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--:-- Shamita Basu: Welcome to In Conversation from Apple News Today. I'm Shamita Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News.
--:-- Shamita Basu: In 2014, Tony Hathaway was arrested outside of a KeyBank in Seattle. The police and the FBI had been looking for him for months. Tony had robbed 30 banks in a single year, all within a 30-mile radius of his suburban home. And he made it look easy.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Josh Dean first reported this story for Bloomberg Businessweek a few years ago. I think we all have this Hollywood view of bank robberies, where it's like a gang of people in elaborate Halloween masks who, like, staged this very choreographed robbery. You know, carrying machine guns and they get into a vault. And that was not what Tony was doing.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony was not a professional criminal, at least not at first. He was a family man, a loving father to two kids, an engineer making six figures at the aerospace company Boeing. He worked on the 747 and traveled the world in business class.
--:-- Shamita Basu: But after a serious back injury, Tony's family doctor prescribed him Oxycontin. And that's when his life started to fall apart.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I'm a heroin addict, and I had to do something, you know, to not just feed my drug habit, to also help take care of my family. So for me, it was bank robberies was the easiest way to get money.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony's story may sound unbelievable, but at the core of it, his experience with addiction is a really common one.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Here's Josh again. It's the story that thousands, if not millions of Americans could tell about someone that they loved who got addicted to a pill and their life fell apart. And it's the subject of a new podcast by Apple TV Plus called Hooked.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Make sure to check out the first episode of Hooked in our podcast feed. It opens with the day of Tony's last heist. You won't want to miss it.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Now, we don't want to give away everything you're going to hear on Hooked. But in my conversation with Josh, he explained why Tony decided to put so much on the line for what, at the end of the day, came out to not so much money.
--:-- Josh Dean: I remember the very first story I read about him. Actually, the story that I found that led me to write to him in prison was that this man in the Seattle area had robbed 30 banks. And I thought, wow, that's an unbelievably high number of banks. That's got to be some sort of historic record.
--:-- Josh Dean: If not, he'd done it in 50 weeks, but his total haul was $76,000. Now, that is a lot of money on its own. But when you divide that by 30 robberies, you see that he's walking out with like $2,500 each time.
--:-- Josh Dean: And if you think about the risk to himself, to others, that does not feel like a logical decision. So why did Tony arrive at this idea to start robbing banks? Like, what was that going to solve for him?
--:-- Josh Dean: Well, he was so desperate that robbing banks became to him almost a rational decision. Because at some point he lost his job. He lost his house. He was homeless and living with his son in a car and felt like the only way to make money at that point was to commit a crime because he really was at that point living his life in four or six or eight hour increments, which is just about where are you getting your next fix?
--:-- Josh Dean: Oxycontin has progressed to heroin for him. And so then he has a new drug, which he needs to get more often. It's cheaper, but you need to buy it all the time. So he needs a reliable way to make money. And in a moment of, I guess, desperation, just decided like, what the hell, I'll try and rob a bank.
--:-- Josh Dean: And as you'll hear on the series, the first one does not go well at all and leads to a really terrible thing, which is that his son goes off to prison. And then Tony's left alone, feeling especially lost and nihilistic and like he has almost nothing to live for, however, still addicted.
--:-- Shamita Basu: This is probably a good place for us to pause and explain how Tony's life got so dark, how it unraveled so quickly over the course of a year. It all started with a fall. Tony hurt his back and was prescribed Oxycontin.
--:-- Josh Dean: And at first, it made his life a lot better. I mean, he used the term miracle drug. He had been plagued by that point for several years with back pain. And one day, he says, as soon as he started taking the Oxycontin, and was able to go back to what felt like a more normal life, like get up and go to work without pain, get through the day without pain, be active again.
--:-- Josh Dean: By the time he was approaching a year, because obviously he needed the drug to feel good. The pain was only absent when he was taking the Oxy. But that wasn't it. What happens with opioids is that you get addicted very quickly. Your body becomes physically dependent.
--:-- Josh Dean: And also, as you take it for extended periods, the dosage needs to go up because your body gets adjusts to it, gets tolerant. So he goes from like 10 milligrams to 20 milligrams to 40 milligrams to 80, which is the maximum.
--:-- Josh Dean: And then it's like 180 a day to 280 days to three. And then not even that is enough. And he certainly is aware that he's got problems because if for some reason his prescription runs out or he forgets to take one one day, it's not just the back pain that comes back.
--:-- Josh Dean: That's not even an issue anymore. You start to feel this overwhelming sickness that addicts call dope sickness. And so he's aware of that within the first year, that he's fully out of control in the sense that he needs this medicine to feel normal.
