Meth, Fentanyl, and the Power of Hard Work Without Fanfare

00:00:24
Speaker 1: In today's episode of two Percent, I am speaking with Sam ki Yonas. Sam as a journalist and author. He is probably best known for his work covering drug addiction, the opioid and meth epidemics, and the unraveling of American communities. But he recently got a bit burnt out on all that sort of negative, depressing stuff and he started looking for people finding fulfillment through hard work that doesn't offer a quick reward, a quick payoff, money, or fame. And he found it in the Tuba, of all places. So I wanted to speak to Sam because his books, I think are a big metaphor for this modern world we live in where we can get all these rewarding things quickly, cheaply, but they often heard us in the long run.

00:01:09
Speaker 2: Sam, Welcome to the show.

00:01:11
Speaker 3: Michael, great to be with you.

00:01:12
Speaker 4: Thank you so much for having me on and for your support of the Tuba book.

00:01:17
Speaker 3: I really appreciate it.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: How did you start reporting on drugs?

00:01:21
Speaker 4: Well, it really it's a strange thing, but I mean I lived in Mexico for ten years.

00:01:27
Speaker 3: I was a reporter down there.

00:01:28
Speaker 4: My first two books were about Mexico, so my job was really to go out into the provinces to the states far away, the Mexican villages and stuff where particular, they began to focus on immigration. And then I came back to work for the La Times in two thousand and four, and it was a year after that that the Savage drug War kicked off. But I was really writing about immigration because I thought that was most important story, really much more important than drugs at that time. And I also didn't want to write about drugs because it was very dangerous.

00:02:00
Speaker 3: I didn't have anybody backing me up.

00:02:02
Speaker 4: So when I was at the La Times and I had people back me up, began to write about this. And at one point I remember a woman, a DEA agent, supervising agent in Phoenix, told me, we are now seeing this would have been two thousand and eight.

00:02:18
Speaker 3: Or nine, I think nine.

00:02:22
Speaker 4: We are now seeing huge amounts, new amounts of heroin. We're seizing new amounts of we haven't seized these quantities of heroin in thirty years.

00:02:30
Speaker 3: And I'm like, Wow, that's wild. Who would be using heroin again? And why you know?

00:02:34
Speaker 4: And that's really what got me into my first book, Dreamland, about the opioid epidemic, because what I learned along the way was the reason why we had so much addiction to heroin was because of this brand new revolution really in pain management in American medicine that said you now should use almost unrestricted amounts of opioid painkillers, narcotic pain prescription painkillers in a way that medicine.

00:03:09
Speaker 3: Never ever used before.

00:03:12
Speaker 4: And also seemed to me that no one had written in a comprehensive way about the opioid epidemic at the time and how addiction to these pain pills, which include opioid painkillers, would then lead to heroin, which is another opioid drug.

00:03:31
Speaker 1: You know, beyond the fact that we had this sort of revolution and how pain was treated in the US, do you feel like there were underlying cultural conditions in the US at the time that made people want to do drugs in the first place.

00:03:47
Speaker 3: Yes, answer your question.

00:03:49
Speaker 4: One is the most basic was a kind of a shredding of community that did that had been happening probably since the eighties, but really kind of accelerat and that is uh. And and this was in rich areas and poor areas and middle class it didn't it didn't really matter. It's kind of pretty much across the board in the United States, where you had all these people, all Americans, just got gradually got used to not being with each other in one way or another. And this was a gradual thing, took some time, but we stopped investing in things that brought us together cost too much tax money. Uh. In some areas, job loss and disintegration of a community. People atomized that way. But whatever it was, we became a far more lonely isolated country. One of the symptoms then was a drug drug addiction. However, I would say also we were watching the development of a of a corporate economy of isolating an addictive products and services. Of course, junk food and all of that is number one. Starts with that, I think probably sodas and all that kind of stuff. But by the time I was writing Dreamland, and then certainly by the time I wrote my next book about this topic, The Least of Us, you began to see smartphone media and apps and the very toxic algorithms that seem to be almost diabolical sometimes honestly to me. You began to see a widespread addiction to pornography, to video games. Most recently obviously it's gambling apps, and the transformation of the gambling industry you wrote about in the Scarcity Brain. And then on top of that you add massive prescribing of the most addictive drugs.

