The Gabriel Plan: From addiction to self-sufficiency

0:00We've learned anything from these past couple of years. My fellow Americans, is that personal medical freedom and liberty are in crisis. America, our love, helps brings together the top experts in healthcare-related fields to keep you a beat ahead. I'm Dr. Randall Bach here to unpack myths, explorations, and give you actionable insights into the world of medicine and health. Ginny Burton began using drugs as a child and faced her fourth prison sentence at 40. Today she teaches personal change inside correctional facilities. Her book, The Gabriel Plan, asks what institutions must do to help people build lives they can sustain. Hopefully towards a better future we have with us Ginny Burton. Thank you for coming on the show, Gin. Oh, thank you so much for having me on Rand. I really appreciate it.

1:00So I suppose we could discuss either the reality of what you do now and or the pathway by which you got there. You can pick one. I think sometimes for listeners it's really good to understand who you're in the room with. So if we did an overview probably of where I came from and what makes me the credible deliverer of what it is that I do not I think kind of makes sense. All right, so tell us your story. I mean it's an incredible story. I heard it on one of these Megan Kelly Ancelari shows through crime or something like that. The name of it maybe you can tell us a little bit about that. And what's the crime part of your story? Yeah, well first of all, gosh, did you say what's the crime part of my story? So there's so much from a personal crime motivation to system, system crime. And so and I think that we both touched on that with what we're doing currently professionally

2:01in the world. So I was born into a family of addicts very early on. I began my relationship with the Department of Corrections in 1976. I was just four years old and then of course my relationship with substances began in 1979. So I was seven years old. So I was born into a family of addicts. I had absolutely no idea. I was tested as gifted at the age of three. So I was in Excel programs and I loved learning. And I think that's really important to note. I didn't really give it a lot of credence or credibility until well probably over the last couple of years. I didn't really understand what that meant nor was I concerned with it. But I think that some of the components or characteristics of the giftedness has really shown through when it comes to my I guess ability or drive to

3:06change a system so that we focus on improving the lives of the people that make up this country. And so anyhow, I started down a road, drug use, really without my consent, but my environment dictated how I participated in that. And I was seeking acceptance and love over doing what my internals or what my spirit said was the right thing to do. And so when that love is delivered through your own parents, it becomes I think the dominant factor in your life. So what I mean by that is my dad was taken in prison when I was four years old and my mom started the spiral of interactions with relationships that were extremely devastating to her and then had an effect on her children as well. And so my mom didn't seem to like me very much.

4:07And this really isn't a narrative to suggest that my mom was about a person. I truly believe that human beings practice behavior that is modeled to them without the awareness or the skill sets to change their behavior. And I see we think we see a lot of that in our world today. But I ended up following suit, though that was never my desire. And by the time I was 12 years old, I was using hard street level number products. By the time I was 14, I was smoking crackly pain. My own personal relationship with incarceration started at around the age of 12. And all of these things persisted until I was about 40 years old. And if you take a look at what's happening on any of your metropolitan streets, especially on the edges of our country. So on the east coast and the west coast, you'll see it more dominantly, the problem with addiction, though it has blood all through our entire country. You can only imagine, you know, based on what you see with an individual who is on the streets,

5:12the condition of their internal and then their environmental life. What I mean by that is personal self destruction and hatred, the destruction of, you know, family, ties and relationships and things like that, all in pursuit of drugs. So that was really the reality of my life for a long time. I became somebody I never intended to become because I became dependent on first, I became psychologically dependent. And then I became physically dependent on a relationship with drugs that absolutely took my life in a direction that I had never intended. And, you know, fast forward to what I wanted to say. I have utilized all of the really hard experiences that I am not upset that they happened, which I was for a long time. It was very resentful, very upset. I had an expectation on the system to deliver the skills necessary for me to navigate life differently. Once I was, you know, outside of things like prison and jail, those things never actually

6:16occurred. But I developed a process for myself and I would have never been able to develop this process had I not gone through all of the really hard things had I not become a drug addict, I not have started to commit crimes, had I not have had children that were then abandoned to the system because of my inability to care for self and anything else outside of me. And just a little bit of insight into what it means to be a drug addict. The pursuit of drugs became everything. And so I was willing to victimize not just myself, but others around me and, you know, make a real mess of all of the things that I touched, whether that was society, my children's lives, the people who cared about me. And the list goes on. You know, what I knew when I was arrested at the age of 40 because that's when everything changed. I was seeking death.

7:19The death was delivered through the last arrest and I had a realization as I was facing my fourth prison sentence that something needed to change. The system wasn't going to deliver it. The system was providing me the separation from the environment that I could not manage on my own. And it was time for me to get really busy. And so I went internal. I embarked on a journey inside and I really started to dismantle the mechanism, the internal mechanism, my thought processes, my messaging, all of the things that contributed to the destructive nature with which I lived in for more than three decades. And so, you know, here we are 14 years later almost. And I have not just personally overcome, but I deliver this process now inside of our carceral facilities.

