Answer Addiction

Tag: interviews

  • Meet Adie Wilson-Poe, the Cannabis Scientist

    Meet Adie Wilson-Poe, the Cannabis Scientist

    “Of all the things that cannabis can potentially do for humankind, the impact on the opioid crisis is by far the best and biggest thing it could do for humanity.”

    Dr. Adie Wilson-Poe was a straight edge kid. She grew up in Arizona then moved to the northwest at 19–first to Seattle and later to Portland–and found her home there. She wasn’t into drugs or drug culture; she was a punk rock kid who moved to Seattle for the music and ended up in science. While getting her psychology degree, Dr. Wilson-Poe became interested in drug use and addiction. She started studying neuroscience, specifically the neurobiology of psychology. 

    The first time Dr. Wilson-Poe smoked weed, she was 25 and well into grad school. Although at the time there was scant scientific literature about marijuana, she studied whatever data she could find and came to understand that cannabis had medicinal properties. She also started studying the basic mechanisms of addiction and how different drugs affect the brain in unique ways. 

    Dr. Wilson-Poe is an accomplished neuroscientist whose work is regularly funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

    Why do you think so many pain-relieving drugs are addictive and what does the future hold in terms of cannabis-based pain relief?

    The whole reason that most people are using opioids or cannabinoids is because they’re trying to relieve pain. There is a very complex interaction between pain relieving drugs that are also addictive. That dynamic interaction between pain relief and drug abuse or drug misuse is something that we spent a lot of time working on. There’s a big gap between what we do in the lab and what we would do in the clinic and I’m trying to narrow that gap for cannabis and opioid interaction. 

    We know that inhalation is a very common method that people use to relieve pain. We know it’s a very effective method for relieving immediate pain. Oral products and edibles are great for nighttime when you can wait for them to kick in and then work overnight. But for relief when you’re in pain, you need something that works right away, and we know that the lungs are a great method of doing that.

    How do you think cannabis can solve the opioid epidemic?

    Of all the things that cannabis can potentially do for humankind, the impact on the opioid crisis is by far the best and biggest thing it could do for humanity. There are a number of places where cannabis can interact with opioids. If we just follow one person, let’s say you get injured at work, you throw out your back, and you have pain. You have a choice at the time that you’re experiencing pain. You could start using cannabis right away and never even use an opioid at all. All of the side effects, all of the risks, all of the dependence potential. You can prevent it entirely by managing pain with cannabis. Cannabis has been used for pain relief on this planet for 5,000 years. 

    The other thing we know from the evidence and my work has contributed to this as well, is that when they are used together, cannabis and opioids provide synergistic pain relief. So synergy means greater than additive effects. Rather than two plus two equals four you have two plus two equals seven or something. We know that this is a very robust effect, we see it in people, we see it in all other mammals, we see it whether you use a synthetic cannabinoid or delta-9, you see it whether you use codeine and morphine. When you use the drugs together, you get better pain relief and what that means–the outcome of that better pain relief–is that you don’t need as many opioids.

    Can you explain how cannabis can also be used for addiction treatment?

    Let’s say again: you have your injury on the job and your doctor prescribed opioids. You took them as directed and get to a point where your injury has resolved, but now you’re physically dependent on opioids. There’s a role for cannabis here. Part of the science is a little bit more messy than the others, but there’s some preliminary results showing that people who are physically dependent on opioids have some withdrawal relief from cannabis. During withdrawal you feel restless, you can’t sleep, you’re irritable. Those symptoms are very well treated with cannabis. 

    People have always talked about weed as a gateway drug, but now we’re hearing that marijuana is the exit drug. What are your thoughts?

    The gateway hypothesis came out of some evidence that was produced in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, which showed that there’s a correlation between using cannabis and using harder drugs like opioids. But that correlation is also true for people who use nicotine and alcohol. Just because those things are correlated with the use of harder drugs doesn’t mean that they cause a person to use harder drugs. That gateway hypothesis has been thoroughly refuted in more recent work. We now know that cannabis is not necessarily the gateway to causing someone to use other drugs. We’re in this new time where we see that cannabis is not the gateway drug to opioid use, but rather it’s an important tool for exiting from dependence on opioids.

    How has our government ignored the evidence that cannabis is less dangerous than alcohol? 