00:05:47
Speaker 3: Known to the human species, which are opioids.

00:05:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, you need a population.

00:05:53
Speaker 1: There needs to be some underlying problem or discomfort that the substance temporarily fixes. Right, it provides some sort of comfort, whatever it might be. If if the society has no problems, you're probably not going to have as much of an addiction problem. But if there's also not that supply, then there's nothing fueling that. So it's like this this collision of these two things.

00:06:18
Speaker 4: Yes, I think also if you if you allow economic forces, meaning corporations and whoever free reign to do all that, then you are you are you know, you're going to pay a significant price. I would say that we did not learn our lesson, and we have legalized marijuana in a in a way that kind of almost replicates the opioid epidemic.

00:06:44
Speaker 3: Now, marijuana should be.

00:06:45
Speaker 4: Legal, but there are ways of legalizing it. The details are the thing, you know, Devils in the details and all this, and and so we we have we have not been good at standing in the way of people who want to make money.

00:06:57
Speaker 3: It's almost like almost in our cultural to.

00:07:00
Speaker 4: Say, oh you want to make money, create jobs, Oh go go for it. You know, no matter what damage that that activity it may actually be creating.

00:07:08
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:07:09
Speaker 1: And in the In the Least of Us you write about how the drug industry changes in a way where things become faster, stronger, easier to make. It almost becomes drugs used to have to be grown in fields and processed, and then it goes into this sort of more lab based that really accelerates things.

00:07:33
Speaker 2: So tell us about that a little bit.

00:07:36
Speaker 4: Mexicans figured out the Mexican trafficking world in particular is very sophisticated, very deeply very uh uh you know, wide, and have kind of like a lot of division of labor and been going for for a number of years.

00:07:49
Speaker 3: Figured out that there was this new market.

00:07:51
Speaker 4: Before that, trafficers in Mexico never wanted to deal heroine ever, it.

00:07:57
Speaker 3: Was the scuzziest drug.

00:07:58
Speaker 4: Nobody liked heroine and they want to do cocaine and that kind of thing. But now they figured out own there's this new heroin market out there and they began to supply that. The guys that I wrote about is from this one little village were pretty quickly, well within a within about ten years, overwhelmed by the big cartels.

00:08:15
Speaker 3: And you know.

00:08:16
Speaker 4: That's a whole other long story, but but but basically you saw that that that transition happened all of a sudden, Wow, heroin, we got to.

00:08:24
Speaker 3: Get into that.

00:08:25
Speaker 4: Along the way, uh, they discover that that there is actually a synthetic way of making a very very powerful opioid, which is known as funnannel. They don't really know what that's that's what it's called. When they discover it. They think it's called eroina synthetico, which is what they call it. But they figure out that the and and they have already figured out through the production of metham fetament, that is far more profitable and far less risky to make your own drugs with chemicals rather than.

00:09:00
Speaker 3: Grow them.

00:09:01
Speaker 4: They're like, oh wow, we don't have to harvest poppies grow poppies, and oh great, this is better. They begin to shift and so what you begin to see. Really it takes a few years, but by the twenty thirteen fourteen fifteen, you see the entire United States become inundated. Gradually over the next six five, six, seven years with two synthetic drugs, which is still the case. Fentanyl may again no plants involved in either one of these. And then methem fetament, which they figure out ways to make that are and the potent that the real thing is. The supplies are massive, they cover the country and also highly highly potent. Fentanyl has always been way more potent heroin, and any form of fentinal you provide is going to be way far far more more potent and very very dangerous.

00:09:51
Speaker 3: Methum fetament becomes.

00:09:53
Speaker 4: More and more potent because they are able to control the amount of the chemicals they get in through the ports.

00:10:00
Speaker 3: Now that's all you care about. Can we get access to the.

00:10:02
Speaker 4: World, come local markets through the shipping ports China principally great, okay.

00:10:07
Speaker 3: And they begin to make.

00:10:08
Speaker 4: Quantities of metham fetament that we have never seen. They run out of business, all those little meth cooks across the United States and they take over the entire market, and they cover the country and drop the price by ninety percent and reached levels of purity and potency and metham fetament that the drug has had never equalled.