8:20And we have really astounding numbers. People are turning their lives around. I have a really hard time subscribing to system narratives because it seems to me. And obviously to you based on our connection, that, you know, we are a country of industry. And people like me are low-hanging fruit when it comes to perpetuating these revenue streams that continue to progress this industry that has nothing to do with human flourishing. So, if listeners really sort of were able to grasp onto what I'm talking about there, that's awesome. If not, I'm sure we'll get into it a little bit deeper in our conversation. I assume the situation was desperate. And then people have this desperation, they try to get away from it. You know, how do you get outside that point so you can actually view it in a, you know, this kind of meta analytic way, philosophizing in a way, the luxury that you have right now?

9:22I mean, how does that happen? Yeah, that's a great question. And I love the setup. And I would have to agree wholeheartedly, especially with the description of the rackings and bears. I'll be honest with you. And nobody ever likes this answer. Every single time it's been incarceration. And sometimes people will ask me, well, then why didn't it happen the first time? I mean, arguably this is the thing. A incarceration creates a separation which creates a space of clarity. When instruction is absent in that space, people, human beings, most, most of us animals on the planet tend to function in patterns of behavior or habitual conduct. So when instruction isn't present, when you're incarcerated, you tend to navigate back toward these patterns of familiarity. So again, like I had said in my opening, you know, I had an expectation that system intervention

10:27would also provide instruction, which it did not. So every single time I was arrested or incarcerated, a level of clarity arrived, a desire for change or something different was present, but it lacked instruction. So how I was able to really, inside of the fishbowl, the clarity always happened inside of the fishbowl, but it was sort of one degree of separation from the chaos from the environment. So what you're describing with rackings on the streets, that's kind of being immersed in the drug addiction. So when I'm overturned in garbage cans, it's really hard because I'm functioning in a place of desperation or attachment to, for example, the drugs, right? And I can tell you this, is that any single person who becomes addicted to drugs, it doesn't matter. Your better judgment is 100% focused on getting, finding, and ways and means to get one

11:28more, whether you want to do that or not. And so the incarceration creates that separation so that you are not even in the environment with the ability to get the drugs. We've eliminated that though today and now we're putting replacement drugs in all of these drugs. No, it's the crazy thing. This is one of my efforts to fix. I have Jay Bhattacharya on my show four times and I've written for Brownstone.org and I've kind of like peripheral to the MAJ movement and I know some people in DC now and it's like I think this is a huge iceberg of which we only see the tip where helping people is with avoid withdrawal. This is kind of an interesting metaphor. The withdrawal, I mentioned about the fish and the tank, whatever, in order to see where you were, I mean you had to withdraw from society in a sense. You have to go through the discomfort.

12:30Yes. It's literally their potential stopping drinking coffee or what have you 100% and this is the thing Brandy and I think we'll agree on this from two different perspectives from the same fish bowl is if a person does not experience the consequence of the choices they made their destined to repeat it. We cannot just make everybody comfortable but we have an industry that does not have all of this is exciting. Anybody who's a parent understands the basically the conditioning psychology is necessary. We all come out little savages. We all want things we jump around a lot more energy and parents obviously are a little tamer than the kids and they have to navigate them. The kid knocks something over. It's like, oh that's so amazing. You are able to use your arms and overturn the fish tank say for instance like, oh wow, you're experimenting with the world. It's not how it goes.

13:33There's some obvious repercussions. You just stick your fork in the outlet. Wow, okay, I got a shock and I touched the oven. Oh wow, I'm not going to do that again. If you don't have negative mental or physical association with something then you will not learn not to do that. But harm reduction is a cushioning effect. We haven't really brought that term into art. I think there are loads of great words that have come up in social services whether it's affirmative action or DEI, diversity equity inclusion or harm reduction. Nobody doesn't want to reduce harm. That's always nice. But the thing with all of these things is they are couching some kind of other mechanisms by which I don't know, coincidentally are causally they themselves are able to get wealthy. So harm reduction keeps, as you say, kind of keeps the, let's say you are the zoo keeper and you make a reasonable salary keeping the zoo, you're not going to have a zoo without

14:37animals inside with cage and whatnot. That's kind of a harsh metaphor. But I think there's something there and we've been dealing with animals wear them out. So I suppose it's like a fable or something like that. But it has some aspect which is that you have to kind of follow the money and the money sometimes fall. Yeah. But the carceral system as you mentioned, our prison system whatnot, they're business models different. They are there as a firm structure and there's probably no shortage of people roaming their hotel. They're not like the Marit. They don't have to advertise. They have time on their hands. So it's kind of an interesting thing which is a different buffer from the people who are ostensibly there out to treat you and help you. So I like to really, I guess we could talk about your pathway further or the places in treatment that work and how they compare say inside prison from without. Yeah. Well, first of all, right now, I mean, you said a lot and I'm so in agreement.

