The new agent in charge of the DEA in Los
Angeles has his work cut out for him.
Drugs are killing Americans at alarming rates.
In fact, for the age group 18 to 45,
drugs are the number one cause of death,
specifically fentanyl overdoses. Last year,
the CDC estimates that more than
110,000 people lost their lives to drug poisonings in the
US That's more than 300 people a day dying of
drug poisoning.
And the problem just seems to keep growing.
We'll talk about what the DEA is doing to stem
that tide.
And then there's the problem of addiction.
Nearly 50 million people in the US have a substance
use disorder,
and alcohol addiction is even more pervasive than drugs.
An addiction expert tells us what can be done and
where the biggest problems are these days.
Fox 11 News in depth starts right now.
Hello, everyone. I'm Hal Eisner,
and this is FOX 11 News In Depth.
At the end of last year,
Los Angeles DEA Special Agent in Charge Bill Bodner retired,
and we're grateful that he's been a frequent guest here
on our program.
But now we'd like to welcome his replacement.
Stepping into his shoes and assuming the very challenging job
of special agent in charge of the
DEA for the Los Angeles Field Division is Matthew Allen.
And Matthew, welcome. It's so good to see you here
and
thank you. You know, Bill always gave us a lot
of very significant information.
And and I know you
will be following in those footsteps because you and I
have a bit of a history before this as well.
Absolutely. You know, you have quite a history with the
DEA.
Yes. And and just just as a little 32nd
Cliff notes here,
you've been in Afghanistan, you've been to a number of
different places where you've been embedded trying to do things
on behalf of the DEA.
And yeah, just give us a little thumbnail,
right. So I, I hired on with the DEA back
in 2002 and
my first post of duty was here in Los Angeles.
So this has become kind of my adopted home.
That's when I first met Bill Bodner,
as a matter of fact.
So I've known Bill for over 20 years,
been a pretty important, important figure in my career and
you know,
very big shoes to fill there.
But you know, I spent my formative years as an
agent here in in Los Angeles and
went to Afghanistan for a couple of years.
You know, going after the the funding sources for the
insurgency then back to this area,
spent a couple of years in Mexico and Mexico City
as Assistant Regional Director and Acting Regional Director for that
that region and then was able to promote to the
senior executive level and back to California.
I'm sure that you probably can give a better perspective,
but it seems like over the years things have not
necessarily gotten better.
They've gotten more complicated. They have gotten more complicated.
Hey, listen, the cartels that are involved in,
in pushing this stuff on our streets,
they evolve
at an alarming rate, right?
Whenever we catch up with something,
they're trying to figure out another another move to stay
ahead of us.
So it's a constant struggle.
So in your new job,
you've got goals. I do.
What are they?
Well, there's a couple of different fronts,
right?
The DEA is historically is,
I mean we're an enforcement agency,
right? So
as far as enforcement goes,
we, the things we're laser focused on right now,
fentanyl, methamphetamine, I don't think that's going to be a
shock to anybody,
right? But are those things,
what's your greatest concern? Fentanyl.
Fentanyl, yes. And because it just poses all kinds of
problems we've never seen before.
A lot of the people who are dying from fentanyl
overdoses,
they're unwitting users of fentanyl,
right? They don't know they're taking fentanyl.
You're talking about situations and this is a real situation
where you'll have a 16 year old cheerleader that twists
her ankle at cheerleading practice.
She's concerned she won't be able to perform,
you know, Friday night for the game.
Friend of hers says, hey,
take this. I got it off of,
you know, social media and her parents find her dead
in the bedroom the next morning.
And we've heard these stories because we've followed
about 15 fentanyl families who have lost their children
and and many of them have started nonprofits to try
to keep other children from ending up in the same
situation.
Fighting social media, fighting algorithms,
all sort of things. What is it?
You have to fight
the natural curiosity of childhood almost.
You know,
and you're you're right when you say that a lot
of these families have started nonprofits,
you know, and they've become involved in this fight with
us
and and hey, they have the loudest voices,
you know, they really do.
And and we need them to stand up and talk
about it,
You know, part of it,
we need to take the stigma off of it.
Right? Because you talk to some families that only because
they're they're terrified someone's going to think their child was
a drug addict.
You know and it's just not the case or the
appearance of or the appearance of Exactly right.
And and so taking the stigma away is one thing.
Addressing the that natural childhood curiosity.
May I tell the little story.
Listen, I I spoke with the family who lost a
college age son to fentanyl.
They have two other children who are in college.
Those children now become activists themselves.
Right. So when they go to parties,
they take fentanyl test kits
and they'll test, you know,
because obviously there's going to be things at college parties,
right. So they'll they'll offer,
hey, before you take that,
let us test it for you,
you know, And they told me the story of a
friend of theirs who came up.
He had five pills that he bought from someone from
the same person.