00:10:30
Speaker 1: And it feels to me, I mean from anecdotes and you've written about this that with the potency rising, so do the effects on a person's life. So I have friends that were meth addicts, and you know, they've done it for years, and it was something they often started because they had a job that had crazy hours, demanding hours. So they're a truck driver there, you know, graveyard shift worker, and they would do math. You know, they knew it wasn't good for them, but they're going, well, it helps me work more than I can earn an income. And yeah, there's some repercussions, but okay, and then when you see this shift to this new form of math, they wind up with mes psychosis, living on the streets for a handful of years. They're like, there was this moment where you just started. That started happening, happening to everyone, and even getting off of it was harder.

00:11:21
Speaker 2: What did you what did you hear about that?

00:11:23
Speaker 4: Well, that was in two thousand and eight and nine is when that really happened. And before that, the meth the myth that they made in Mexico, the myth they learned to make meth on used a chemical known as a federan, which is a decongestant. You find it in suda fed pil dey congestant pills. It's why you can't after a while, you couldn't just go into a Costco or a Walgreens and get suit of fed pills. You had to sign your life away and all that because meth dealers would take those pills. It was very laborious, not terribly efficient, and distill those pills down into a vegerant, and from a veterant, combined with other chemicals, they would make metham futtament. Down in Mexico, they gotten effan from the pharmaceutical industry that was diverted. It was really headed to the pharmaceutical companies in Mexico. In some portion of that went to the trafficking world. And then in two thousand and eight the Mexican government really restricted effteran importations. The trafficking world shifted to this new it's not a new method, it's an old method, but it was new to them, a method of making metham fetament that evolved chemical. The principal precursor was no longer a fteran. It was a chemical called phenal to propein oonne P two P. Just the P two P method is how it's basically known. And this method was not a great way of making metham fetterm. It was smelly, and it tended to explode more easily than the Federan method. However, it did have one benefit, and that was you could make P two P many different ways with different combinations of legal, toxic, cheap.

00:12:57
Speaker 3: Very liberally easily available chemicals.

00:13:00
Speaker 4: That meant that the government could not easily crack down on your production the way it did with a federant and so you could shift. If the government cracked down on this method of making PTP, you could shift to this and to that. There's probably twenty thirty ways of making PTP, according to chemists I talked to with the DEEA. So they shifted, and that shift really began in two thousand and nine. And this is the time when you begin to see the first cases of the people you're referring to. I've met few like that as well, where I was a Matthewser and then all of a sudden and it was a party drug. It was like I was everybody's best friend and yak and away all night, and then all of a sudden, it was sinister, and I was seeing demons coming out of there, and I was talking to people who weren't there, and this began to happen as that myth exploded in quantity, and so many, many, many people in New Mexico got into it.

00:13:53
Speaker 3: The chemicals were never ending, almost.

00:13:55
Speaker 4: Limitless quantities of metham fetament, and they came in and people began to make it Mexico, and it just marched across the country. And you see again the price drop, the potency rise. But as you say, you also began to see this transformation of you know, a huge rise in mental illness, huge rise in homelessness.

00:14:16
Speaker 3: To me, this was the remarkable idea.

00:14:18
Speaker 4: I started the least of us thinking I'm going to write about how these guys have been able to produce so much metham fetament.

00:14:25
Speaker 3: That they cover the country and drop the price.

00:14:28
Speaker 4: And then along the way, towards the end of the manuscript, about to finish it, maybe three four months from finishing it, I came upon this other element, which was that it's not only doing that, it's also creating rapid descent into essentially symptoms of schizophrenia so much that people in doctors and nurses and eers cannot tell when you come in if you were an organically schizophrenic, or you are a meth induced schizophrenic. But it began to happen all over the country, and and doing my research then, but then after the book came out too, I continue, it's clear that it is happening all over the country.

00:15:07
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it feels like there's this ingredient of more, faster, stronger, cheaper, And to me, that is almost a metaphor for our times and all these other behaviors substances that people overdo that provide some sort of short term relief but get them in trouble in the long run. I mean, we'll use gambling as an example here. Right, it's I live in Las Vegas. If you lived in the country and you wanted to gamble, you had to get your butt on a plane and you had to fly to Las Vegas. You had to go into the casino to make that sports bet, and then you had to sit and wait for the game to finish three hours and you go, okay, I won or I lost, and then you go back to Des Moines or wherever the hell it was. Today though, to continue this example, sports betting has been spread across the country. It's now in phones, so you don't have to do the physical act of going somewhere. And even the speed of betting has increased in the sense that sports betting places, they start to go, oh well, a game takes three hours. That's a lot of time between when people are making bets. What if we just did oh well, now you can bet on like will this guy make the next shot? What will the score be at the end of this quarter? And so it's just this rapid, more faster, stronger and cheaper. And I feel like that extends to so many different areas. Where do you see this and how do you see this affecting us?