    In the early seventies, President Nixon assigned a bunch of scientists and doctors the task of analyzing cannabis’ effects on people and making a determination about how safe or how dangerous it was. This was the Shafer Commission. They wrote up this exhaustive report and gave it back to him. The report said, “This is a very innocuous substance, it shouldn’t be regulated, it’s even less dangerous than alcohol.” But Nixon ignored the evidence and allowed cannabis to persist as a schedule one drug.

    Through the history of prohibition there’s been a blatant disregard of the evidence. We saw this even as recent as the current administration. Jeff Sessions is probably the worst at this. Everything that comes out of his mouth about cannabis is directly in contradiction to the evidence. The evidence has always been there to support cannabis as a relatively safe substance, especially compared to other drugs.

    Can you talk about what you’re doing with the business Smart Cannabis? 

    We’re really interested in what the effects of cannabis in people are and how we can use that information to both better support the people using cannabis and help to support the people who are cultivating or producing cannabis. We have to study it in people and ask them, how did this make you feel? Knowing what people actually find enjoyable, not just intoxicating because there’s really a difference there, right? Like just because something has 30% THC and it got you really high doesn’t mean that was necessarily an enjoyable experience. Maybe you’d have a better time on Friday night if you had had a 17% flower, but we don’t know that until we actually test it in people. 

    Do you have an opinion on the recent vaping controversy?

    Oil cartridges are not going anywhere. This is an incredibly convenient and very popular way for people to consume cannabis. But what we really need to focus on is what’s the safest possible way to consume. Propylene Glycol and Vitamin E Acetate are probably never going to be allowed to be in these cartridges again. Obviously, all of these flavors and additives that break down into really nasty chemicals, those are going to be outlawed. 

    We’re going to need to have some regulation around.

    We’re probably going to see some change in the technology also. You can’t have a battery that’s over this amount of voltage. You can’t have a ceramic coil or a fiberglass coil that gets hotter than this temperature, because we know at that temperature, that’s when things start to break down and even if we don’t have the FDA or some other regulators telling us that this is what we need to do, it’s on us, it’s on the industry to be able to make those decisions for the health of our consumers.

    Cannabis events help to educate people about cannabis, what do you see as your role in all this?

    I feel incredibly grateful that this is what I get to do with my time on planet earth. It just so happened that legalization and the opioid crisis was happening when I was going to grad school. I get to participate in something that could leave a very long-lasting mark on humanity. It’s also interesting that a lot of my colleagues–a lot of doctors, a lot of healthcare professionals–because of the federal prohibition, there’s a lot of conservative thinking. There are a lot of people who are afraid to talk with their patients about cannabis or a lot of people who are afraid to speak about these things in public. 

    I believe in doing no harm and it’s very clear to me from the evidence that cannabis is a medicine and opioids, although useful for certain things, are dangerous. I feel very privileged that I get to participate in these really important conversations at a really important time. But one component of that is my not fearing what the National Institutes of Health are going to do or what the DEA is going to do. There’s some inherent risk for me in openly talking about these kinds of ideas because so many of my colleagues would just rather hide in the laboratory because it’s too much of a risk for them. But the right thing to do is to reduce harm and keep people alive and I feel very privileged that I get to play some part in that.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • Halloween Special: Tales of Addiction Horror

    Halloween Special: Tales of Addiction Horror

    “Addicts are like vampires. We hide our behavior and feed off the living, siphoning their money, their sanity, their trust.”

    Mark Matthews spent years fighting the insatiable monster that screams for more. He says that he still dreams about the electricity of cocaine, the soothing caress of heroin, the heaven in a bottle of Stoli vodka. But the party for him ended long ago. By age 23, Matthews was a wreck. He had alcoholic hepatitis of the liver, swollen pancreas, and a bleeding stomach. 

    After several failed detoxes, Matthews finally hit bottom and crawled into residential treatment. Getting sober was excruciating, yet rewarding. Equipped with his new recovery tools, he learned to manage life without killing himself. He returned to college and earned a Masters in Counseling and a BA in English.

    Now, with 25 years sober, Matthews has built a thriving career that encompasses his two passions. As a certified addictions counselor, he’s dedicated to helping minds heal. As an author, he’s a master at using his characters’ addictions as a metaphor in the genre he calls “addiction horror.” 

    The Fix: What made you combine horror and addiction?

    Mark Matthews: There is nothing more diabolical than the voice of addiction hijacking thoughts, rationalizing atrocious behavior. It plagues us with lies. Aw, come on, you can get high one last time. That monster’s voice that lurks within ignites seductive memories of how good that first hit feels. Addiction is deep in my blood. When I write, I put a knife in my heart and it spills all over the page. That force to get high can be equal to the will to survive.