They tested them. Three of them
tested positive for fentanyl. And the reaction was,
but these two are cool,
right? How do you stop that?
You know that that's just,
I mean what more do you need?
But you know, I'm not sure a lot of people
really understand what fentanyl is.
Yeah. And and and and just as a case in
point,
I I had this little medical procedure and they they
wanted to give me a little something to knock me
out
And and I said, what are you going to give
me this fentanyl?
And I went,
really, are you going to give me fentanyl?
After all these stories I've done about fentanyl and all
these kids that have died and all these families that
have been torn apart,
but I didn't understand what fentanyl's real purpose is.
Big difference in pharmaceutical red fentanyl and what we're seeing
on the street.
And the difference is the difference is one of them
is made in a professional,
sterile laboratory environment by people that know what they're doing.
And the other one's made in
somebody's mom's basement. Right. And and and you know what?
Another thing that fits into that,
and this kind of goes along with the testing thing
too,
is kind of what I call the chocolate chip cookie
theory,
right? When you make it,
when you make chocolate chip cookies,
you dump the chips in,
right? And you're, you get a cookie,
there might be 7 chips on one side,
2 on the other side.
That's what happens with fentanyl,
right? So you you could have two.
You and I can sit down.
We can split a pill in half.
You take half of it,
you're perfectly fine. And I keel over that.
What an interesting analogy I've never heard of put that
way.
But you know, there are so many tentacles
to this thing. I mean,
let's talk about China for a minute.
They, they, they make the devices that that end up
being the forms for the pills to be made.
Explain that. So a lot of pill presses being being
manufactured there,
they find their way over to Mexico,
mostly some of them into the United States.
But the big thing, you know,
China's big role was obviously precursor chemicals.
There's just an unlimited supply of chemicals coming out of
China,
going to the major ports like Puerto Manzanillo in Mexico,
you know, for the first time because of because of
the availabilities chemicals,
right. Because of what the cartels are able to get
their hands on,
you know, at any time.
And we're seeing kind of a weird thing in,
in, in in, you know,
Drug Enforcement. Typically the drug market is driven by demand,
right? OK, Cocaine's in high demand.
Let's start shipping cocaine, right.
What we're seeing now is the cartels controlling
the demand through the supply.
Because by by doing things like putting the fake pills
on the street,
creating addicts, right. Pushing the fentanyl,
We have so much fentanyl we don't know what to
do with.
We can make it a drop of that.
Let's just keep pushing this and that's what they're doing.
You know, we've got so much to talk about it.
So stay with me for another segment because coming up
next on Fox 11 News in Depth,
we talk more with Special Agent in Charge Matthew Allen,
and we discuss the ways that the agency is trying
to address the huge amount of drugs spread across our
cities.
We'll be right back.
Welcome back to Fox 11 News In Depth.
I'm Hal Eisner and Matthew Allen,
special agent in charge of the DEA for Los Angeles
is still with us.
You know, we we heard the big news this week
coming out of the DEA of the rescheduling,
I guess is the right term
of marijuana. Cannabis from a Class 1 to a class
three. Yeah, always sort of heard and thought and I
thought we sort of educated ourselves to understand that that
marijuana was a a gateway drug.
And now we hear some of these changes,
right? Listen, not surprised if you want to talk about
that.
That's obviously big news right now.
It is something that's currently happening,
right? And it's currently underway.
So I'm not really at liberty to discuss it.
There's a lot of administrative procedures to go through.
But you know, it's interesting you mentioned gateway because
you know
another big gateway is what kids are finding in their
parents medicine cabinets,
right. And that kind of leads me to talk about
what we just had this past Saturday,
which is called take Back Operation.
Take Back. It's it's something that the DA has been
doing for years.
We do it nationwide and we go out to multiple
areas in the communities that we serve and we set
up stations and we basically what we do is we
receive all of your young used medicine both prescription store
bought everything from the medicine cabinet from the medicine cabinet.
We we encourage everyone to clean out their medicine cabinets
with the stuff they're not using and bring it down
and turn it in and and you would be shocked
how they. I mean listen in the LA area alone
at least what the LA field division covers
we we took in over 20,000 lbs.
Oh wow 20,000 lbs. Right.
And and I mean you see everything from you know
Oxy cotton to Percocets to you know,
I mean you see some crazy stuff that people leave
in their their,
their cabinets. And it also has a,
it also has a environmental aspect to it too because
you don't want to be flushing that stuff down the
toilet,
right. It gets into this the sewer system,
the water system and it's just not good for anything.
It sounds a lot like
local Police Department sheriff's departments that have gun take backs
very similar very similar.
Right. Trying to get stuff off the street,
off the street right before before you're curious 14 year
old decides to
to take one of those pills mom has left in
her in her cabinet.
But but to put put that in some perspective,
I mean how much of A gateway
is the medicine cabinet? It's huge.
