Gas Station Heroin Linked to 2 Student Deaths At Ole Miss, Father/Son Duo Face Federal Charges

0:01 Body Bags with Joseph Scott Moore. Have you ever heard people say after work, I'm going to stop off for a quick one, right? And that can mean any number of things relative to alcohol consumption. It could mean, you know, I'm going to go to my local watering hole, maybe throw back a highball or two, or I'm going to stop by I don't know, the local convenience store. And, you know, grab a Tallboy, right? And have that ready for me when I get home. And certainly in some cases, driving down the road consuming it. But we won't go there today. But can you imagine walking in to your local convenience store and saying, you know, to the guy behind the counter, you know, I'm having a lot of trouble with sleeping at night. I'm having trouble. trouble with anxiety,

1:01 and I just want to escape my reality. What can you sell me? Well, today we're going to talk about a substance that was sold to two young men, or at least they acquired it and ingested it, in Oxford, Mississippi. And to be honest with you, I think that this problem extends much further than Oxford, Mississippi. Its problem is that is going on in a lot of places, and that is these compounds that you can pick up at your local convenience store. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. Dave, you know they catch your eye when you go into a convenience store to pay, and you'll see these kind of brightly colored uh festooned packets you know with bright lettering and all these sorts of things and it kind of draws the eye and you

2:02 don't quite know what they are you know it's just they're like right there you know for years it's been the little bottles that you get and i know some of that stuff is like pure caffeine you know that people are throwing back they think that it's feeding their brain um But, you know, you see these other items that are there and you have no idea what it is.

2:23 And in this particular case, we've got two young men, students at Ole Miss that are now no longer with us.

2:31 It's so sad, Joe.

2:32 But, you know, in the case that we're talking about today, Ole Miss and the two student deaths that happened on the same day, or their bodies were found on the same day, a couple of weeks ago, September 21st.

2:45 And the reason.

2:48 I mean, look, anytime two students die, you know, on a campus, it's going to draw attention. And there were a lot of discussions about what happened. You know, were they drugged in a bar? How did this occur? And then there were reports that, well, there is a packet that contained Kratom in it, found at each location.

3:11 And so we covered the story, you know, as.

3:14 Again, you're dealing with college students dying. And, you know, and you've got an 18 year old Aiden Hamilton from Colorado and another from Atlanta, Robert Strang. He's 20 years old and he's from Atlanta, Georgia. And we're looking at these going, well, OK, what's the connector, you know?

3:35 Yeah.

3:36 And I will tell you this, that when we first looked at this story, all I could think of is a number of states have outlawed Kratom for a reason. And Alabama is one of those. And so just, you know, Joe will say, bear with me when he's going to explain something along. I've talked about this openly about sobriety.

4:01 And I have been involved with a number of different programs that are sobriety long-term places.

4:10 Okay.

4:12 28 days does not fix the problem, but that's another day, different discussion, write me privately.

4:16 I'll answer you.

4:17 But I noticed one of the programs that I was working with a lot and had taken a number of people there was near my house. And there's a convenience store at the bottom of my hill. And I noticed, as you were describing, Joe, those packages.

4:31 Brightly colored.

4:32 It was like equal to 20,000 cups of coffee in one hit. And I noticed a number of people who were in the program stopping by to get there because they all had jobs during the day, you know, and they stopped by the convenience store to get, you know, a snack to have for lunch or whatever. And I noticed them picking up this substance, this, you know, energy drink or energy hit. Bottom line is at the time, this is 10 years ago, Joe, 10 years ago in Alabama, Kratom became a big deal and nobody was testing for it.

5:10 You had people that were coming out of jail or what have you and into programs that And they were taking this because it gave them a lift. It gave them something similar to what they had taken before that got them in the program to start with. OK, but this one was legal, sold in a convenience store and named all types of different things. Active ingredient, you know, Kratom was in it. And so that kind of exploded in Alabama big. And we put a stop to it.