00:16:33
Speaker 4: It's really part of what we are seeing that I was talking about earlier, which is simply the ultra processesation.

00:16:41
Speaker 3: That's a bad term.

00:16:42
Speaker 4: I got to figure out on another one, but it's ultra processing of supply. You know, you are constantly being prodded.

00:16:49
Speaker 3: To be distracted, which we naturally we.

00:16:52
Speaker 4: Evolved to do because if you're not distracted until you get eaten, you get killed, right, you know, back millions of years ago whatever, and so gambling new gambling apps or absolutely that. But then you also get pornography. So no longer do you have to be in a movie theater, you know, dared to be to feel the shame of people watching go into the movie theater. And now you can constantly watch the most graphic stuff. And we see it with marijuana too. So now marijuana that used to be like seven percent, three percent whatever THC it was back thirty years ago. Now it's ultra processed into THC. Evapes and wax and can and gummies and all of these things, all with the idea of massive hits, immediate, immediate, immediate, all of this kind of thing. There is an entire segment of our economy. I think, as I was saying earlier, it just seems to me to be devoted to creating the tendency, not creating drug addicts, but creating the tendency for addiction necessary.

00:18:00
Speaker 3: You know.

00:18:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, So The Least of Us has this subtitle True Tales of America and Hope in the time of fentanyl and meth.

00:18:10
Speaker 2: So the word hope, why hope?

00:18:14
Speaker 4: Part of this was really about me trying to tell stories of people as bulwarks against what we were just discussing, this whole you know, processed version of of consumer and goods and services to make them more addictive. And the way I wanted I thought was important to highlight was that people were working in very small ways, nothing magical or big, solving all our problems. It just solve this one issue in your neighborhood, or you know, do something with this old parking lot and turn it into a baseball field, you know that kind of thing. It's small steps together with other people together that take a time to do.

00:18:57
Speaker 3: It's not overnight, it is in no way overnight.

00:19:00
Speaker 4: And and and that this is the way you come to true social change, without without the unintended consequences that rapid.

00:19:11
Speaker 3: Sexy, magical answers would give you. That's true.

00:19:15
Speaker 4: True social change comes small steps, just the way small human innovation comes usually in small steps, just the way human improvement comes usually in small steps, with lots of hard work and practice and all that. You know. I wrote about the threat fatonal, math, synthetics, all that kind of stuff, the addictive qualities of so many products and so on. I wanted to write about people in the smallest way, unnoticed, not sexy, just moving forward towards repairing or rebuilding community in various towns.

00:19:46
Speaker 1: All right, so you just released a new book the perfect tube of forging, fulfillment from the base horn band and hard work. And let me just say to the listeners, I didn't know what to expect when I opened this book. I'm not the type of person that reads books about tubas, but this book was awesome. So how did you go from covering drugs to tubas of all instruments and topics? And I will say, let me hearry and say for listeners before we start, the book is fantastic. It's so fascinating. It was one of those where I read it, I go and go tubas, huh, I'm not even sure what a tuba looks like or sounds like. And then I start reading, I'm like this, this is one of those things where you found this subculture and you just went all in and you made it something that I would never picture myself reading.

00:20:35
Speaker 2: I was just turning pages. It was unbelievable.