It's huge. I mean that because that's there in the
home,
right. And I mean kids,
kids are observant and we're looking at that gateway from
this past week right now.
Yes. And so it's a huge problem.
It's a huge problem and and how do you address
that other than taking things back from,
from homes? Well, listen, that's just a starting point,
right? I mean that's taken taking it out of the
home so it's not even there.
Hey, enforcement, community outreach, you know,
it's a double barrel approach,
right, That that we're, that we're using.
I mean we're living in a time where
hey, when I grew up if if somebody wanted to
buy drugs,
they had to go to the the right or wrong
area of town,
they had to know what corner to go to.
They had to know who to talk to or who
to call.
Now kids just get on their cell phone,
send a couple of emojis,
tell their parents they're walking the dog,
meet a car out front and and they're back.
And when you talk about emojis,
just to be clear, you're talking about emojis on on,
on one of the services that may indicate a dealer
absolutely,
absolutely have their own coded language.
All these emojis mean different things,
right. And and there's a lot of them and and
anybody that's interested can go to
dea.gov we have all that documented,
they can, they can pull it up and look at
it.
So you know, in case you want to take a
look at your kids phone,
you can see what I know,
I know you have charts and things showing all those.
We we've actually showed some of that here on the
program.
But, but I mean, how much of a problem is
social media and these, these sort of selling things that
occur
with these emojis? Well, it's huge.
I mean, it's just made access to this stuff
like incredibly easy. There's not even money exchanges hands,
right? You send it on Zelle or Venmo or something
like that.
You get on social media,
you order. It sent me.
No money changes hands. You know,
It's just, it's all done on the phone.
The DEA recently prosecuted drug poisoning cases.
Tell us a little bit about that,
why and why that's important to families.
That's incredibly important because I think it holds the person
who sold their loved one
that substance that resulted in their death.
It holds them personally accountable,
right? I mean, we, it's no secret what this stuff
is doing to our communities,
right? And it's also no,
see the people who are selling this stuff,
they know what they're selling.
If you're buying a pill
from anywhere other than a pharmacy,
it's fake. It's fentanyl. OK.
So the people that are selling this stuff,
they know what they're doing.
And it's and it's what we're doing is we're looking
at these things like a traditional,
almost more of a homicide investigation,
right. Where we go, it's a forensic approach.
It is we go we evaluate things.
We we we conduct our own investigation.
We have all the parameters set.
Now that we're we're we're we're helping to work with
like the like the sheriff's and the state and local
counterparts.
Right. So that when an officer arrives at a scene
like this,
you know, we've kind of set
what we need in order to do a federal,
a federal you know, investigation on this.
But a lot, a lot of these people,
and I didn't want to stop either.
I'm sorry, but but but a lot of these people
are anonymous
online. They see the emoji somehow some mule is sent
over to to hand off the drugs.
How do you get to these people?
We got some of the best investigators in the world
and we live in the Los Angeles area.
We have the best detectives in the world,
you know,
and and listen, they're out there every day doing this,
I mean, on a weekly basis,
they're out searching, you know,
searching homes, pulling over vehicles,
conducting undercover buys. You know,
I mean, it really kind of hits home,
especially with what we saw in Charlotte the other day,
right, with the, the four individuals in the Marshall Task
Force.
I mean, what the men and women of law enforcement
are out there doing on a daily basis and how
dangerous it actually is.
But you got, you know,
you've got your army. They've got their army,
right. And it's war,
right? It's a fight. It's a fight.
It's a fight. You know,
I don't typically tend to use the the war on
drugs
statement, but, you know, that's
to me, it's like anything else,
right? There's
murder. Not going to stop it,
right. But you got to keep fighting it,
you know, sexual assaults, you got to keep fighting it,
you know, drugs taking over.
She's got to keep fighting it,
Right. Matthew Allen? Yes, Sir.
Thanks so much for joining us.
A new special agent in charge of the DEA for
Los Angeles.
And coming up next on Fox 11 News in depth,
we take a look at the human impact of drugs.
Substance abuse disorders are growing in the United States.
And it's not just fentanyl and opioids.
There's been a resurgence in the use of methamphetamines.
We look at the impact of that right after this.
Don't go away
while we're talking about drugs,
we have to talk about the rising tide of addiction
here in the United States.
Just last year, more than 46 million people over the
age of 12 met the criteria for having a substance
abuse disorder.
That's about
16 1/2% of the population.
Of those, more than 29 million
had an alcohol use disorder and
24,000,000 were classified as having a drug use disorder.
Looks like we may have a problem.
Let's talk with our new guest,
Doctor Itai Danovich, the chair of the Cedars Sinai Department
of Psychiatry and Addiction.
He's an expert on it,
and good to see you.
Thank you, doctor. Thank you.