--:-- Shamita Basu: What's the physicality and the psychology behind dope sickness? What does that actually feel like? How did Tony describe that?
--:-- Josh Dean: He describes it as the most miserable state he's ever been in. And I had that backed up by experts who say this is really the the insidious thing about opioid addiction is that I think a lot of us and myself included who have not been exposed to it personally always assumed or at least partly assumed that it was it was about getting high and that's not really what it's about with opioids.
--:-- Josh Dean: You're avoiding this horrific sickness that feels like the sickest you've ever been. I think he described it to me as like, imagine the sickest you've ever been and it worse than that because you can get out of bed, fever, chills, diarrhea, you shaking, you feeling like near death almost.
--:-- Josh Dean: And so because that state is so horrific and so traumatic, addicts will do anything to stay out of it. And that's what makes opioid addiction so difficult to get out of because you know that the only way to get out of it is you have to get through that state.
--:-- Josh Dean: And you're going to have to be in that state for some extended period while you work the tolerance and the dependence out of your body. So it really makes a lot of sense when you understand that, that why people get so stuck in this pattern and can't get out.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Tony was so dope sick that at a certain point, Oxycontin was no longer cutting it. That's when his teenage son, Connor, introduced him to heroin.
--:-- Josh Dean: Here's how Connor describes the conversation with his dad in the podcast Hooked. He comes to my room and says, what are you guys doing? I'm like, smoking. And he's like, what, is that oxy? I was like, no, but yeah, pretty much.
--:-- Josh Dean: And he's like, well, give me a hit of that, damn it. And I'm like, what? Okay. You know, I'm like, but just so you know, it's not oxy. It's heroin.
--:-- Josh Dean: Tony describes using heroin immediately fixed him up, and he never went back. And so if you boil it down, yes, it was his son who introduced him to heroin.
--:-- Josh Dean: He would have found it anyway. But the sad part of that, well, that's already sad. The additionally sad part of that is that then they began using together. And so their lives began to fall apart as a collective unit.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You talked about how for Tony, his opioid addiction became a heroin addiction. And now more recently, we're seeing the rise of synthetic opioids like fentanyl.
--:-- Josh Dean: Can you talk a bit about how we've seen the opioid crisis evolve over the past two or three decades?
--:-- Josh Dean: Yeah, so experts who've been following this crisis that's ravaged America tend to think of the opioid crisis as three waves. I mean, this is an oversimplification, but I think it's a useful one.
--:-- Josh Dean: And the first wave is largely ascribed to the arrival of OxyContin. I mean, opioids were around, obviously, before OxyContin. But what they were is they were more diluted versions that were prescribed under more strict controls by doctors.
--:-- Josh Dean: Now OxyContin arrives on the scene in the late 1990s. And not only is it potent, extremely potent, what's really different about it is the way it's marketed.
--:-- Josh Dean: So the Purdue Pharma, its maker, trained all of its legions of salespeople to go out and convince doctors that this is a thing you can give to patients over extended periods. Only a tiny percentage of people get addicted and it will change their lives.
--:-- Josh Dean: And yeah, it did change lives. People with chronic pain weren't in chronic pain anymore. But unfortunately, they turned into drug addicts. And so that's pretty much the state of the epidemic through the early 2000s.
--:-- Josh Dean: Obviously, some of those people discovered that heroin was cheaper. And OxyContin is basically identical to heroin. So when addicts realized that the pills were getting expensive or their doctor cut them off or whatever, family members said no more Oxy.
--:-- Josh Dean: That's why people started choosing heroin. In Tony's case, the second wave for him starts around 2010, which is when Purdue actually changed the formula, making the pills impossible to snort or inject or smoke.
--:-- Josh Dean: And that was a response to what they saw was happening, was that people were abusing the medicine. However, also there's like a cynical side of that, which is Purdue's patent was coming up.
--:-- Josh Dean: So by reformulating OxyContin in 2010, Purdue was able to renew its patent and continue to reap billions of dollars in profits a year. So the opiate oxy epidemic becomes a heroin epidemic.
--:-- Josh Dean: And then wave three, which we are in now, is the arrival of fentanyl, which is 50 to 100 times more potent.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Last year, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges for misleading doctors and patients about how addictive Oxycontin is.
--:-- Josh Dean: And as of two months ago, Purdue Pharma is now officially dissolved. A bankruptcy court judge approved a $4.5 billion settlement.
--:-- Josh Dean: The Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, will have to pay that amount. But other than that, the terms of the settlement clear the family and the company from further liability.