00:20:38
Speaker 4: So how'd you get thank you? First of all, I don't play the tuba. I was never in marching band. I grew up in the seventies man playing guitar like every single other guy I knew, okay at the La Times, having a deep background in Mexico speaking Spanish and all this my job. Part of my job was to write about the Mexican immigrant community in LA. And one of the stories I wrote about was how huge and important the tuba was in the Mexican immigrant world in Los Angeles. Hit very important, and mostly because a lot of social life takes place in backyard parties. And one way of showing you have arrived, you know, kind of a certain way of economically, certainly socially, is you have a band with a tuba in it. And the tuba is enormous, big gold thing, you know. And so it became like this hugely popular instrument in Mexican LA. And I wrote that story and then the day came out, a band director called me. He says, you know what, yeah, so much so your story is right on the money. We have been losing. People have been stealing our tubas for the last whatever had been three or four months. By then, I had not heard this. I wrote another story about tubas being stolen from these high schools because it was so popular. Eventually began to just interview tuba players of all kinds, nice of Mexicans, but all kinds of tuba players. Why because I could see that most tuba players loved what they did, but they loved it without, as you said, the expectation of any you know, applause, any wealth or fame or any of that kind of stuff. And generally, as a journalist, I find if you can find people like that doing something absolutely for the love of it, you will find if you stick with them, you will find some great stories. So as I was writing the Dreamland book about the opioid epidemic and then fentanyl and mathma in the Least of Us, I was periodically I would periodically do interviews so tuba players.

00:22:33
Speaker 3: Why I had no plan to write a book.

00:22:35
Speaker 4: I just thought, if I stick with it, something good is going to happen. And so I interviewed over the next few years, probably fifteen to twenty eight tuba players. It wasn't like constant, but and there was this big file at the back of my computer called Tuba and I just put all my notes and my tapes and all that stuff in there. And then The Least of Us came out, and that was twelve years. That marked twelve years of writing about grim stuff like addiction and drug profiteering and all the rest that you would write about and.

00:23:06
Speaker 3: I felt like I needed like I love writing about that stuff.

00:23:10
Speaker 4: I still love writing about that I still find it a fascinating topic. But there is a point where I want to say, I think I need to do something totally new. And my agent said, well, why don't you see what kind of book you might be able to write about that tuba project. You've been kind of half working, half assed working. I mean it was really not very focused on it. Just wanted to see what kind of could learn.

00:23:29
Speaker 3: You know.

00:23:30
Speaker 4: I had remembered this conversation that I had with this guy named Bob Carpenter years before in Orlando, Florida, a NASA scientist and a tuba player for the Orlando Symphony, who told me about these two perfect tubas, these two tubas made in York Instrument Company in nineteen thirties and Grand Rapids, Michigan for a very famous tuba player who ended up not being able to play them and it was too fat, basically, and he sold him to one of them to his student, and his student using this tuba went on to be one of the greatest tuba players in the history of the instrument. Arnold Jacobs, who then was forty years at the Chicago Symphony and sold that horn, and then he bought the other two.

00:24:15
Speaker 3: These were two prototypes.

00:24:17
Speaker 4: There was only two of them, and the York Instrument Company went out of business not long after the story of the Search for the Perfect tuba because nine companies have tried to make these tubas, replicate these tubas and really kind of succeeded, but not exactly. It just overtook my life in this beautiful way. So its not writing about people pimping out their sister or their girlfriend for dope. It was people practicing endlessly to get this eight measured.

00:24:49
Speaker 1: Part of this A two Just right, I'm going to read you a quote from the book. I found it hard to avoid the conclusion that a root of our epidemic of drug addiction was a s running of community in America, which left us isolated and a loaned and vulnerable to addiction. I came to see how marching bands in fact create community in this country. They find a place for kids of all kinds to thrive, not based on their side or speed, but instead on their willingness to work hard. What did you learn from some of those kids? And I will say, as you're saying this, when you think about. You know, if I pick up a guitar and start playing when I'm twelve, I can go well, if I do that, I could end up on some big stage in front of one hundred thousand people a tuba player.

00:25:33
Speaker 2: No, no one's.

00:25:33
Speaker 1: Going to know the name of the tuba player in our current society. But they keep at it. And there's lessons in.

00:25:40
Speaker 4: There, absolutely, And I think a lot of the lessons of what we've already talked about, the importance of hard work, the importance of attention to detail, and a time of distraction, focus and attention to detail. Right, it's a collaboration and time of isolation. Even with people collaborating with people you know, maybe don't like all the time, still keep on doing.

00:26:01
Speaker 3: It's hard work.

00:26:01
Speaker 4: It's discipline, postponed gratification, and a time when immediate gratifications we all crave.

00:26:08
Speaker 3: Apparently I began.