    Like a mirror image? 

    Yes. It’s the same strength that makes a drowning person fight to the surface for air. With addiction, the will to live is flipped and becomes self-destruction. Addicts are like vampires. We hide our behavior and feed off the living, siphoning their money, their sanity, their trust. We live in shadows, cursed with our affliction but unable to stop the compulsion.

    Your stories show such empathy for your characters.

    Oh yeah. I’m not demonizing the addict. Some of the greatest fiction comes from the deepest of personal pain. The blood we suck out of our families reminds me of The Exorcist, the most terrifying horror movie ever made. I see an analogy—a desperate, powerless mother trying to save her daughter from addiction.

    What can you tell me about your new book, Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror?

    It’s available for preorder October 22. It’s a thrill that great horror writers are in this collection. It’s six novellas written by different authors—Gabino Iglesias, Caroline Kepnes, Kealan Patrick Burke, John FD Taff, Mercedes M. Yardley. 

    That’s five.

    [Laughs] I’m the sixth. Addiction horror is an important reminder. Even after 25 years in recovery, if I used, everything I’ve worked so hard for—family, career, sanity—it would all be gone. But that monster doesn’t stop begging to be fed. My mouth waters just by thinking of vodka. There’s a jolt in my spine when a TV character snorts powder. I have using dreams. But it’s up to me to find joy in living and there’s nothing more badass than facing every day sober.

    * * *

    Caroline Kepnes’ exquisite contribution to Lullabies for Suffering is “Monsters,” but you may remember her as the writer of YOU, the best seller that became the binge-worthy Netflix series. Horror master Stephen King tweeted about YOU, calling it “Hypnotic and scary. A little Ira Levin, a little Patricia Highsmith, and plenty of serious snark.”

    YOU follows the demented path of creepy yet sexy stalker Joe Goldberg. Joe’s a sociopath who meets a woman in a book store, becomes obsessed with her, and uses social media to stalk and manipulate her. He’s a narcissist convinced that only he knows what’s best for her. Booklist called the sequel Hidden Bodies, “the love child of Holden Caulfield and Patrick Bateman.”

    “Monsters” is another disturbing trip into the mind of Kepnes. Like all of her work, “Monsters” grabs you by the ankle. Interviewing Kepnes for The Fix was a titillating highlight in my lifelong devotion to dark humor and the scary books I’d push way under my bed. I love that thrill of terror.

    The Fix: Any vivid memories of Halloweens past?

    Caroline Kepnes: I grew up in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. It’s a place so primed for Halloween. The seasons change, the days are shorter and the library is rumored to be haunted. My elementary school always had a parade. I loved being creeped out. In high school I went to a haunted house and got so scared that I punched someone dressed up as a zombie (sorry, Zombie).

    Any plans for this Halloween?

    In LA it lasts for a month and you see people in costumes in the grocery store at all hours.

    Ever struggled with dependency on drugs or alcohol?

    I’m a really addictive person. I saw myself in a lot of artists who battled addiction and it was so easy for me to imagine myself finding one thing that obliterates everything else. In high school, Sassy Magazine gave me an honorable mention for a story about a girl who is speaking from the afterlife. She died from an angel dust overdose. [My] guidance counselor was concerned.

    Painkillers were tricky for me.

    I get it. When I had emergency throat surgery they gave me liquid Percocet. Oh God, the way I held onto that bottle and begged for more. When my doctor refused, I couldn’t sleep. I was shaking all the time. Brutal. It gave me so much empathy for people who are in the throes of that growling, incessant beast.

    In every book, and in “Monsters” for Mark’s anthology, I think of the height of my [Percocet] dependency and how to put that level of pain on the pages. When your brain is an exasperating place to be, there’s no escape.

    Do you know anyone in recovery?

    Some of the kindest, most thoughtful people I know are in recovery. They have so much heart. They root for people [and] have this enormous capacity to care about others. That dazzles me … because my God, what a powerful thing, to be in the intimate, internal process of overcoming [an addiction] and simultaneously be so generous with your heart.

    What makes you write such dark stuff? Black comedy seems so necessary during America’s surreal political nightmare.

     [Laughs] When anyone says “black comedy” I light up inside like “Ooh-where-what-gimme.” I love being in the whirlwind of feeling amused, mortified, scared, disgusted, enraptured all at once. It feels genuine to what it’s like to be a living, breathing human.

    Where do your ideas come from?