5:43 You know, people were dying for it. They put a stop to it. So it's illegal in Alabama. You can't buy Kratom in Alabama legally. After we did this story about the two students at Ole Miss, Joe, you know what happened days after that?

5:57 A huge arrest.

6:01 Liquor store owner was selling Kratom in his store out the back door illegally in Alabama, busted him.

6:08 He's still in jail, a $ 1. 5 million bond. All right. It is a serious deal.

6:14 Now, whenever you have something like this that can be bought legally in some places and not in others, you know there's going to be a problem with it. The thing is that I didn't know until we did this story, and I mean this. I really didn't know people overdosed from Kratom. I really did think it was like a low-level thing. like a Loracet, something along those lines, hydrocodone, that if you took enough of them, you could have the effects of that.

6:39 That's what I thought it was.

6:40 And at the time, I think it was that, Joe, but I believe it's changed now. Over the last 10 years, because it is legal in so many places, I believe they have used kratom and different things to stack these chemicals together to give people a much bigger rush, a better high maybe.

7:00 The compound itself actually goes by 7-OH. And this is the chemical compound of kratom. And kratom is a manufactured substance. It impacts people in a variety of different ways. You can actually have reports of individuals that are suffering from anxiety. That will say that it calms their nerves. There'll be other people that when they take this stuff on, it elevates them. It's like a mood elevator.

7:34 Right.

7:35 And then you'll have individuals that are suffering from sleeplessness, pain, all these other things. And the sleeplessness goes away. And also pain goes away. It has been suggested... that the compound of this manufactured kratom is akin to or has the same effects as, like, a methadone, okay? Which, you know, if people are coming off of heroin, they substitute methadone.

8:13 You don't get the high with it, but it soothes you, you know, relative to that desire for the drug. It is. Within the opiate family, kind of, the toxicologists will kind of hedge their bets. And the reason I say that, it's not like traditional heroin or morphine. In our brain, we actually have opiate receptors that are in there that have been identified. So that's why opiate-based drugs have an impact on us. So kratom itself, attaches to those receptors and it gives you, I guess it can give you euphoria and, you know, all these sorts of things, kind of this calming thing. I still don't quite understand the stimulant aspect of it because it is very complex. But, you know, kratom's been around, oh Lord, for thousands of years.

9:07 It originated, the actual naturally occurring kratom originated in Southeast Asia.

9:13 Okay, wait a minute, wait, wait. It is naturally occurring?

9:17 Yeah, as a matter of fact, the plant that it's derived from is within the same family as coffee. Yeah, kind of cool, huh?

9:27 Do not come after our coffee. You will die. Whatever you do. My name is Dave. I am a coffee addict.

9:34 You stop.

9:35 Hi, Dave. Yeah, my name's Joseph. So am I. But yeah, so it's got an interesting history to it. But what has happened, though? like with so many of these things, these substances are manufactured in laboratories. And the molecular, there will be kind of an adjustment, right, to a standing molecular formula. And that tiny little adjustment within the structure of this thing can impact how it's going to act upon the human body and also how humans react to it after having ingested that. ingested this. And just, I mean, and I guess I kind of did it tongue in cheek in the opening. You know, I was talking about, you know, you've got anxiety, you've got this, you got that.

10:24 Let's go down to the convenience store and see what this interesting man behind the counter has in the brightly colored packages to see if he can give us some relief in our life or maybe it'll show the way. You know, you're expecting almost if you open one of these packets, Dave, that, you know, that rainbows will pour out of it or like a gold, almost like Indiana Jones, like a shining gold light, will appear out of this thing, showing you the way to eternal bliss.

10:52 With my way, it would be that boulder coming down. It would not be the rainbows.

10:56 Well, you know, the thing about it is it didn't work out that way for these two young men, Dave. And I submit to you, I'd really like to know, I would truly like to know, how many other deaths have occurred nationwide where you can legally obtain this stuff And they didn't pick up on it.

11:17 Oh, wow.

11:18 And that's really scary because this is not something, if you were to go into an autopsy, pull tox, this is not something that you would normally be testing for. That's truly problematic here.