15:45The focus today is long term management and just to sort of go back and just address that being back in 2002 right after 9.11. And I was sitting in an info session at Seattle Central Community College and it was projected that these industries were going to explode within the next 20 to 25 years. And that's really what we're looking at. So for me, Randy, I believe it's by design. So and it was right around that time, which I'm sure you're aware of because you were a first driver that Suboxone was being studied at the University of Washington in 2002 and 2003 and so. Yeah, boy, but I'm sure we'll get into that. I don't want to take it too far that way. But what we're seeing right now in today's world and this is my biggest challenge and argue that I don't want to dismantle the system. The system is a machine. I just want to create this other environment over here where we can cater to human flourishing and then let the people decide because I truly believe that our way out of this problem

16:49is to strengthen and stabilize those individuals on the bottom so that they're no longer willing to drink the poison. That's the only way we're going to make the market shift when market demand changes, the market will shift. And so that's what I truly believe. And so that's one of the reasons I love the carceral facilities because. I've never met a person that tries to engage with the service or who is separated from their destructive path that doesn't want to change the outcomes once they are released because arguably a lot of people, I would say the majority, the larger percentage of people serving time come from a similar background as mine. Not all, but a larger percentage. And I would also suggest that people don't have the driving desire to destroy their lives and to end up in places where they have no agency, no autonomy or authority to act in ways

17:51that they choose to act. Jenny Burton says separation from drugs creates room for change but people need instruction to use that room. After the break, we'll examine what she teaches and what she believes treatment should accomplish. America outlawed pulse always be to head. Are you struggling with thinning hair? Try roots from the wellness company. This doctor formulated non-oily hydrogel uses seven powerful peptides and key nutrients to nourish your scalp and support visibly thicker healthier hair. Visit twc.health4thslashoutload and use code out loud for 20% off your first order. That is twc.health4thslashoutload. During treatment, the structure of tap water gets messed up. Yes, we have to purify water but what are we doing to fix the water structure so the body can actually absorb it? That is why we created our lab certified structured water devices. These devices restore water molecules back to their natural structure just like a mountain stream, making them highly absorbable. It's not how much you drink, it's how much you absorb that counts.

18:52Better hydration, better energy all day. Get one for your home or on the go at chemicalfreebody.com forthslashout loud for an exclusive discount. That's chemicalfreebody.com forthslashout loud. Welcome back I'm Dr. Ramabock, your own pack myths, explorations and give you actual insights into the world of medicine and health. We're back with Ginny Burton, author of the Gabriel Plan. She calls her work a change program.

19:52Its purpose is to help people choose differently and build the lives they want. I truly believe addiction, whether we're aware of it intellectually or not, tends to catch in the individual because this is sort of, this is partially what happened with me is that I recognize that the use of substances not only helped me to gain a level of acceptance, personal self acceptance, but it also gave me an escape to the things that I didn't have the skills to navigate. That becomes very addictive to the individual. I don't know really pretty much 100% of the people that sit in my classrooms have been addicted. I don't have a treatment program, I have a change program, I teach people how to choose differently to develop the lives that they want.

20:53The beauty of that inside of a cultural facility is that they're already suspended, they're already separated. However, the medication assistive treatment are now MOUD so that the treatment component isn't on the end of that anymore. What's MOUD is like, I wrote an article in the MOUD for my sub-sac. Medication, what is it, opiate? Yeah, opiate medication for opioid use disorder. The treatment component is no longer attached with Medicaid or the insurance reimbursement. That's what somebody gave me that little piece of information. What we're seeing on the streets now, this is the difference between incarceration and our treatment environment. However, they are beginning to overlap. And today, I'm going to tell you, I have two adult children who have a relationship with substances and both of them have been to, I hate substance use disorder.

21:57They've been to addiction a couple of times and recently my stepson went to a detox facility. He was higher in detox than he was on the streets because they are prescribing. If you're prescribing, there's got to be a psychiatrist involved in that or an ARMP and they are without diagnoses, they are prescribing anisocytotics and other very, very mood changing mind altering substances. The moment that an individual enters into the quote unquote treatment addiction treatment space, that is extremely problematic. See, Randy, I was lucky. When I was in active addiction almost 14 years ago, last time things were still illegal. Drugs were still separate from our treatment environment. Unless you had an opioid use history or, and meaning that you had to come in with heroin

23:05or opiates in your system to be able to get something like suboxin or methadone to taper in typically in detox facilities, you were not getting methadone. You might get libraum and other kick stuff. You might get some benzodiazepines in the very short term, not more than 72 hours. And you might get on request if they had the ability to prescribe suboxin for a couple of days just to do a rapid detox. That was the only thing you were going to get in detox. That is not what's happening now. You go into detox and then you transfer to a treatment facility from detox and you are prescribed and required to be on these drugs. Otherwise they say you're in refusal for treatment. It is now considered pharmaceutical intervention. So all the stuff that we used to do and they're training it in our schools.

