these deaths.
And they have these civil judgments against them that were pushed by state attorney general
offices for all this death they caused. But an ordinary person, if you are accidentally killed someone
in our car who's on a bicycle and we could be stoned cold sober if we were driving recklessly,
we're going to prison for a little while. But you can turn around and be responsible for a
quarter of a million deaths. But if you're rich, you don't. I mean, like that's what I would point.
Yeah. Right. Well, Scott, it's on the one hand, fascinating on the other hand, you know, again,
sobering, you know, talk about this because we live in a country that somehow does have crime
inscribed in this DNA in a way that makes it almost impossible to imagine an America, which isn't
always fighting with itself over this kind of schizophrenia between the outlaw and the in law.
Let's want to put it in those terms. But as we wind down, I want to read what I think are
two really eloquent paragraphs that conclude your book of shadow people from your epilogue.
If you don't mind, can I share that with our listeners? So here you write on April 18, 1945,
war journalist Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese machine gunners when he was embedded with US
troops in Okinawa. It was the closing days of World War II and Germany had just surrendered
inside the dead reporter's pocket was his last newspaper column, which focused largely on the American
troops he had spent more than two years embedded with in Italy as they fought the German war machine.
Quote, "Now I am as far away from it as possible, but my heart is still in Europe,
and that is why I am writing this column. It is to the boys who were my friends for so long.
My one regret of the war is that I was not with them when it ended." And quote, and then you go on
to say, "For the peace officers I mentioned, the police officers that you talk about in your book,
it never ends. And my one regret is that I won't be with them to see the future victories
like arresting a violent fugitive, stalking through a peaceful county, neighborhood,
or snapping a pair of handcuffs on a so-called man whose pummeled his girlfriend's face to
sickening colors or carrying a small, underfed child who's covered in dirt and flea bites
out of a meth house. Finite victories, silent victories, anonymous and mostly forgotten victories,
but victories nonetheless."
Yeah, I wrote that in Washington, DC, as the project was ending, and I had this realization that
I wasn't going to be out there with them anymore. I am in this other tribe, and it was time for me
to go do my job and do the job that they all expected me to do. But it was hard to imagine
at that time in my life, them walking into all these shadows and threats that they go into all the
time and not being there anymore. We've been speaking with Scott Anderson here on entitled
"Openian." Scott is the author of "Shadow People," it's a book that we've been discussing at length
here today. I want to mention also the title of your other book. Those 500 hours you spent in another
project, that's a book called "The Cutting Four Piece," "Cribe and Tragedy in an Era of Prison Over
Crowding." Also, the two podcast series that I mentioned at the beginning, one is called "Drinkers
with Writing Problems." The other is called "Trace of the Devastation," and finally,
the two parts show that Scott and I did on California writers a couple of years ago.
Scott, thanks for coming on in title opinions. It's been a very moving conversation, and glad you could make it.
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