11:37 Let me ask you something, Joe, because kratom has been illegal in Oxford, Mississippi, since 2019.

11:43 They were one of the people who got on. The state was one that got on it early.

11:47 And so they were already aware of the negative effects of Kratom and its packaging and everything else.

11:52 And so they made it illegal.

11:56 If it's a state that it's not illegal in, OK, it's just sold, you know, without any kind of problem. They wouldn't look for it, would they? I mean, if it's legal, sold over the counter. They wouldn't be testing for kratom.

12:11 Would it pop up otherwise?

12:13 Yeah, that's not the case because, you know, at autopsy, we even test for things like Tylenol and salicylates, you know, relative to aspirin. So that'll show up on a tox panel. But salicylates are very common. At this stage in my life, I don't think I go through a day without taking aspirin for something. You know, I will take it. You're going to find it in my system if you draw my blood. Kratom and other substances like it are such outliers that the state is not going to put that into a panel to look for. Now, there might be specific elements that when you break this down, is it going to appear in a panel and give us an idea as to what was going on with them? Because I got to tell you, I do know this, that

13:06 you've got Two young men, and I mean young men. One is a freshman at university. Another is a junior. You walk into their dwellings and they're dead. I want some answers. Brother Dave, you know, you're very well aware of my university life. I mean, it takes up just about everything that I do, right, other than, you know, sitting my butt in this chair and running my mouth.

13:43 Isn't that what you do in class, too? Yeah, I do.

13:48 Well, most of the time I stand. But, yeah, so, you know, I'm around college students day in and day out. And, you know, we've got convenience stores around here, and there's still stuff, you know, I'll walk in. And to put it in the vernacular of the kids around, you know, I'll see stuff in there that's really sus, you know.

14:11 So you walk in and you're thinking, what's the utility of this? You know, why do you have this? In our generation, I don't really remember seeing items even similar, remotely similar to this around. Of course, we could buy beer when we were 18 years old. But what I'm saying is you didn't. This is something that in the modern context is new, kind of. And what's really interesting about this, Dave, is that we've got all of these substances that have been created in some lab somewhere that are being created in order to sell to individuals, but yet they're not regulated. You think about for years and years, I remember... As a matter of fact, I remember the first time that I ever heard about ecstasy. And I

15:09 was working a case where a girl had taken cocaine and she'd used cocaine for years, but she had also taken ecstasy. And I remember asking one of my colleagues, you know, what exactly is ecstasy? And they began, and she was at a club, you know, when this happened. Well, that's a designer drug, right? And designer, the from a historic standpoint, designer drugs are those things that are, that are created. They're not like, and we've always had compounds, but these elements are actually manufactured by the hands of men in a laboratory somewhere. And then they're sold and they, they're in different degrees of effectiveness, right? And they're also in different degrees of potency. And that's why you need people.

15:56 If you're dealing with pharmacology, you need people that can regulate this stuff. And, All bets are off when it comes to whatever you're walking into a convenience store and you see this stuff on a shelf somewhere and it's available right there. Or some guy's selling it out the back of the store. you know, to anybody that's aware to go there. It's scary stuff, bro.

16:16 Whenever, you know, buying drugs on the street is a lot different than buying it from CVS.

16:21 There's no doubt about that.

16:22 You know, I've never gone into a pharmacy and seen baggies with twist ties handed out, you know. And so, but Kratom actually is being packaged. It's an actual item you buy and it's got a stamp on and everything else. But Joe, we got an 18 year old and a 20 year old that are both dead now. And their families are wondering what the heck happened. When you see politicians, you know, pressured to move on, do something, I'm like, look at what you already have first, okay? That's step number one, because people who break the law don't care about the laws you're creating. And right here, when you're talking about Oxford, Mississippi, Joe, they've already outlawed Kratom.

17:05 It's not legal.

17:07 So when this investigation began into Aiden Hamilton and Robert Strang, because both men were found, and I say men. Legally, both of these guys are men. They're young. They're in college. But still, Aiden Hamilton and Robert Strang, both attending Ole Miss. They're in Oxford, Mississippi, and both found dead on the same day. Different locations. One is on campus in a dorm.