24:08When a person goes in to study substance use disorder counseling or whatever the heck they call it these days, those are the things that they're being indoctrinated to believe, all of the pharmaceutical intervention practices. And so they're starting to do it in our prison system as well. I'm lucky right now the one institution where I teach the process that I've developed currently is very remote and does not have an active medication line and does not have active access to the medical facilities that most of the other prisons in the state do. However, it is fast encroaching in that in December as well. Yeah, now I think this lot there going back, I'm going to leave some of what you said just there for a second while I segue into the idea that getting back to the kind of

25:08fish bowl aspect. You can clean the fish bowl, you can change the temperature, whatever, and the fish will be affected one way or another. So I don't want to carry that example too far except to say that the problem we see is society, let homeless on the street and the addiction, whatever, that's not the forever default position of our places whether it's the east, west coast or any place in between. I like to look at things temporally and geographically. There are lots of other, we can experiment state by state, country by country and time by time. So there's clearly, I'm old enough to remember, I grew up in New York City, a New York City that had its issues, it was kind of similar to current phase in the 70s wetter, but there weren't people lying around on the streets. Every now and then you might see a beggar, but we didn't see encampments, we didn't see people

26:11under the, we didn't see those scaffoldings that are all over the city endlessly for other reasons that's a whole insurance, whatever, I don't want to get into that. But you keep it. Oh, remind me, Randy, don't, sorry to interrupt, don't let me forget, I want to send you an email with something from HUD that I attended that's going to give you a little bit of insight in why we've seen that explosion from the homelessness perspective. Absolutely, no, I appreciate that. And to that point, these things came because of structural changes within our statutes and the way we react to those statutes. You and your own book mentioned, I think I do as well in my Martin versus City of Boise, I think it's called, and later, Rance Pass. So this is obviously Boise Idaho, and I don't know who sued her on what we have, I don't really know the case intimately, but basically that happened some time ago within, I think the 90s, maybe I don't forget the time exactly. And all of a sudden, everyone said, oh, we can't take somebody off the street unless there's a

27:11place to put him. And so homelessness, everyone just kind of threw up their hands because it would cost $100,000 to take a vagrant off the street. And so they didn't have to, it had to like marshal all the forces and all of a sudden, so these things obviously grew. Rance Pass is kind of the undoing of that, but it didn't happen uniformly everywhere. People looked at this decision, the Boise decision in different ways in different places. So, you know, Indianapolis looked at it differently from Seattle. And so places like LA and Wanda, they interpreted it. And as we have to just let them go. And places where there's good weather, these can't be relatively good weather, these can't be grew and grew and grew. And they can be year round. And you see, I've been out to LA, and they're just endless, you know, like you can go drive a mile in certain places on roadside and see these places that did, for me it was associated when I was a kid with say, oh, Calcutta, whatever, people on the street living in tents and parts of Africa, you know, I drove through Mexico as a, you know, young guy. And they were just like, oh,

28:13shanty towns, we're seeing that here. We don't have to. It's not part of societal default. And, and, you know, so I bring that up only as far as what you're talking about, certain of the things that are changing. It's like sobriety is not going to be part of, you know, prison. If they, if we just, you know, add the methadone or buprenorphine, we think we're helping. But in fact, we are fostering a place where we don't ever hit that zero point, which is the natural default of society. And frankly, every mammal on earth, we don't have drugs in our system when we're born, unless we seek and hunt those things out. We're not experiencing heroin or crack or meth deficiencies in our brain. And so we're now self-medicating. You know, Randy, I hate the term self-medicating. Oh, you feel about that. As an addict, when I hear people, I'm like, oh, that's industry and doctoration, you know, because it's suggesting that everybody has a mental illness, which I think is problematic also, not to swirl out on this other topic. But we have indoctrinated a society to consider what we're seeing mental health. And this is what I

29:19can tell you. And I'm sure you probably see this as well. As a prescribing doctor, drug side effects, fit criteria in the DSM, whatever version that now becomes prescribable, right? And Medicaid or insurance, free and versatile. And so yeah, it's driven me absolutely. Absolutely. No, we recently intersected on the substact. And people should follow you on substact and elsewhere. We can get into that a little bit. They can find you as they spell your name right and whatnot. Yeah. They'll be able to find you in Gabriel clan and so forth, which I recommend. It's a great read. And frankly, you know, I posted a yesterday day before. Wow. I just kind of page from your book. I apologize for that. But it's just amazing. I lost my question here. But oh, I know what it was. The mental health parity thing that I wrote great article by the way. Oh, my gosh. The thing is just something that nobody talks about that what happened. Our world

30:23changed when we came up with this again, nice caring thing mental health parity. Who doesn't want mental health parity? We want parity for everything. You know, there's nothing wrong with parity. You know, we're all having equal chances at work. What happened with mental health parity is that you would treat a problem with your, you know, with like something with your brain is the same you would treat a spring. So a spring, you can you can pretty much, you know, diagnose you could find you see it on em or you don't really do it. But you would see it on MRI. You'd see a spring. So it's a ripping of, you know, the ligaments a little bit. And you can see a broken bone. You can see you know, hepatitis, whatever. You can see a lot of things one way or another, you know, forensically, either by lab tests or x-ray, whatever. We can find things. But once once this kind of mental health parity and the essential, the concept behind it, the caring, sharing, nurturing part of it is that we don't want somebody with mental health, you know, issues not to be able to see a doctor, you know, insured and want and have to pay out of his pocket. And so they came with this concept, I think it was, you know, term of art probably in the 80s, whatever. But it kind