00:26:10
Speaker 4: To see too that that is how we evolved as a species to find that inner feeling that we call fulfillment or contentment. We don't, you know, we want that immediate gratification, but it's so transitory, it just passes quickly. Every you get a new iPhone, two days later, you don't really care, right, you know, And and there is instead this feeling of working very hard without much applause, until finally you create something, say a big concert you've been practicing for, and you play it once, really really well, and it's over and you feel the applause. You have people coming up slapping you on the back. Wonderful thing, and then it's over. But it's it's It leaves you this feeling like of achieved something through hard work. It's not like buying something which didn't, you know, as somebody else did the hard work.

00:27:07
Speaker 3: You just bought it, you know. And to me all of this, I began.

00:27:13
Speaker 4: To realize that what I had stumbled into and was writing about fully and fully focused on now was in fact the opposite of what I had written spent twelve years writing about.

00:27:27
Speaker 3: The addition is about an opioid, is about the drug.

00:27:30
Speaker 4: Stifling that your ability to breathe. That's how you overdose on an opioid. It just the brain stops breathing. Basically, Tuba is about nurturing that beautiful column of air so that you can force it through this big, enormous metal beast and out. And it comes starts with this horrible sound through the mouthpiece, going like that, and it comes out the bell, this gorgeous, powerful sound that will rock your world, you know, and the bones of everybody in the listening to it. It seemed to me strangely that I was writing about something that was like the bulwark against the thing that I'd spent the last twelve years writing about isolation and distraction and craving a pleasure, all leading to addiction on one hand. And here you have these people who we ignore, we don't pay any attention to.

00:28:24
Speaker 3: We plot the athletes on the field.

00:28:26
Speaker 4: The kids who are really learning the great lessons are in the stands playing for those guys out on the field.

00:28:34
Speaker 3: This is so beautiful.

00:28:36
Speaker 4: It's about sustaining community, about working with others. It's about working hard and accepting that every progress will be hard earned and will be small.

00:28:44
Speaker 3: But then you keep on and you keep on.

00:28:47
Speaker 4: And there was this one part about a band from Lopez High School in Real Grand Valley in South Texas and Brownsville, and they practiced they were selected the first honor band for all of Texas for from the Rio Grand Valley, and which was an honor that and they were terrified that they wouldn't be able to pull it off and show and represent the value well. And they practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced for six months on this program that they were going to perform before all these music teachers at this big conference and everything. It was just so powerful what these kids, thirty five kids or something like that create, And it's still remembered twenty years later, and all this kind of stuff. But then I remember this one kid who was late leader of the French horn section that a week later on campus, sees the band director. He goes, hey, hey, hey, what's next. And the guy goes, no, that's it, nothing else. We're done. He goes, what do you mean we're done? We need to keep going. We need to practice hard. You know, he had gotten so enamored with the process of making sound sound better by small, small increments that he couldn't believe. He just got used to the beauty of hard work. And that's what they say. And the one guy said in the book, don't ever tell the kids this is hard. They'll rise to whatever level you set, Just don't tell them it's hard. And what he said later this kid, now I'm talking to him twenty years later about that concert, and he says, you know, they wanted that we were trying to make everything perfect.

00:30:21
Speaker 3: I'm not sure if we actually did it.

00:30:23
Speaker 4: We did our best, but the idea was we were working towards something. We got used to working hard towards that perfection, and what were we trying to do?

00:30:33
Speaker 3: Play one thing? Once?

00:30:36
Speaker 4: Really well, I used to not know what to say when parents would come up to me and say, how do I keep my kid away from drugs? And I didn't really have a good answer for that. Now what I tell him is, well, you know, I don't know. I'm no expert, but high school band seems to do a pretty damn good job.

00:30:53
Speaker 3: Am I want to try that? You know? Anyway? I get carried away on this stuff sometimes.

00:30:58
Speaker 1: You wrote the two gives kids an unnoticed middle class life of nurturing your abilities. But that's why it's the same thing. It's pairing life to what we need, not what we're told to want and insistently demand. And I think what you just said it actually played out in this Texas border town you wrote about where there's this band director's names al Cortinas, and he arrives down there and there's all these kids who are getting sort of sucked into the Sinaloon cartel.

00:31:26
Speaker 4: Is that right, the golf cartel actually, but yeah, it's the same idea golf cartel.

