Ben Westhoff Went Undercover to Visit a Chinese Drug Lab | Joe Rogan

Well, there are a lot of people that are growing marijuana that are using pesticides and chemicals that are dangerous. And there was one... What was the company that got caught recently, Jamie? They tested their stuff. Cushy Punch, I believe, yeah. Cushy Punch, with the microphone that looked up there. Cushy Punch. We had a guy named John Norris on the podcast, and he wrote a book called Hidden War, and he started off his career as a game warden, you know, investigating people that caught too much fish, things along those lines. And he thought, hey, what a great job this would be. I'm going to get a job in the great outdoors. I love the outdoors, and, you know, I'll get to do some good for the wildlife. Well, turns out, along the way, they started stumbling upon these public land Mexican cartel grow operations, where they would grow these marijuana plants, just giant plots of them, and they would use these extremely toxic pesticides. And also they would use poison to keep animals out. And they had vats of this shit laying around, and some of the marijuana was actually infested with this shit, or infected. Yeah, my friend Amanda Chicago Lewis is this great journalist focused on marijuana. Yeah, she put the fear of God in me about those pesticides and carcinogens. And the other thing is just like these, you know, these different oils that people are smoking. Some of them are marketed as like all natural, but they find synthetic cannabinoids in them. And basically, you know, synthetic cannabinoids like K2 and spice are what they're known as sometimes. And those are, people call it synthetic marijuana, but the big difference is that, THC is known as like a partial agonist. So it will like these receptors, it will, it will activate them to an extent, you're chilled, it's relaxed. But the cannabinoids, they also interact with the cannabinoid receptors, same as THC, but they're full agonists. And so they make you basically like go crazy. And your heart starts beating fast. You start people overdose and die on these these cannabinoids. And they, these are all made in China too. I went into a lab in China where they made these and they made fentanyl analogues. Did let you in? Yeah, I mean, it was it was a whole thing. I like wrote them on the internet. I made a fake email address and I said, I'm a drug dealer. I'd like to visit your lab. May I do that when I come to China? And they said, Yeah, what? Yeah, that's like, Did you have a fake drug dealer name? I called myself, what did I call myself? I tried, I had this like Skype avatar picture where I looked like a bro, like a 23 year old dude with like big hair, like kind of a stoner look. And they just, they said, Yeah, come by. And so, so I went to Shanghai and I met this guy at the train station and he owned his own lab. And he asked me if I was a journalist, actually, like pretty straight away. He was like, are you a journalist though? And I was like, no, like, no crazy question. Do I look like a journalist? No. And so he didn't know whether to trust me. So we went to his apartment. It was like the top floor of this fancy high rise. He's a total family man. He had like lived there with his wife and kid. Brings a stranger to his home. Yep. Meets a guy who says he's a drug dealer, picks him up at the train station, says, Hey, come to where my kids sleep. Yeah, exactly. Wow. And so then he showed me, because he had, they had the website, a lot of these companies in China, they make legitimate chemicals and recreational chemicals. And they specialize in drugs that are legal in China, but banned in the West. So banned in the US. What is illegal in China? In the US, we have this thing called the federal analog act. And so that bans all these drugs even before they're invented. So anything that's similar to marijuana structurally or in effect, anything that's similar to opioids is just automatically banned, automatically scheduled. But in China, they have to do it one by one by one by one. And so fentanyl itself was scheduled in China, was banned in China decades ago. But these chemists, like this one I met, specialize in this window when something is banned in the US, but it's still legal in China, but it's become popularized on the internet. So there's all these websites, these web forums where these like drug nerds basically are like, you can't get fentanyl, but you can get this thing that's kind of like fentanyl. And that's a hilarious way drug nerds. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they are. And like psychonauts, I'm sure you've heard of psychonauts, right? They specialize in these new, usually psychedelics they tend to prefer, that have never been tested on human subjects. But this guy was entirely specialized in fentanyl analogs and synthetic cannabinoids. And so he took out, you know, he had his like fake list on his website of all the legitimate, you know, like Cialis and, you know, legitimate pharmaceuticals, things like that. But at his apartment, he showed me the real list. And that had all these, you know, it was cannabinoids, fentanyl, it was like fake Valium, like different types of Xanax. And he showed me the prices and I was like, all right, looks good. Can I go see your lab? And so finally he decided he trusted me. He called up his driver on the phone. And the driver showed up and he was kind of this big, like muscular dude who didn't speak any English. And I was a little worried. I was like, oh, this is the dude who's going to break my kneecaps if when he finds out I'm a journalist, you know, but I just got in the car and we drove like 30 minutes to the outskirts of Shanghai. And we got to the lab and it just looked like a regular office park, like a suburban office park. There was a fountain in front of the building. There was like, you know, you use the key card to get in the parking lot. And then it looked like kind of a new construction building. It smelled like cement. We went inside. We went up to the lab. All the windows were open. It was the middle of the winter and it was kind of a strong chemical smell. But it looked kind of just like Breaking Bad, like, you know, like industrial sized glassware. You know, beakers, Bunsen burners, all that stuff from high school chemistry. And he would point. He points out, like, basically, I had my recorder, you know, on my phone and I had it in my jacket pocket just on record. And so he told me I couldn't take pictures. And so to take notes, I would just say stuff aloud. I'd be like, oh, that's a light orange mixture that's being mixed up by a mechanical arm. And you say it's benzofentanil, very interesting. But the language barrier was such that he didn't think I was being too much of a weirdo. But I clearly was. But the cannabinoids were crazy. There