    It’s just the way my brain works. I look at a basement [and] think, “Gee, I wonder who’s trapped down there?” I’m always wondering what people are capable of, why they do what they do, how they got there. I knew this was my jam in high school when I was in this summer-long intelligence experiment at Yale University. It was a college level class on abnormal psych. [We read] about serial killers, violent kids, case studies. I didn’t want to sleep.

    Have you known any stalkers or scary fans like Annie Wilkes in Stephen King’s Misery?

    Ha! Annie Wilkes [is] one of my all-time favorite gals. But I did have a stalker many years ago…. It was a terrifying experience and there was nothing even remotely funny or rom-com about it. It was a humiliating mind fuck. 

    Was Joe based on him?

    In a sick way, Joe was … a way of revising that history, a personal coping mechanism for processing those phone calls and that terror that was with me for so long…. You watch movies where dreamy guys break boundaries to get with women. But [with my stalker] there wasn’t an ounce of Cusack in him.

    Why do you think thrillers appeal to people?

    I’ve met my share of monsters…I like to read about people who lack self-awareness and empathy and have logic systems that enable them to do terrible things. It’s empowering, in a know thy enemy sort of way.

    Do you have a favorite movie?

    I love The End of the Tour and watch it a lot because of the conversations about addiction to television. That was part of my way into Joe Goldberg—the danger of one-way street friendships that we cultivate with characters in books, TV shows, and movies. I go through phases where I’m depressed and hide in the TV, my drug of choice.

    TV is in our phone 24 hours a day. People [like me] with addictive tendencies can get our hands on so much. What a miracle that a bottle of vodka can appear on your doorstep—a miracle and a horror. Writing helps me stay happy. It gives me a purpose and a healthy place to put my obsessive energy.

    What thoughts do you have when writing about Joe?

    I made him up out of that self-critical voice in my head. That’s the worst demon of all, your own inner-hater. The voice that sounds like the mean girls from middle school, the creepy stalker, the bitch from that time, a violent monster who gets away with it. That voice is the part of me that gets disgusted with myself, with others, that voice in my head is the most helpful thing in the world where writing is concerned.

    Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror will be available in January, 2020.

    Read You or binge watch it on Netflix.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "Dope World" Takes a Globe-Spanning Deep Dive into Our Relationship with Drugs

    "Dope World" Takes a Globe-Spanning Deep Dive into Our Relationship with Drugs

    Vorobyov investigated drug use and culture in 15 different countries on five continents, from the coca plantations of Colombia to the mean streets of Moscow.

    With the release of his new book, Dope World: Adventures in Drug Lands, Niko Vorobyov has become the Anthony Bourdain of drugs and the worlds they inhabit, a modern day Hunter S. Thompson. By interviewing cartel members, big-time drug dealers, street guys, gang members, and even government officials, Vorobyov seeks to understand humanity’s bond with drugs. 

    Before our interview, Vorobyov told me about one surreal night in the mountains of Sinaloa, Mexico, where he and his buddy had traveled for a meeting with one of El Chapo’s relatives. Deep in cartel territory, with posted guards everywhere brandishing AK’s and AR-15’s, where one wrong move could mean death, El Indio, the guy who owned the ranch, threw a sushi party. 

    Vorobyov remembers all these guys standing around with assault rifles slung over their shoulders eating sushi. One of the gun-toting sentries even came over to Vorobyov and started chatting to him about movies. He came away with the feeling that El Chapo’s family were pretty normal, if you forgot about the guns.


    Tributes to Malverde, the Sinaloa patron saint of narcotraficantes.

    The Fix: Why did you decide to examine every angle of the drug war and how has the drug war affected the whole world?

    Niko Vorobyov: There’s a lot of great books about this already — Chasing the Scream is one of my favorites — but they take a very Anglo-centric point of view. I wanted to explore other places that we don’t hear about so much like Russia, Japan, and the Philippines. Some people like to say it’s all America’s fault and that they started this whole mess with Richard Nixon, but it goes back way before that, all the way to China and the Opium Wars. Right now, America’s legalizing weed while Russia, China, and the Philippines are fighting the drug war the hardest.

    Why do you think you got involved with drugs in the first place?

    Growing up I was quite a weak person with low self-esteem, so I kinda thought if I acted in a certain way, that would help me accept myself; that drugs and criminal activity would get me friends and respect and all that. I started getting a lot into the underground rave scene and became a student drug dealer. And once you start moving in those circles it’s quite easy to make connections and meet a supplier. From then on, I worked my way through ups and downs till I had a small crew running weed, coke, and MDMA through the hallowed halls of East London universities. 