17:31 The other is off campus, okay?

17:33 But, Joe.

17:35 It doesn't matter what you do about laws because it's illegal there already. And it has been for years. I mean, it has been illegal since both of these young men were in elementary school. So I don't think you need new laws. I think you need to enforce the ones you currently have and make it more aware maybe of what we're dealing with here. You know, it's not a failure to communicate. It's a failure to understand what we're buying in the store. And in this case, um, what does, uh, you mentioned a minute ago, we, we had a guy in Georgia that his wife said he died because he was taking these over the counter things, um, with Kratom to help him sleep. And I've seen it the other way where people take it because it gets them jacked

18:25 up and gives them energy.

18:27 And you know what, Joe?

18:29 Um, I know that the same thing happens with hydrocodone and, uh, uh, the Percocet line, oxycodone. Some people, they take those medications and boom, they go to sleep. Others, they take those and bang, they're good to go for six hours.

18:45 There is the chemical reality of the compound that is created. And then there is the pharmacological impact on an individual system and how they will react to said substance. And now there's an expectation that anyone that ingests this stuff will react in a particular way.

19:03 Okay.

19:04 But I think that there is a level of unpredictability here because no one is monitoring this stuff. So with that said, with these two young men, for those that have never been to Oxford, Mississippi, first off, beautiful college town, home of William Faulkner, one of my favorite people of all time and one of the most creative southern writers of all time. Lovely place, lovely square and beautiful campus.

19:35 They don't have deaths. Not with kids this age. OK, so I was thinking about forensically how the authorities there would have reacted. you know, to these two events, because it doesn't take, you know, particularly the smaller the smaller your sample group that you have or your your population is a more accurate term, smaller your population.

20:03 The.

20:05 The more impactful deaths can be. You know, if we were in, I don't know, Charlotte, North Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, or Philadelphia, if we had two deaths of two men that approximated the same age, close to it, and they were unexplained the same day, might not draw much attention. Oxford, Mississippi, going to be drawing some attention. And so I'm curious relative to the timeline of when these young men were found and whether the initial reaction of the police, because I've had similar circumstances. Generally, they're involving violent cases, not ODs, though we have had ODs. We had for a while in Atlanta, someone, if I remember correctly, they had put some type of poisonous agent, I wouldn't say rat poison,

20:58 I can't remember, so many years ago into a local supply of heroin. And we had people that were dying, that were addicted. I might be off base with that, but somebody had affected a local supply of heroin, and we had several deaths that were related to it. When you have these two young men, one on campus and off campus, I would like to try to understand, first off, when I got to the scene, what condition their bodies were in as far as time since death, and also how they're presenting. Because you can have a body that's been down for a while, we've talked about this, and the body will begin to change color. With a case involving something that is related to an opiate, the first stop along the continuum is they're going to be in

21:57 congestive failure. So I would expect to see highly congested eyes, purple discoloration in the face, the head, the neck, down to the nipple line, maybe even a frothy edematous cone coming out of the nose and the mouth. Because the way this stuff would impact the respiratory system is it's going to send this individual into congestive failure and respiratory failure.

22:26 So they'll begin to present this way. And it would... And not... I would really like to try and understand the mechanism of the death. Like when they're in throes of death, how is the individual presenting? Like how do they present initially? And I'm just fascinated by this idea that if these two kids, young men, source these items from the same location, who else was out there that heard this report? And thought, okay, I just bought something from there. And they chose not to use it. Or how much of this other stuff is still floating around out there? Because with this investigation, since they have identified a location of sourcing, this is going to be a highly layered case relative to the state authorities in Davis,

23:24 not just the state. that's involved in this. You got the feds involved in this too.

23:29 Oh yeah. I mean, up to their eyeballs. That's going to open up a whole new investigation, buddy. Yeah. Yeah, it will.

23:35 It will.