Pleasure to be here. Well,
let me ask you, in your years of working with
addiction,
do you think things are getting worse?
Well, things have have.
Addiction is a unending problem.
So it has evolved. It has changed in its shape
and form,
but it has persisted throughout.
I think that the element of addiction that's gotten worse
is that there's more access to a
highly potent and lethal medications that have resulted in significant
increases in overdose deaths.
And the things that have been getting better is gradually
better understanding of what addiction is and what to do
about it so that we can help people.
And and let's be clear,
addiction is nothing new.
When I was a kid,
about 150 years ago, I remember a movie with Frank
Sinatra called The Man with the Golden Arm.
I think it was called
and it was about being a heroin addict.
I was a little boy just back in the 50s.
This has been an ongoing thing forever and ever and
ever.
So now is it opioids that are to blame?
Is it fentanyl that's to blame?
What? What's to blame?
Well, I think that's right.
As long as humans have existed,
humans have been intrigued with things that can alter their
states of mind and can intoxicate themselves.
There are cave paintings that describe and characterize early experiences
with intoxication of all
sorts. And as long as people have gotten intoxicated,
some people have run into problems,
either accidents related to intoxication of other or other
unintended consequences. And a subset of people develop this thing
which we call addiction.
So addiction is a result of taking an addictive substance.
But not everybody that takes an addictive substance becomes addicted.
The risk for becoming addicted has to do with genetics,
with our biology, and also with psychological factors and social
factors.
And the way we define addiction is really a pattern
of substance use.
Could be alcohol, could be drugs.
It's characterized by harmful consequences,
by loss of control, by compulsive use,
and by inability to stop despite all of these negative
consequences.
That's really what addiction is.
And and not everybody that tries an addictive substance
goes on to develop that.
But it's an incredibly prevalent problem that's been with us
as long as we've existed.
Yeah. And you know, to counter that,
you use things like what methadone and and other treatments
that replace opioids.
Is that good? Is that bad?
Yeah. Well, we now understand that addiction is a disease
and it's a treatable disease.
So for a long time,
we've had effective psychotherapies that that help people change their
behavior and to achieve recovery.
And we've also discovered several,
several medication treatments that help for some types of substance
use disorders.
Methamphetamine is an example of a type of addiction for
which there are very effective psychotherapeutic treatments,
but there aren't any particularly effective medication treatments.
There are some medications that have shown some effect,
some effect, but no substantial effects.
In contrast, opioid addiction or opioid use disorder
is a condition whose treatment has been revolutionized by medications
that really dramatically save people's lives and enable them to
achieve long standing recovery.
You know, when we were talking with Matthew Allen in
the last segment,
we talked about cannabis. We talked about marijuana as a
gateway drug.
Now you're an addiction expert.
How do you, how do you view that?
Well, the notion of marijuana as a gateway was described
decades ago when people observed that
that that young people typically
navigated through a pathway of smoking tobacco and drinking alcohol
and then using
cannabis and using other drugs.
And so this theory was developed about whether cannabis actually
was a gateway,
whether it increased people's predisposition to develop addiction to other
drugs.
That's been studied extensively. And there's no evidence,
there's not good evidence that cannabis itself increases the risk
of developing addiction to other drugs.
On the one hand, and on the other hand,
early use of all substances of abuse,
tobacco, alcohol, cannabis increases risks of harm,
increases risk of addiction and is associated with a whole
bunch of
lifelong consequences. Let me ask you.
But let me ask you,
do you think this relaxing this rescheduling of of marijuana
by the DEA to
a from a Class 1 to a class
3A good move a necessary move or or just
nebulous.
Well, I I I think overall it's a good move
because I think it's going to enable additional research which
has been limited by the by the DEA scheduling status.
And right now we have policy in a lot of
parts of the country that's been decided by ballot initiatives
as opposed to science.
The science has been limited by the difficulty studying cannabis
to determine what it's therapeutic effects are and and how
to leverage them and and and
and we also know that treating cannabis as an illicit
substance and using criminal justice interventions doesn't help people that
go on to develop problems and it worsens disparities that
people experience. So I think overall it's a good thing.
However, it's a double edged sword.
We've already seen significant increases in cannabis use and with
that cannabis associated problems.
And it's quite possible that the reduction in scheduling is
going to also be associated with increases use.
All right, Doctor Rita Danovich,
thanks so much for talking to us.
We'll we'll have you back again because that's a lot
of really good information you have.
Thank you again. And Fox 11 news in depth will
continue right after this break.
Don't go away.
And finally, if you want to hear an audio version
of this program,
check out my podcast. It's called What the Hell,
and it's available wherever you subscribe to podcasts.
Or just go to
whatthehellpodcast.com. That's it for this week's Fox 11 news in
depth.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Have a great week, everybody.
We'll see you next time.
Bye, bye.