00:31:31
Speaker 1: They're almost acting as lookouts. They're making a few hundred bucks just providing eyes for the cartels. And he starts trying to grab these kids into band, and it saves so many of them.

00:31:41
Speaker 3: So tell us about that.

00:31:43
Speaker 4: Yes, he Al Cortinez is a wonderful, wonderful guy, not even is still still around. Seventy eight now seventy nine. He came up in a town that was mightily segregated Latino white, and it was helped to go to college and got into band and it changed his life and he lived he still lives the rest of his life with this fervent belief in the transformative power of band to change kids' lives, particularly poor Latino kids. And so he is teaching at another school in the real Grand Valley and the band. The superintendent from a school district nearby Roma, Texas, wants to really revamp the band. The band is really not good, they've never been any good. They're really like old beat up instruments on it. They hire Al and al says, you know, I've been teaching on the real Grand Valley for a long time. The economic realities are that most of your kids, almost all your kids, really will not have enough money to afford music lessons.

00:32:46
Speaker 3: So we need to design a band system that will make.

00:32:49
Speaker 4: That will offer lessons as the primary way of getting better. And the superintendent's all for it, and they devote a ton of money to the Courtinas what I call the Courtina system, which is too higher for the entire district. Ten teachers, each one focusing on one instrument, you know, trumpet, clarinet, saxophone, etc. And over a period of years, this system with one teacher guiding kids through from six to twelfth grade. By the time these kids are in ninth tenth grade, they are really getting good. And over this, over a period of years, the Cortinas system transforms Roma, Dinky little Roma Texas, eleven thousand people in this town. No one in Texas knows where on the map Roma Texas is. Transforms the band from Roma Texas into a band that competes head to head with the white tech suburbs of Boston and Dallas, Fort Worth and Houston. It's in a remarkable, remarkable story. Do they ever win outright? Do they ever win top band of all is Marching Vandiba. No, they still based hurdles with regard to size of the band, the amount of money they have, stuff like that. But that is not the point. Band is about winning later because band is only tangentially about It's about music, obviously, and it's about the difficulties of playing music well together in a group.

00:34:20
Speaker 3: But it's not about churning out musicians. It's about turning.

00:34:24
Speaker 4: Out kids who who are able to navigate life productively, positively, with a community basis and so on.

00:34:33
Speaker 3: And that's really what you found. I interviewed a bunch of.

00:34:36
Speaker 4: Kids from the two thousand and three two thousand and four Lopez High School band.

00:34:41
Speaker 3: I think eight or ten kids.

00:34:43
Speaker 4: Every one of them twenty years later was doing really well, a couple of PhDs. Everybody had a positive point. They had families, they had they had careers. No one was about involved in drugs. It was it was just this wonderful story. They were the middle class. They rose up out of like migrant poverty. It's these activities you engage in that at the time seem extraordinarily hard to do, and we should not hover over kids and so oh yeah, no, no, no no, don't don't do.

00:35:14
Speaker 3: That'll be too hard for you. No no, no.

00:35:16
Speaker 4: Let them go through heart, let them go through difficult let them let them work together.

00:35:21
Speaker 3: To go through all of that. Very very important.

00:35:24
Speaker 1: It seems to me, what do you think the sort of practical advice for the average listener is, if they're gone, I'm probably not going to pick up a tuba.

00:35:34
Speaker 4: So I think for most people, I would say it's don't ask for easy, don't demand easy, you might get it. That would be a damaging thing for you. And parents, don't insist that your kids like this. One one woman, a parent in Roma, Texas, said, my all, my all, my friends, They say, doesn't it bother you that your kids out there practicing marching in the rain, And she said, as long as.

00:36:01
Speaker 3: There's no lightning, I'm good with it.

00:36:03
Speaker 4: You know that there's a reason why they are where they are, and it's because they practice their butts off.

00:36:08
Speaker 2: So you go from.

00:36:12
Speaker 1: The opioid epidemic to writing about meth and fentanyl to tubas and so, what is the next project for you? Because I feel like the trajectory is just who knows where it's going to go.

00:36:22
Speaker 2: So I want to hear what's next.

00:36:24
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, the next book is going to be a biography of Chalino Sanchez, who was the Mexican narco singer in who started his career really in Los Angeles, not in Mexico, and.

00:36:41
Speaker 3: Very much a punk rock kind of guy. He just starts singing.