31:27of got into the 90s and the zeros and whatnot. So that insurance has had to and they become less and less insured, like you're not insuring, insuring your car so much, insuring all kinds of things and becomes a benefits program. And so what happens is that, you know, all of a sudden the insuresis are obligated to treat things that are far more nebulous, like all the, what I call the four and potentially five A's, the four A's or the apocalypse, the addiction, autism, ADHD, anxiety, those are the first four. And then the other one I kind of kind of slide in is autogonophilia, which is, you know, is gender dysphoria. And once these things get paid for, my point here, from getting to a point, believe it or not, one at my point is that once these things got paid for, guess what, there's more of it, you know, that the doctors, you know, psychiatrists who were writing this stuff, all of a sudden they got codes for this and they have to get paid because insurance has to cover this stuff. So things that again, for my childhood, you know, back in the palace, everybody blocks to the umbrella that's delivering the dollar for the regular standard family plan or

32:34extra in real dollars. It's about five thousand dollars a year just devoted because we changed this terminology. Now, did the world get the, do we make the world a better place as a result? So now everyone has access at another A to, you know, all these treatments is the world better for having had it. I obsess about all of these things. Your article where you talk about the mental parity was so I waited until before I went to bed last night and I read it and I was like, oh my gosh, this is my twin. But you, I'm going to tell you there was a personal connection to, especially the autism piece and I'll tell you why I have three children, one pastor, way in 2024. All three of them have suggested through external pressure that maybe they're autistic. So that really hit home because my kids are not autistic. They accuse me of being autistic. So that suggests that industry is leaking messaging into every area of our society

33:36because what does that do that lends to the industry, right? So anyways, we have, well, I want to go back actually and I, well, and I'll ask you, I want you to think about this question. Do you really think that we're just trying to help and solve the problems? You know, I think that we have people at the helm of these industries that are far smarter than we're giving them credit for and for me, I feel like for me and maybe it's the same for you. I have to give even the people that are really smart at the top and I'm not suggesting that the rest of us aren't. I'm just saying that we're being duped that I have to give them grace because if not, I walk around pissed off all the time. But anyhow, you know, this is the thing. We have convinced everybody and I was talking to a friend the other day, a girl who's went through my program in the community. She is getting off of 17 years

34:41quote-unquote anti-depressing use. She was put on and out of the teenager along with birth control, which is a hormone impactor. I don't even know how they work, but you know us as women, we've been labeled crazy. I have allowed my crazy to be a thing for a long time and I chose street level drugs. Sometimes I think it's better than the pharmaceutical approach, but only because it doesn't seem to have affected me in the same way that pharmaceuticals have affected other people. But you know, as she was getting off of these drugs and I said, you know what, you have to understand is that you've been indoctrinated, you know, because maybe you were hard to deal with when you were a teenager. There's a system that told you that flat lining is a baseline that we should all reach for. That's just not accurate. We have an industry that suggests that this is a baseline that normal people, right, this gauge on a washing machine or a dryer that normal is within this space that not

35:47one human being actually functions in and that pharma or our medical industry can actually deliver. Jenny Burton challenges the assumption that a comfortable patient is a recovered patient. After the break, I'll ask her to put her proposed approach into concrete terms. America, Allah, pulse, always be the head. Mom, Tyler sneezed on me directly on you. Twice. Let's face it, kids bring home more than homework from school. Clear nasal spray is a gentle mist of saline plus zyletal to clean and block bacteria and viruses in your nose. And it helps rinse away what they've been breathing all day. No drugs, no rebound. Make it as routine as washing hands. Can I have a snack? Wash your hands first. Learn more at clear.com. That's x-l-e-a-r.com. Clear. Breathe better. Live better. Are you looking for healthy snacks, but you've had enough of all this sweet, sugary energy bars? Good news. There's a new bar to try that's savory, crunchy, and packed with

36:51goodness. Beer bars are based on just six simple natural ingredients. A certified organic veggie nut and seed bar that's low-tembed ride, never baked or fried. Beer bars are plant-based, gluten-free, and loaded with nutrients and protein. Head over to beerbore.com forward slash out loud and get the exclusive discount just for America Out Loud listeners. That's b-e-a-r-b-a-r.com forward slash out loud. I'm Dr. Renable Bach here at Unpacked Myths, Explorinations and Giving Action Landsites to the World of Medicine Health. Ginny Burton is with us for a final segment. We'll turn to accountability and the practical work of helping people regain authority over their lives. We've created all of these other things surrounding it. I really love, I just really love the way that you look at this stuff. You've put language to my 30,000-foot view from a person that was looking at it from the inside of the 15-foot mud pit. Or it's like, okay, I think this is what I'm seeing and this is how I see it impacting people like me. This is a problem because my freedom actually exists in having to