23:36 Well, okay.

23:37 Let's get back to what will happen on location when you've got two bodies, two students, freshman and a junior, and they're found on the same day, miles apart from one another, but both students at Ole Miss. The one thing that captured the attention of law enforcement Because they both presented as possible overdose deaths. OK, just getting that out there. And yet both had SMAX, S-M-A-X. SMAX was packaging for a particular kratom drug.

24:13 All right.

24:14 And it was found at both locations, Joe, at Hamilton on campus and at Strang off campus. Um, interesting to point out and, and I'm not trying to, uh, facts are facts. And when we look at the scene on both these young men, um, Aiden Hamilton, uh, he was known to smoke a lot of pot, a lot of weed. Um, and so much so that Joe, he had a cough, a cough from the amount of weed that he smoked.

24:44 He kept his marijuana in a safe. He didn't want anybody messing with his weed. Um, multiple times a day, okay? And again, had developed this bad cough. Maybe he was looking for something alternative to that.

24:56 I don't know.

24:57 On the case of Robert Strang, he was known to use nitrous oxide, whippets, okay? This was something that he did every day. And I found that shocking and fascinating at the same time because I don't know if both of these young men had their, you know, their DOC And they were looking for something different?

25:22 I don't know.

25:24 Again, I point out that Kratom and the products associated with it are legal in a lot of states.

25:30 Not in Oxford, Mississippi, though. It is illegal.

25:33 So police find the package for the smacks, and they're like, okay, where can we find these? Well, you know, just like cops always know where the crack house is, they always know where the meth is being sold. They know these things. It's just they don't have the manpower to shut them all down. So they keep an eye on them to see what's going on, pretty much. And that's what happened here.

25:55 They knew where to go. Or they maybe not know. They had an idea of where to start. That's why they were able to find where the packages came from. And they were able to arrest two men really soon into this investigation, Joe. But that SMAX, S-M-A-X, that was what was found.

26:13 That wrapper was.

26:15 But it was not a wrapper, verbal wrapper, a packaging wrapper.

26:20 Yeah.

26:21 Both of these guys took the same thing, and both of them died.

26:25 Yeah.

26:25 So my understanding is that Kratom can actually present in a number of different ways, or let's just say configurations, if you will. You can get it in powdered form. I think one of the more popular ones are gummies. Yeah. again, going back to what I had earlier stated, the delivery method, whether it is in a powder form, I'm assuming that it can probably be injected. If someone wanted to, you could cook it up, draw it up and inject it or use it as to inhale it, snort it, if you will. Additionally, you could probably smoke it if you wanted to lace, like if you had weed and you wanted to place that into a joint or into a pipe.

27:17 And you could probably uptake it that way. And then, of course, gummies. And you never know what, first off, what the level of how strong, like if you had a batch of, say if you had a bag of gummies with the stuff in it, I would submit to you, that if this stuff is being manufactured in some lab somewhere, there's no guarantee that you could take each individual gummy and say that it has the same amount in each one, okay?

27:52 It could be infused with higher dosages or lesser dosages. Like, for instance, you eat one gummy and you don't feel anything. Oh, well, I think I'll do another one. And the next thing you know, you're walking on your knees. You know, it's kind of like that scene from Wolf of Wall Street. Yeah, where they had the disco biscuits. You know, what are those called?

28:19 Disco biscuits?

28:20 Yeah, disco biscuits is an old term for quaaludes. And so they were thinking that they were no longer had the same impact because they were old. And the next thing you know, they're knee walking, you know, and dribbling out of the corner of their mouth. So it's kind of a crapshoot, I think, when it comes down to a lot of these substances that are out there. But at the end of the day, relative to what they're going to find to this point, Dave, as we are speaking at this moment, we still don't have toxicology back.