--:-- Josh Dean: The court ruled the money should go to addiction treatment and prevention programs.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Josh spoke with Tony about all of this, and Tony says it's just not enough.
--:-- Josh Dean: He very passionate and first of all angry at Purdue and the Sacklers personally. I feel like you know is not apologizing for his crimes in the sense that he feels like being addict made him a bank robber.
--:-- Josh Dean: Like he like I did my time and I should have. However, I chose to take this drug and become addicted. And that this is damage that was inflicted on this country by a company and a family.
--:-- Josh Dean: And why are they the only people who are not suffering here? I mean, he very much is disappointed by the settlement because the Sacklers will be rich forever.
--:-- Josh Dean: They're not personally suffering. They'll say they contributed $4 billion or whatever, but they have many billions left over. They're getting their names taken off museums, but they still have yachts.
--:-- Josh Dean: And I think he feels like a lot of things about the way that we handle opiates are still not quite right. He's pretty passionate about treatment.
--:-- Josh Dean: Feels like we don't quite get treatment, right? That 30 days, which is a typical inpatient treatment is not a long enough treatment so that we need to think about how much time people need to get their lives back in order.
--:-- Josh Dean: Because he went to treatment, I think, two or three times, and each time was buying pills literally on his drive home. And the only thing that got him clean was prison.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Josh, I want to go back to something you said at the very beginning of this interview that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.
--:-- Josh Dean: You mentioned that most people who rob banks today are people who are experiencing opioid addiction. Is that true?
--:-- Josh Dean: Anecdotally, that has been told to me by police officers that that is true. I mean, I don't have an actual statistic about what percentage it is, but cops that I talked to about it said that in their experience, that's absolutely true.
--:-- Josh Dean: Wow. That this type of bank robbery where someone runs in and demands money quickly and runs out, usually without much thought, is almost always a drug addict.
--:-- Josh Dean: And over the last decade, it's opiate addicts. So now it's, well, now we're into the fentanyl era, but it was Oxy and then it was heroin and now it's heroin and fentanyl.
--:-- Josh Dean: But yes, I mean, we've created an army of desperate, desperate people, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Now, not all those people go to the extreme that Tony went to, but a lot of them do.
--:-- Shamita Basu: I think one thing I hope the series does is it takes people inside the life of someone who has lost everything and has only one impulse, and that's to feed his addiction.
--:-- Josh Dean: What's Tony's life like today? He's getting it back together. He's been clean now for, well, since he went to prison.
--:-- Josh Dean: His son, Connor, who people get to know in the series, struggled quite a bit, even more than Tony, because he got out of prison, was on his own again, and got relapsed a few times. Also doing great.
--:-- Josh Dean: Yeah, they seem to be, they're doing great in the sense that no one's using, everybody seems optimistic. But also, Tony now has to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.
--:-- Josh Dean: I think he's a little wistful and nostalgic and sad that he doesn't have that Boeing life anymore and is now going to need to figure out what to do with himself.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You know, Tony's story is, of course, unusual in some ways. I mean, robbing banks is particularly unusual. But the way in which he became addicted to opioids through his family doctor is such a familiar story in America today.
--:-- Josh Dean: What was it about Tony's story that made you want to tell it and made you think that maybe there was something that people hadn't heard before in his story?
--:-- Josh Dean: I say in the first episode it's an exceptional story it's a story about a man who robbed 30 banks in one year and of course you're going to want to hear how and why that happened.
--:-- Josh Dean: But it's also a very typical story it's the story that thousands if not millions of Americans could tell about someone that they loved who got addicted to a pill and their life fell apart.
--:-- Josh Dean: And I think we need to look at addiction as a disease and as a serious health problem and not as a moral failure. And I think we're not quite there yet.
--:-- Josh Dean: I hope the show is part of the conversation that changes that way of thinking about addiction, which is that, and I'm guilty of it myself, frankly, of thinking in the past that people who were addicted to drugs, certainly heroin, were like moral failures or were like people who could have made a decision not to be.
--:-- Josh Dean: And I don't think about it that way anymore. And I think Tony would like people to recognize that. And I hope that by telling the story, we help people reframe their POV on addiction.
--:-- Shamita Basu: Josh, thank you so much for bringing us this story. I appreciate it.
--:-- Josh Dean: Of course. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Shamita Basu: You can find Josh Dean's new podcast, Hooked, on Apple Podcasts. And you can read the article that started it all, which Josh reported for Bloomberg Businessweek, by visiting our show notes page.
--:-- Shamita Basu: And make sure to check out the first episode of Hooked in our podcast feed.