37:54face the hard things. In existing in the nose, because the nose, when I think about parenting my own children, and I was doing for because I didn't want them to have to have the experiences that I had, and biggest problematic approach that I ever, ever participated in, because as my frustration grew that my kids would squander the resources that I gave them, that I had to work really hard for and sacrifice myself or my own needs or desires, and not really having an understanding of why are they not respecting or valuing these things? Well, because they didn't have to work for it. The working title for my book right now is Four Months to Freedom, Escaping Opiate Addiction and Maintenance. The title was originally with Draw to Freedom, Escaping Opiate Addictions Maze,

38:58and that was given to me. The concept of the title was given to me by Dr. Anthony Daniels, who has long written under the pseudonym Theodore Dowrup on his. He was a guiding life for me. He wrote a book, Romance and Opiate, which in the UK, in the original form, he's British, was called Junk Medicine, a retelant of William Burrow's title, but in a sense, Junk Medicine, he gets double on Tondra that they're treating this issue with Junk. They're treating the Junk, plus it's Junk. They're placing one Junk with the state and... Yeah, and it's obviously a double on Tondra, because he's basically labeling it bad medicine, Junk Medicine, it's like the Junkyard medicine. So it's cute to end, Eric. For some reason, that title was deemed too harsh for the American audience, so the American publisher had changed it to Romance and Opiate, which is interesting, because the thing really... Well, yeah, because Junk Medicine could actually be an indicator that Pharma doesn't know what the hell they're talking about. Right. Well, it's not... I don't like the blame

40:01pharma per-safe of this, because I don't think the opioid epidemic is a pharma-generated thing. Everyone, like here, we can... Well, I don't think it's not the epidemic, Randy. I don't think the epidemic is a pharma-related thing. I think it contributed just like anything else, but this is what I do know, is that Pharma absolutely 100% has a business model that intends to increase and grow, because they focus on capturing more... Right. ...participant. I think there's obviously the kind of cocktails that you get in detox these days, and that is part of that, but I personally see it as more of a human-based thing. I see it as... I see it as the methanol. Can I just say this though? I want to say this, and not to interrupt you, but I walked into... I'm obsessed with this topic. I am obsessed with it, because I'm watching more and more people be captured by it, and I'm watching similar language be... ...blet into organizations where people like me who have gotten clean are now pushing the poison on to others, and this is what I can tell you. I walked into a Starbucks a couple of months ago,

41:05and they're... for whatever reason, and I was just having a conversation with God while I was driving. I had the peace, so I had to stop, and so I was just having a conversation with God, and I said, God, if you want me to divert my attention, you're going to have to help me stop being obsessed with this topic. So I walk into this Starbucks. I see these three people having a conversation, and I didn't know if it was a mom and a dad and a kid, but what happens is I go to the bathroom, I come back out, and I hear the phrase addiction recovery, and it is a customer service, representative, or a community rep for Indivier. And you know who Indivier is, and they are talking about how they're going to capture, they have this app. This one seasoned rep is training two other reps, and I only know, because I turn... I was like, you've got to be kidding me, I turned around,

42:07and I looked... This was not 10 minutes after I have this conversation with God. I turn around and look, and I see on all of their laptop screens, this study that is lending to the targeting of not just doctors' offices, but other industries, that they're going to target in specific towns, local to where I am, of how they're targeting prescribers. So this is the thing. Do I think that it starts out as I do not? I think it starts out as health, and the thing that makes them believe that it starts out as health is because there was restricted prescribing methods that were attached to Bupernorfen and Suboxone in the beginning, because I was somebody that was buying the octagon pills as it was being studied at the University of Washington to the study recipients. That was homelessness exploded, but this is what I know. Money

43:09insights greed, it does. Yeah, no, there's a term for that. I wrote a book called Over-Turning Zika, and it was about the Zika of Microsoft Lee Panic Pandemic of 2015-16, mostly in Brazil, but it kind of affected the world in a sense, it kind of gave a power to the Rio Olympics 2016, and it was big in the news and traveled, changes, whatnot. But it disappeared. Nobody explains why. But in the run-up to why this became a thing, I think it's kind of a tool of mania, hysteria in a sense, and I want to get too far into Over-Turning Zika. But the reason I bring it up is because the term that I heard from Andrew Klaven is apt. It's a conspiracy of interests. So that's different from a conspiracy. The example I give a conspiracy of interest is like, I go outside, listen, get me, getting back to the raccoons and whatnot, I go outside, and it's a hot day and I've got a triple stacked ice cream cone, and I'm walking along. And the raccoons are minding their own business and they're not attacking me, they don't want the ice cream cone, because they're not in part of their consciousness, and the ants and the flies and the bugs,