29:01 And I think, it's my opinion at least, that since the feds have gotten involved in this, they probably did an initial draw before the autopsy on both of these young men. They got blood. They got urine. Urine, by the way, is a great source for detection of opiates in particular, things that are opiate-like. They would have done eye fluid, probably bile. I'm assuming that both these young men probably still had their gallbladders took that, they would have taken samples of brain, which is not just for microscopes. study, but they can spin the brain down and liquefy it and check it out as well. So the state, I think state toxicologists would have done kind of a broad spectrum panel, but dude, when you have at your disposal

29:56 the DEA and the FBI and These samples are going to go somewhere else because I'm sure that there are people at the DEA and the FBI that are truly concerned for these young men and their family. That ain't their end game here, though, brother. They're trying to understand if there is a network. That's what they're trying to understand.

30:19 And they want to get all in the middle of it. And trust me, Oxford, Mississippi is not the only place this has happened or where the feds have come in contact with this stuff. And all it takes is for just one bureaucrat within one of these offices that takes an interest in this. Then you get a U.S. attorney involved in this and they really take an interest in it.

30:42 I think my thing is I want to try to understand if they are going to have, like, is this going to be as big a driver for them as, say, for instance, they bust some cocaine dealer that's got kilos of coke. Or they've got a mass of heroin or meth. Is this even going to register on their radar? And that's the sad thing about it. Because, yeah, you've got all of these illicit substances out there that are well known. But, brother, we're talking about going down to the local 7-Eleven or wherever it is, and you're buying this stuff at the gas station. Is this going to register at the same level with the feds and those that that are tasked with enforcing drug enforcement issues, is this going to register

31:30 with them? Are they actually going to do anything with this information? Will there be anybody else arrested? So Dave, as it turns out, these. These items that are purchased, right, are purchased from a store called Puffs, and they're actually in tablet form, which means that you've got some powder that has probably been pressed into tablet form so that they can be ingested.

32:13 They have affected arrest relative to these two deaths, but the feds are particularly involved in this case Thinking about where are they going to go with this case next and also these individuals that have been hooked up on charges there in Oxford. How far are they going to pursue this relative to other people like the sourcing of these items and anybody else that they're being sold to in that particular area?

32:49 Interesting point. Islam Mohamed is 18 years. His father, Yahya Mohamed Mosley, 51. Those were the two arrested, again, charged, but not convicted, friends. That's a big deal here, okay? People get arrested every day that don't end up getting convicted. Now, what they're accused of and what took place, it'll all play out in court. But as Joe mentioned, we don't even have toxicology back yet. We just know that two young men died in Oxford, Mississippi. And at the site of their death was found this packaging that was for Kratom that came from the same location, apparently.

33:31 You know, that's what we've got.

33:33 And again, we're dealing with a drug that has not even been classified nationwide in the same way. You can buy it legally in one place.

33:42 And you know what?

33:43 In some areas, Joe, it's county by county, city by city. You know, you can buy it in this county, but not in that. It's like the old days of dry counties, you know, wet counties for alcohol. Very similar to that right now. So while they're dealing with Kratom as whether it's something you can buy in a convenience store right off the rack, you know, no age requirement. I mean, there is a lot going on with this. I think the biggest thing and you hate to say it's on parents, but you know what? Parents are not as involved as they need to be with their kids and a lot of young people, you know.

34:20 They need to be more dug in.

34:22 Well, I mean, you've got one man here that is a freshman in college. That means that he has just shown up on campus. And, you know, he's already got an affinity for other substances, right? Yeah. So, yeah, it starts off, you know, prior to arriving at college, whatever baggage you have, either in reality or metaphorically, at your college address is probably stuff that you brought from home, you know, regarding whatever your dependencies are or whatever the case might be. It doesn't reduce or mitigate the tragedy here because it certainly is tragic. But how many other people had these young men come in contact with that were also that had an affinity for these substances? How many other people within their own network, network of friends,

35:15 were aware of this? How many people participated in it? Because, you know, you've got other things that they had access to, everything from Xanax to weed to nitrous oxide, which, you know, nitrous oxide is not something that, you know, gee whiz, I'm going to go buy nitrous oxide. You know, how do you source this?

35:35 You know, it's interesting that that has become something that's popped up in a number of episodes that we've done.