00:36:44
Speaker 4: Everyone tells me he can't sing, and in Mexican context, you know.

00:36:48
Speaker 3: It's very velvety, operatic voices. He sounds like battery acid. You know. He isn't not very good, but he keeps going.

00:36:55
Speaker 4: But he rises out of nowhere, unlettered, no English immigrant, illegally in the country, and creates this phenomenon of ballads about drug villages and drug drug involved people, mostly from his own village or ones nearby, stories he knew, and he transforms Mexican music becomes one of the most important musical figures come out of Los Angeles, right up there with n WA and some.

00:37:27
Speaker 3: Of the punk rock bands.

00:37:28
Speaker 4: I think that that became very very popular in Los Angeles. And so he goes back to Mexico to for a gig where later on after the show, there's a famous meme.

00:37:40
Speaker 3: Where he's looking at a note during his show.

00:37:43
Speaker 4: The meme is that the note is supposed to say something like sing well, because it's gonna be your last time.

00:37:48
Speaker 3: Someone threatened to kill him, and that.

00:37:50
Speaker 4: Night they cops take him out and anyway he gets he gets abducted and is found murdered that morning in an irrigation canal. And after that his his his fame post mortem fame just explodes. And to this day he remains the most important musical Mexican musical singer come out of Los Angeles and one of the most important really in Mexican, in Mexican music, and it's I got the In the Tuba book, I wrote one chapter about him, because he is really responsible for making the tuba so popular. The tuba was a corny, old fashioned instrument and a lot of kids before Chalino started singing these really riveting, almost cinematic stories of how people died and shootouts and whatnot back in Mexico, and a lot of the times he recorded those songs with a BANDA banda is is a form of Mexican music that plays dance music with marching band instruments, and so the tuba is a very big deal and that he really transformed the tuba into this popular instrument that it was not before him, and it became after his after his death. So that's kind of how all of this kind of weirdly fits together.

00:39:11
Speaker 1: Before we go, what are three narco courido bands people should check out?

00:39:16
Speaker 4: Well, the very best band of all all time is not specifically exclusively a narco corrido band, but I would say that that Losis del Norte are the best. I spent a lot of time with those guys when I was in Mexico. They are the best Mexican binational band that you can.

00:39:37
Speaker 3: Possibly listen to.

00:39:40
Speaker 4: And if you want to understand Mexican immigration and the feelings of Mexican emmorants, just check out the lyrics to Thesigurs. A certain number of their songs are also narco corridos, although they don't really focus on that exclusively by any means. They are the best, and I actually learned a lot of when I went down to Mexico. I didn't really speak Spanish, and uh, part of my homework every night was to take a ticket is a Norte sung home and transcribe it and and learn it. And this kind of thing because they're singing very clear. It's actually very good to use that. I would say. Another good band to pay attention to only because it teaches, not because it's narco Corridos, but but because it's right out of saying Aloa is Banda Perricodo, which is probably like the top banda. You know, a lot of times the narco corrido stuff is really vile. I'm not gonna lie. It is absolutely pornographic. Has become pornographic lately in the last ten years or so. Charlino had a different approach to it, which was more reserved spare, you know. But and so I think much far prefer prefer him. But one band that you can listen to that I think is reflective of all this is those Kanes the Tijuana, who were I'm not sure how much they're around anymore, but they were in their time, kind of like the up and comers after Chelley, you know, was killed.

00:41:07
Speaker 2: Awesome, great recommendations.

00:41:09
Speaker 3: I love those.

00:41:10
Speaker 2: Tea Grace, Sam, Yeah the best.

00:41:12
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for coming on the show. This is an awesome conversation.

00:41:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, I really had a great time, Michael.

00:41:17
Speaker 4: Thank you very much for the invitation. It's wonderful you to do that. Appreciate it.

00:41:23
Speaker 1: Thank you for watching and listening, and thanks to Sam for coming on the show. We are in your feeds twice a week, so keep an eye out for more. As a reminder, we are always open for questions for our Ask Michael Anything section, so please drop in any questions you have into the comments. You can even email them to media media at twopct dot com. Even better, if you want to send us a voice memo or a video of yourself asking the question, we would absolutely love that. We will try to answer as many of your questions as possible as always, have fun, don't die, class back