Nick Pell

How big of a market is this?

It's a little over $2 billion a year in the United States.

Now, that sounds like a lot, but by comparison, legal weed is a $20 billion a year industry.

So this is just an absolute puppy dog in terms of market share compared to something like weed.

Wow.

The total illegal drug market is estimated to be anywhere between $100 billion and $150 billion every year.

Some people claim to be using it therapeutically, but the question for me is always, how much of this is cope?

Like, are you just saying that you're using it to manage chronic pain or anxiety, but...

Really, you just enjoy getting high.

And to circle back to the guy who spoke to me at the gym, like nothing about him struck me as being deceptive about it.

I think he's got chronic back pain and he doesn't want to do opioids for all the reasons people don't want to do opioids.

I'm sure that he's not the only person on earth that this is true of.

I'm equally certain that right now there's a guy taking a handful of kratom gummies and saying it's for his back pain when really he wants to drool on himself and stare at the ceiling for the next four hours.

So are these people who say they're using it to manage anxiety or chronic pain, are they really using it for that, or do they just like getting high and they have a ready-made excuse for it?

Well, as I told you on that episode, heroin doesn't really exist anymore.

It's been completely chased off the market by fentanyl.

So I'm going to take these one by one.

Methadone is highly regulated, so you're going to know exactly what you're getting.

But you have to line up every day to get your dose.

And I used to live across the street from a methadone clinic and was pretty routinely woken up by people screaming at each other in line at 5 a.m.