44:13and I don't know, whatever, the birds, nobody's thinking about that. Maybe they look at it, but they don't do anything. And so, but it's a hot day, the whole thing topples and it winds up on the ground. I'm not going to pick it up, if I're desperate, maybe, but I'm not. So I'm going to leave it there, it's ice cream. What am I going to do? Now, if you come back 20 minutes later, the ants, the birds, the raccoons, and they're all bickering over this thing, they, so, you know, they didn't anticipate the ice cream foam, but once it does, they have to mobilize because there's ice cream, and there's something to be had. So the conspiracy of interest is in this case of Zika, microcephaly, that there was a lot of interest in Brazil, anyway, from the left mostly, to overturn the abortion constraints, because it's a Latin American Roman Catholic country historically, to get rid of that. So, once Zika, microcephaly came along, everyone was like, oh my god, the ice cream fell, they had, they scutt, they started really quick to get, to pick up the pieces from that, to make something out, to fill their own needs. And so they went, they made, you know, injunctions against, to allow abortion, all right. My point here is that, you know, things happen along the way. You know, this, the

45:17Mirfoldon thing started with Vincent Dolmary Nicewender and a marriageing crack at the Rock of Hill University in New York City. And it was not about addiction per se. So I've written on this topic extensively, and it was about treating crime in New York City, because it was the sexy, and they, and New York City being a really mobile play is not cars so much, but you get in that of the subway, so you can kind of disappear, you can steal something. On Fifth Avenue, you can, you know, zip into the, you know, Lexington Avenue subway and zip, and you're in Harlem, nobody's gonna chase you, what, not no video cameras back in those days, and what, now so, so the crime could just happen and be happenstance, and that's that. And no, no guns, nobody's self-protecting in what, not New York City. So they're like, oh my god, crime, what are we gonna do about it? Well, Vincent Dolm came with the methadone concept of, you know, replacing. So basically, if they had had, you know, obesity problem in Harlem, you know, rather than dealing with why they're obese, or they had a starvation problem, either way, and they want a doughnuts, and they're stealing everything, you know, what you're doing is basically throwing doughnuts at the problem without

46:18addressing why the problem there or why they're stealing to fix it, which is too separate issues. You're trying to provide the thing that the addict is seeking, and I totally understand that, however, right now we're, we're looking at capture, which it has evolved. So that's my challenge now, because now the industry is really looking at progressing, but we're seeing this in all of these other spaces that you're talking about. And there are stakeholders in all of it. We have the providers. We have the insurance companies. We have medical and mental health, you know, practitioners. We have all of these different industries, and everybody has some skin in the game, and they want more. All right, so let's talk about your book, how people can get it. And I actually want to talk about your kind of 10 point plan, you know, the Gabriel plan, and we can, you know, get a little segue for your title, but you actually, it's an experience. Your book is, you know, I always tell people, my book is like certain, certain, you know, minns, you know, it's like breath mint and a candy mint, like two books in one. My book is like an intellectual pursuit of

47:21how the whole thing happened, and a separate book about how to, what you do if you're loved one, presumably or yourself, are admired in this kind of addiction, you know, you know, rat mo, roach motel. You can't quite get in your, you're stuck in there. And so how to turn it to something else, but you actually have kind of a 10 point plan, and you want to actually change things. I mean, you are an activist in the best sense of the word, you're active, and you're working on something that needs, you know, fixing. So where do we go from here? How do they buy the book? What's the useful part from the book that you, you know, lead people with? Or you could be a policy maker? Yeah, great question. So you can find the book is called Gabriel plan 10 points to recover our nation. And it's on Amazon, it's on Barnes and I will. It's on probably all of the different book sites. Publish it through Amazon. You can also get on my website, which is vginnygion and ybructln.com. You can get a link there to purchase the book. I think the biggest takeaway for me with all of it.

48:24And the focus of the book is that, I mean, in regards to systems, systems could actually profit off of human flourishing as opposed to human decline. And right now we have a massive system across many sectors in our country of human decline. But the focus is really accountability. And I think that accountability has gotten a really bad name. We look at it as criminal justice intervention. Accountability just means checks and balances really. And we need it at every single level of our country. But specifically, the focus of systems and services really needs to be helping to educate, equip, and stabilize every individual to become the strongest version of themselves. And utilizing our systems in order to do that, you know, we have a lot of perspectives on prison abolishing and compassion focus. And not having people be uncomfortable. We've used all

49:24this language to indoctrinate our very well-meaning young intelligent people to become not just advocates, but soldiers for these problematic approaches. As much as I believe that these approaches that you and I have been discussing on this call started out with good intention, I don't think there's one person that can see that they are not actually lending to the stability of the individual being served. And that, my friend, is my problem. And so when I know that not just me, I am not an anomaly. I know thousands of people just like me who, and we're able to be separated long enough to gain clarity and to build a life, work living a life that helps them actually accomplish and achieve the components of stability and self-sufficiency that lend to them having agency and ownership in their life. That is the argument for the entire book. It is about really developing community with the individual first and being able to help them address their deficit areas both internally and

50:28externally to become the strongest version of who they are, to reunify families and to create community safety, reduce taxpayer burden, and really perpetuate the very things that all of society suggests that we're trying to do today. In a nutshell, that's what it is. If I were able to wave a wand, I would hold every single facet of our society accountable to actually conduct business in a way that lends to human flourishing and stability. What would you have on the structural basis for the treatment centers in one, if you could, you know, be his assistant, say, and or, you know, speaking about prisons and whatnot, I mean, I think there are a few different things that I think you might say, but I'd like you to give us an idea. Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, for inclusivity sake, you know, you have pharmaceutical relationships early on in treatment to for rapid detox purposes to help the person get through the hardest parts if necessary,