was like a table like this, like almost exactly this size. That was piled up with the cannabinoids that were there for drying. And it was there mounds like this high, just sitting right out in the open. What they look like? Does it look like pot? No, because it's not a plant, you know, it's just basically it's a chemical that's sprayed onto plant matter, like dried sage and stuff like that. Really? So they try to make it look like pot. And, you know, you can smoke that stuff out of a pipe or even roll it into a joint. But if you look closely, though, it's very clearly not pot. Wow. And so they're drying this stuff? That's what I think that, you know, they also had like drying machines. It looked like my editor didn't like it when I use this term. But you know, when you go into Subway and there's the bread baking machines right there. Yeah. It looked exactly like that. Why did he not like that term? I don't know. I think he thought Subway would sue us or something. Jesus Christ. But but they had those and then they had like big buckets of one pound bags of these these cannabinoids and these fentanyl analogues just ready for shipping. He said they were sending them to Russia, to Belgium, to the Netherlands. And then I think a lot of times that's repackaged there. And so I don't know if you knew that the cannabinoids like used to be sold legally in head shops like 10 years ago. Yeah. Yeah. And they would always be in these colorful packets. They almost look like a pop rocks. Right. They say like, so, you know, spice and laugh out loud and stuff. And so I think in Europe, that's where they do that. They put it in this colorful packaging. They and then they ship it to the U.S. And but yeah, he was saying that like he kept like really close track of the law and all these countries, especially China, like they're scheduling this next week. So we're going to take all this and throw it away. And I thought at first he was like, probably just putting me on. But I think they actually do that. Like these guys are businessmen first. They want to make money and going to follow the law. It just doesn't, you know, it's not conducive. This is where bath salts came from. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Bath salts tend to be cathinones. So synthetic cathinones. Have you ever heard of the cat plant? KHAT. Yeah. That's the hijackers, the pirates in Somalia. They love to take that stuff. Yeah. It's really popular in the Middle East. It's like it's a stimulant. It gets you really. Have you tried it? No, I never have. Yeah. But I grew up in Minnesota though and there's a big Somali population. And so a lot of there was a big controversy in Minnesota whether or not to ban cat leaves from being sold in regular stores. Is it legal? I think it is. I think it's not legal in the U.S. now if I'm not, but I don't know for sure. Interesting. It's KHAT. Yeah, exactly. And so the synthetic cathinones are the synthetic version of that, like made in a lab. But there, you know, there's tons of different kinds. You don't know how strong it is. And the bath salts, they, of course, it has nothing to do with like salts for your bath. You know, this was a misnomer. And they also wrote, called them like incense. Sometimes plant food. And on the back of all of them, it would say not intended for human consumption. So that was like the way they got around. They thought they could get around the Federal Analog Act because part of the law says that something is automatically illegal if it's intended for human consumption. So these guys are like not intended for human consumption. Right. Just put it in your bath. Yeah. Your bath smells like fucking toxic chemicals. Yeah. Do you remember when the homeless guy ate someone's face? Remember that? And they said he was on bath salts? Yeah. But that was actually disproven. There was none found in his system. He was just crazy. Yeah. The cannibal, the causeway cannibal, I think they called him. Yeah. And he was just crazy, right? I think he may have like smoked some weed, but yeah, I don't think he had anything else in his system. That was just high on life. Yeah. Oh, man. Florida. The original Florida man. Yeah. It is, it's funny that one state is so synonymous with fuckery. Yeah. And they also had this thing called Flocka. Have you ever heard of that? Yes, I have, but I don't remember what it is. It's more Cathanones. And like, if you look it up on YouTube, there's all these people going crazy. That killed like, I think maybe a hundred people in Florida during that time. And the problem is, you know, like the prohibition on drugs causes people to do really stupid things. Right. So you have this Cathanone, like Flocka. And as bad as that was, once they banned Flocka, the chemists started manipulating the chemical structure. So they changed one little thing. They add like a chlorine group, for example. So like a chlorine, like molecule, you know, it has nothing to do with the drug, but they just added on there to make it so it becomes legal. But then it becomes more difficult for your body to like digest it. So it becomes worse for you. And the high becomes worse. And then they ban that. And then they make something new that's even worse for you. And it's just like down the line. And these Chinese. So that's what all these new drugs have in common. My book is about, they're called NPS, Novel Psychoactive Substances. So fentanyl is the most famous and the most dangerous. But these include basically like synthetic new versions of every drug. So there's, you know, marijuana, the new, the NPS version is the synthetic cannabinoids. Heroin, the NPS version is fentanyl. There's LSD. So you take LSD. It's like a wonder drug. Right. No one has ever died of an LSD overdose. You know, people may have thought they were a bird or whatever and jumped off a roof, but no one has ever overdosed on the drug itself. But once they started banning, once they started really cracking down on LSD, these Chinese chemists started manufacturing this new type of psychedelic that was sold as acid. And so if you went on the dark web, this was like in the like 10 years ago or so, five, 10 years ago, you would search for acid and you would think you were buying LSD, but you're buying this new psychedelic that could kill you and did kill you. These drugs are called N-bombs. It's like the worst name of all time. These N-bomb drugs and they started killing people in like the suburbs in Dallas. You fell into a ring. Ooh, fail. And yeah. You really were a music editor. Yeah. So these kids all thought they just wanted, they did their research. These were like smart kids who said, oh, LSD has never killed anyone. Let's get that, this new thing, and it killed them. And so it wasn't really LSD. It was just something. No, it totally, no, nothing in common at all. Yeah.