    But I got reckless and ended up doing a 2½ year prison stretch which really changed my outlook on life — it made me question who I was and what I was doing here. Sitting in a cell on 24-hour lockdown I read everything I could about the history of drugs and drug bans, how and why they were forbidden, and what the consequences of that may be. When I got out, that led me on a journey across 15 different countries on five continents, from the coca plantations of Colombia to the mean streets of Moscow.

    Looking back now, how did your early drug use and even prison prepare you to write Dope World?

    I’ve always had an anti-authoritarian streak; I’ve hated others telling me what to do, especially if it was “for your own good.” Of course I’ve taken drugs — if I haven’t, would that make me more [qualified] or less qualified to write about this topic? I keep reading articles where you can tell they’ve never dabbled in any psychedelic pleasures because none of them have a clue what they’re on about. Looking back, I wasn’t really very political before I went to prison because it’s easy to feel detached when it’s happening to someone else. 

    But when you’re locked in a cell for 23½ hours a day and there’s not enough staff because someone wanted to save a few pennies, you start to see all these abstract ideas are life-or-death shit. And when you see all these poor, working-class people or ethnic minorities while the government’s laughing all the way to the bank — the UK’s one of the biggest legal weed exporters in the world — it makes you ask what’s wrong with this picture. 

    You interviewed Freeway Rick Ross. What did that teach you about the crack era in L.A. and across the nation?

    The first thing you need to know is the real Rick Ross is not a rapper – that Rick Ross actually batted for the other team as a prison guard. Freeway Rick Ross was the biggest crack kingpin on the West Coast in the 80s and early 90s — this dude supplied the Bloods and the Crips. Ricky’s a tough man to get ahold of; he was actually on his own book tour as I was trying to reach him, so I’m glad he came through. Where his story gets really interesting is when he was involved in the Contra cocaine scandal. 

    The CIA was allowing the Contra rebels in Nicaragua to smuggle coke into the U.S. for buying more firepower and fighting communism back home. Freeway Ricky unknowingly took the Contra’s coke and cooked it up into crack before selling it in South Central, without realizing he was just a small pawn in a chess game of global politics. I’m not really a conspiracy nut, but it’s amazing that this whole scandal came to light—how the Agency knowingly used a foreign army pumping crack into the hood — and it makes you think about what else they might’ve done that we don’t even know about. 

    At the same time, the Feds were going down hard on the inner city to fight the so-called crack epidemic. Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act 1986 which meant that mostly black and brown people who were caught with five grams of crack got the same sentence as someone with half-a-kilo of regular blow. Freeway Ross ended up getting life, while none of the top players who approved the Contra plan wound up going to jail. That tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy, racism, and corruption in the war on drugs.

    In the book, you write about LSD in Tokyo. Can you talk about that?

    So the chapter on Tokyo is all about meth, LSD, and synthetics. I mostly fucked with the Yakuza (Japanese organized crime) and found out how they roll with being among the top meth dealers in Asia. But there was another group that was also quite interesting — a cult named Aum Shinrikyo or “The Supreme Truth,” which in 1995 carried out the deadliest terrorist attack in Japan, poisoning 13 people on the Tokyo subway with sarin gas. Like the CIA used to do in the 50s, the cult used LSD as part of their brainwashing. Maybe being on psychedelics made their wacky conspiracy theories believable. 

    Of the places you visited, which had the worst addiction problems? 

    When I was in Lisbon, the head of an NGO showed me a video of how this neighborhood used to look like. In the 1990s, Casal Ventoso was one of the biggest open-air drug markets in Europe and it really looked like a nightmare version of The Wire or a cheap movie set of the bad side of town. Dystopian scenes; crowds of ragged-looking addicts shuffling past crumbling buildings and filthy, trash-ridden streets. One guy was missing his arm. Portugal had a major heroin crisis — something like 1% of the population was addicted — but it’s precisely because their crisis was so bad that they managed to push through reforms and de-stigmatize addicts.

    Of the places I’ve been to now, it’s hard to say — everywhere has its problems — but probably the most widespread I’ve seen was in Kerman, an Iranian city near the Afghan border. It seemed like every household had at least one member smoking opium, or taryak, and you can see people lighting up pipes or spoons in the archways of the old market. Iran’s a very religious country and opium’s tolerated more than booze. But I’d say every other young person drinks, and there’s a rising alcohol problem because they’re too scared of getting help.