51:30and then you focus on the abstinence-based model where you're literally assessing specific life domains and with many of those things being internal, and having a lived experience component that is involved in that. When I talk about lived experience because I'm going to tell you, I've worked with different state departments who say, oh, for example, when focusing on poverty, we have lived experience. We're working with people that are homeless right now to help us develop this thing. Well, how are you going to have people currently living in poverty help you develop something to help people get out of poverty? If you've never gotten out of poverty, you don't know how to help get out of poverty. Well, that's the important. The live experience is the fixing on it. We have to have experts at the table, and I'm not talking about the people that studied the content from a fourth degree of separation, and I'm not talking about, I knew somebody that knew somebody, and that's how I wrote this article that is now peer reviewed where the peer review is in the same educational silo as the information that was the hypothesis and a theory in the first

52:34place. That was what I really recognized at the University of Washington. I'm like, oh, these people, though they're very intelligent, they're also our next generation of leaders who have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, and they're creating all these ways. There's intelligence, and then there's wisdom and experience. The pathway for me is like intelligence, experience, wisdom. I haven't gotten there, but ostensibly what it is. You get a lot of smart people. I come across young people a fair amount. I'll give you one example I put in one of my recent stories. This is like 15 years ago, maybe 20 years ago. Young college freshman, he's talking about the homeless problem. It was a problem then, and he's like, oh, I want to fix homelessness. It turns out he's divorced parents, both of them are wealthy. He actually has a home with a mom, a summer home with a mom, a home with a dad, and some home with a dad, as well as a little college dorm. I said, oh, come, George. I said, George, and I said, I try to act stupid, which is not that hard for me.

53:38I said, George, homeless thing, I bet we could get somebody reasonably vetted, and if you have five bedrooms, where I see it, and five homes, while you're only at one at a time, and maybe the summer one you're not going to use in the winter, maybe we could get somebody in those homes to be in your bedroom. You could solve... You're not using it. Yeah, when you're not using it, they could probably even... You could probably tax them from one to the other while you're moving in. We want to be one. He's like, those are my bedrooms. You literally said that. I'm like, oh, okay, and I stopped. I didn't say anything else. Obviously, the moment stuck with me, but it's like so much of what happens out there. It's like, oh, PM, other people's money. You know, we'll not take... Yeah, 100%. Nope, I agree with you. And this is the thing, like I say it all the time. Oh, all of you folks that think that prison needs to be abolished. I want everybody to go take a prisoner home. That's being released right now. Yeah, all of you people that think that these encampments are somebody's

54:39home. I want you to go spend the night in a tent in one of those places. I know. I know. Yeah. I am one of them. I am one of them, but this is the deal. In a meaning that I am one of those encampment dwellers. I am one of those prisoners who was not. I was very dangerous at different times. And so when we have opinions about things that we know nothing about, we have no business making policy-based decisions, top-down decisions for what those environments should look like. And so though I believe that these things are developed in a well-meaning state of existence, there's so much separation between the reality of how to actually address them and you know, what our ideas are. It's just crazy. And so, you know, we have to separate people and have the right people at the table and the right people in the classroom and have a collaboration. It takes a village. And we need to let the people who actually know what the hell they're talking about

55:40develop the process out. Yeah. I agree with you there. And so I'm going to let you have the last word there. Any final last last last words, people can find you at the site you mentioned, V. Ginny Berk. Yes. Ginny Berk, you can find me on socials that way as well. Randy, I hope this is not our last conversation. Oh, I very much appreciate that. You know, I got to say, you know, I didn't wake up in a dream thinking this, but I think we should, you know, mutualize book tour at some point. I mean, virtually, because I think there's a lot of stuff, you know, you have aspects in your book. I'm like, Oh, damn, I wish I put that in mind. I know you have stuck in yours too. Just the articles that are bread so far where I'm like, Oh, my gosh, I'm so I'm like, yeah, this just made me feel like two lunatics on earth. You know, we just happened to bumped into each other. I know a couple of other ones, but we're all spread out. Yeah. All right. Well, it's a funny thing. Thank you so much for being on my show. I really appreciate it. I very much enjoyed meeting you. And I got to thank, perfectly, my friend who kind of quote unquote, turned me on in a benign way

56:45to your podcast. And I didn't take to it. And initially, I'm glad I stuck with it because your story is amazing. And I hope people find you and help support you through all methods possible. And I think we have some, you know, collaboration in the future. Oh, yes, we do. I have, I like explosive ideas about how we could redevelop some things. So all right. Thank you. All right, my friend. That's all for today. Remember every myth has a solution and every truth has the power to transform your health. Find us on America out loud pulse radio every Friday at 5 a.m. Eastern or on demand. Wherever you get your podcasts, stay curious, stay informed, and we'll see you next week. America allowed pulse. Always be there.