    Vafoor, or opium pipe, in Kerman, Iran.

    When do you think the world will stop criminalizing addiction?

    I think we’re slowly moving in that direction. The police in some parts of the UK have stopped targeting low-level user-dealers. A lot of the people I’ve talked to are cops, and as a former drug dealer that’s not a conversation I expected to have six or seven years ago! Then you’ve got someone like Boris Johnson inhaling a South American nose remedy, and he’s gone on to be leader of a country that used to own half the world. 

    I’m not saying they’re connected, but we’re starting to realize taking drugs doesn’t always lead to the worst-case scenario. A couple of months ago Malaysia, which was putting convicts to death, announced they’re following Portugal and decriminalizing drugs which means that you won’t end up in jail for having a gram in your pocket. And that’s a very conservative country; much more conservative than, say, Ohio. So I think there’s hope.

    What did you learn the most during your travels and writings?

    I think the most important thing is no matter how much you read, you’ll never truly know how the world works from your bedroom (or in my case, my cell). You’ve got to go to places and talk to people. Listen to them, even if they’re chatting complete bollocks, and try to understand why they think the way they do. We try to put everything in boxes — good or bad, left or right — but our world is too complicated for that. My agent called my book a fucked-up travel guide. I hope I’ve inspired someone to check out these places, if I haven’t scared the shit out of them already.

    There’s a sense that this is it, you’re fucked now. No one’s coming to get you. When you and I get stressed now we can take a walk; go outside; talk with our friends; but when you’re in prison, you’re stuck alone in a tiny cell till they let you out, and you start going crazy. When I was inside there were so many cutbacks they didn’t have enough staff to run the show properly, so sometimes we’d be locked up 23½ hours a day— suicides went sky-high that year.

    What takeaways do you want readers to have after reading your book?

    Look, you might not like the idea of your little cousin bouncing off the walls after a line of Bolivian marching powder. My mum read the book and she was fucking mortified. But dopeworld is everywhere, from scuzzy housing projects to the highest echelons of power, so we’ve got to find a way of living with it, otherwise families will keep getting torn apart and the bodies will keep piling up, whether it’s through prisons, gangs, or ODs. We’ve tried drug war, now let’s try drug peace.

    Search results from the dark web.

    View the original article at thefix.com

  • "The American Dream Is Built on Crime": An Interview with "Godfather of Harlem" Creator Chris Brancato

    "The American Dream Is Built on Crime": An Interview with "Godfather of Harlem" Creator Chris Brancato

    Even though he wants to help his community, Bumpy Johnson is an anti-hero. He is a criminal capable of extreme violence who is visiting horror on Harlem through the sale of drugs.

    Executive produced and written by Chris Brancato, EPIX’s Godfather of Harlem chronicles the complicated criminal life of Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson, one of the most notorious African-American mobsters. In 1963, Bumpy is released from an 11-year sentence in Alcatraz on a drug conspiracy charge. Upon his return to Harlem, he realizes that his drug turf has been taken over by the mafia. Bumpy, played by Forest Whitaker, butts heads with Vincent “The Chin” Gigante (Vincent D’Onofrio), the newly-minted head of the Genovese crime family. Heroin is the money drug, and Bumpy knows he has to control the distribution and the supply. The period crime drama also depicts Bumpy going head-to-head with Malcolm X (Nigél Thatch) and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. (Giancarlo Esposito). In supporting roles, Paul Sorvino plays mob fixer Frank Costello, and Chazz Palminteri plays mob boss Joe Bonanno.

    Brancato also wrote the 1997 feature film Hoodlum, about a younger Bumpy Johnson (played by Laurence Fishburne back in the day) and his battles with infamous gangster Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth). In Godfather of Harlem, Brancato revisits Bumpy as an older man fighting to regain his form.

    The Fix: When I interviewed you about your experience making Narcos, you described Pablo Escobar as a psychopath. Would you describe Bumpy Johnson in the same manner? 

    Chris Brancato: John, that’s a great question. Unlike Pablo, Bumpy was not a psychopath nor a sociopath. He was a multifaceted character and a complex human being. Yes, he could be violent, and he could deliver beat downs and such when they were needed, but he did not thrive off of the violence as Pablo did. Any violence that Bumpy committed was predicated on business or maintaining his turn. 

    In contrast, Escobar was fine with blowing planes out of the sky. He did not mind bombing bookstores and causing widespread havoc. He repeatedly caused the death of innocent people, and that’s something Bumpy Johnson would never do. 

    Like Pablo, Bumpy reached out to his community, helping people so they would help and protect him. Today, how would you describe his community outreach efforts? Was it pure self-interest, or did he truly care about the people of Harlem?

    In Narcos, we made a fascinating comment about the nature of drug money. When you have made so much money that you have bought everything you could think of buying, then it’s easy to give it to the people. You don’t need it. Escobar certainly had leftist tendencies, and he did build barrios for the poor. Some of those feelings were likely genuine, but a lot of what he did was self-aggrandizement. Escobar wanted to raise his stature in the eyes of the people of Colombia in general. He wanted to be viewed as a public figure. 

    In contrast, from the beginning of his life, Bumpy believed that education was the step ladder to success. He spent a fair portion of his life in prison, and he was extremely well-read. He promoted the values of education throughout his life. My college friend Paul Eckstein first told me about Bumpy Johnson. Paul is the co-writer on the pilot and the co-creator of Godfather of Harlem. His grandmother was helped by Bumpy Johnson; this African-American mobster paid for her to go to secretarial school. Bumpy also paid the college tuition of the father of the playwright Lynn Nottage, who has won the Pulitzer Prize for two of her plays, Ruined (2009) and Sweat (2015).

    Bumpy was all about education. Although he was well-known for his public gestures like handing out turkeys on Thanksgiving, his desire to improve his community extended well beyond such gestures. Bumpy wanted people to have the advantages he had lacked. He truly believed that education was vital to success. 

    Heroin is a bigger drug today nationwide than it was in Bumpy Johnson’s time. What do you think Bumpy would have said about such a development? 

    I have an interesting statistic to toss at you in regards to that question. In the 1960s and 70s, during the heroin crisis in Harlem, 90% of the heroin addicts were black, and 10% were white. Also, 90% were men, and only 10% were women. In today’s opioid epidemic, it’s actually reversed. 90% of the opioid addicts are white, 10% are black, and the male-female ratio is cut right in half, fifty-fifty. It’s a development that is hugely due to the prescription painkiller origins of the current crisis and the easy availability of OxyContin and morphine-based pain medication. Of course, it’s the same active ingredient. When people get tired of paying $60 for black market OxyContin, they might as well get a $20 bag of street heroin, which will last just as long, if not longer. 

    The show tries to suggest that Bumpy’s criminality was due to lack of opportunity. He wanted to go to city college as a young man, but they wouldn’t accept him. He tried to be a lawyer, but he was told it wasn’t going to happen. He was left between a rock and a hard place. Feeling there was no other choice, he turned to crime. 

    Thus, one of the themes of the show is how second-class, impoverished communities use crime as a step ladder. Crime provides money that leads to political, social, and cultural power. Such criminality continues until that second-class community is woven into the tapestry of the American dream. Crime does not require a college degree, and there is no barrier to starting a career as a criminal. You just have to be willing to take the risk. The fundamental precept that the American dream is built on crime beats at the very heart of the series. 


    Back Row: Chris Brancato, Forest Whitaker, Paul Eckstein; Front Row: Vincent D’Onofrio, Paul Sorvino, Chazz Palminteri (Courtesy of David Lee_Epix)

    When the five families of the American Cosa Nostra were first formed, dealing drugs—particularly heroin—was forbidden. Drug dealing could get a contract taken out on a made man’s life. In Godfather of Harlem, the mafia is neck-deep in the heroin trade. How and why did that happen?

    The fundamental word to use when talking about any criminal organization, including the Italian mafia, is greed. Movies like The Godfather emphasize that dealing in drugs goes against the rules of honor and so forth, but this is a mythic portrayal of the Italian mob. Goodfellas is much closer to the reality of what was happening. It’s more realistic in its depiction of the venality and violence of these men. The lack of honor of these men is much closer to the truth.

    Yes, throughout history, mafia dons have given lip service to not wanting to deal with drugs. However, it’s believed that Lucky Luciano established the heroin pipeline from Turkey to Lebanon to Marseille to New York City when he was exiled and living in Sicily. 

    I have a book of every mug shot the FBI ever took of someone that was reputed to be in the mafia. If you look through it, 70% of the charges behind those mugshots were for narcotics in one form or another. It’s specious to suggest that the mob wasn’t interested in the heroin trade because of some kind of honorable notion that we don’t distribute drugs. It was all about money, and the most money was in the drug trade.

    The prime fear to face in regards to drugs was not dishonor, but long prison sentences. When a mafia soldier is faced with a three-year prison sentence, they’ll keep their mouth shut. When they’re faced with a thirty-year prison sentence, however, they’ll rat out on their superiors to save themselves. Henry Hill from Goodfellas is the perfect archetype of that reality.

    One of my early Facebook friends was Henry Hill. He mainly was using Facebook to sell his paintings, which overflowed with mafia themes like guns firing and bottles of liquor and fast cars. 

    I’ll tell you a funny Henry Hill story. I had the great pleasure of having breakfast with Nicholas Pileggi, the writer of Wiseguy, the book that was the source for Goodfellas. Nick told me that when the book came out, he got a message from Henry Hill that said, “I need more copies of the book. I need like a hundred copies.” At this time, Henry Hill was in the witness protection program. Nick told him that he could get him copies, but he didn’t know where to send them. 

    It turns out that Henry Hill was staying at the Mandarin Oriental in Hawaii, a well-known fancy hotel. It was like the exact opposite of the Witness Protection Program. Henry Hill wanted to give out signed copies of the book to women at the bar so he could get laid. Of course, Henry was telling these women that the book was about him and that he wrote it. He told Nick that the book was working like magic, so he needed a bunch more sent to him. 

    Okay, next question: Drugs, crime, and family play a significant role in the series. I don’t mean crime families, but actual family life. Even in the families of the criminals, drugs lead to trauma. Can you talk about the trauma of drug abuse in families as a theme of the show?

    Since Harlem was wrenched with huge heroin addiction problems, families were torn asunder. Crime was out of control with family members stealing from their own homes. During that time, one guy told me you had to have three locks on your door. Addiction was a horrific blight on the community. 

    At the same time, Bumpy saw it as a commodity that was going to be there whether he was involved with it or not. He’d rather be the one organizing the trade than the Italians. He wanted to keep the money in the community, meaning in his pocket as well. At the same time, he has an addicted daughter. We bring home the storyline that the guy who sells dope has a drug addict in his own family, and sometimes under his own roof. In the course of the series, we plan to move into that territory where the dichotomy gets exposed, and Bumpy’s role gets challenged. 

    You have to remember that back in 1963, there wasn’t the lexicon of recovery that we have today. Dope addicts were looked at as fiends. In other words, you were stupid if you touched that drug because it gets you hooked. In that regard, Bumpy had a great deal of discipline on a personal level. He was never a drug user, and his favored drink when he went out was ginger ale.

    At the same time, Malcolm X, who is a major character in the series, knew firsthand about the seriousness of the drug problem. Part of the recruitment process of the Nation of Islam was taking junkies off the street and helping them to recover. He then was able to bring them into the fold. Saving people from themselves is a great recruitment tool. 

    In terms of family, when you’re doing a gangster show, you have characters who are morally compromised and who are anti-heroes. What you need to do to make them relatable is give them family lives. You need to know the people who are affected by the gangster and his choices who aren’t fellow criminals.

    In Godfather of Harlem, we spend a lot of time focusing on Bumpy’s family. We make a real effort to create three-dimensional African American women characters. They often get short shrift in these kinds of shows, particularly period pieces. We couldn’t let that happen because, at the time of our story, the backbone of the community in Harlem were the women. From the very first time we sat down, Paul Eckstein and I made it a priority to represent complex, fascinating, and diverse women from the African American community of that period. Family life, particularly their relationship with the women in their life, help us to tap into the gangster as a real human being.

    In Parade, co-creator Paul Eckstein said, “A lot of what we were dealing with in the ‘60s is exactly what we’re dealing with today.” What can we learn from the history portrayed in Godfather of Harlem?

    I believe the contemporary parallels of the two drug crises will make the series relevant for our time. Also, without giving any spoilers, we have a story of recovery in the first season that is very powerful. It will take many twists and turns over the course of the series. Paul and I often talk about the show as the ongoing education of Bumpy Johnson. Despite the fact that Forest Whitaker is playing him as true intellect, even though this gangster wants to help his community, Bumpy is an anti-hero. He’s a criminal capable of extreme violence who is visiting horror on Harlem through the sale of drugs. 

    Over time, incrementally, Bumpy is going to become more conscious of his own actions and their effect on the community at large. He also will start to breathe the fresh air of the Civil Rights Movement that is happening all around him. For me, Bumpy’s journey to a deeper realization and even redemption over time will be the home run of the show. I want to show how a criminal figure changes as he becomes more aware of the consequences of his actions and how they negatively affect his community.

    View the original article at thefix.com