35:41 It has.

35:41 We had the same thing with, if you remember back several years ago with Demi Moore and recently Hayden Panettiere, where that has been part of that investigation that she was known to.

35:52 Have used nitrous a lot.

35:54 As a matter of fact, was denied nitrous while in a hotel in Nashville where they wouldn't deliver it to her.

36:01 That's what her boyfriend, Brian Hickerson, said.

36:04 But, you know, we have this Robert Strang, 20 years old, living off campus, who is using nitrous every day. We have 18-year-old Aiden Hamilton, who's dead, and he was a pot smoker to the point where he has a cough. But Joe, those are both totally different drugs that those guys are known to use. The one thing that we've got here is they're both dead and they both had smacks that has kratom.

36:34 Right. And so here's the rub, as they say, with relative to any kind of dependency they had on other substances. And not to say that weed, stand-alone weed, doesn't have its problems. I mean, we've had cases that we've covered where we've had fentanyl found in weed. Oh, my gosh. But, yeah, as if we don't have enough problems. Because of the nature of the kratom, that we're referring to this manufactured kratom not naturally occurring. You never know how it's going.

37:14 In pharmacology, one of the things that they think about, even when we go to the doctor to get treated for our own maladies, whatever they might be, there are certain drugs that you cannot prescribe along with certain other drugs, right? And because of negative drug interactions. Well, it's the Wild West when it comes to these items. We're not talking about something where you're going to your local doc in the box They're putting you on hypertension medication or, you know, they're treating you for anxiety or, you know, whatever it is that you're presenting with, I don't know, elevated cholesterol.

37:51 You never know how any of those substances are going to interact. And there have been extensive studies that have gone before this stuff gets approved by the Federal Drug Administration, right? Now you're talking about these items that are sitting in stores all over the place that people are availing themselves of. Oh, and not to mention, if in fact you have one of these kids that is taking, say, a prescribed med like a Xanax, some kind of anti-anxiety medication that has been studied, it has been prescribed, right? but yet you introduce this new substance in here, you don't know. It's like this wild Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde experiment that's going on. When you put these compounds together, you don't

38:44 know how they're going to react. To me, it sounds as though that both these kids probably presented as though that this was an opiate overdose, more than likely.

38:55 And even.

38:56 Even let's say that it's a stimulant, you can still see people that will present in this kind of congested appearance. And again, I go back to thinking about how the investigators worked the scene to begin with. You know, when they walk in hours apart from one another and you've got two kids that are dead in a very close geographic proximity, you know, you got bells going off. I really wonder if the cops weren't sitting around thinking, I wonder when the next one is going to happen. Because that's the way your brain, that's the way your brain as an investigator begins to work. When you have these cases where they are similar in many ways, you have one person that dies and then, wait, you got me

39:39 on another call? Where am I going this time? Well, you have this. And, you know, reflectively, I remember when this began to happen in Atlanta with attainted heroin. I do remember that like we would come into work every day and we would check the roll. You know, generally you have like a kind of like which shift nurses call it report. Right. So when they're changing shift, they go through a report. And they'll talk about how their patients, you know, did during their watch and that sort of thing. Well, death investigators, we do the same thing. We have a report, you know, when we change shifts. And I remember back during that period of time asking colleagues, so did we have another unexplained heroin death? You know, because we had

40:24 heroin deaths, but for the most part, they were standalone individual ODs. When you start to see clusters like this, And I'm thinking now, not just as an investigator, but thinking now from an epidemiological standpoint, when you look at the spread of this and how it could impact any number of people around that area. And we're talking about a small rural isolated area here. And it truly is.

40:50 What's going to happen if this stuff hits a larger population? And now you've got more people getting this into your hands. That's why the investigators involved in this case, including the feds, are keen on trying to track down all of the players that are related to this. These guys that are distributing this stuff, they want to know where specifically is it sourced from? Is it coming in from overseas? Is it something that's coming up from south of the border?

41:21 Where do you buy this stuff? Who's the original distributor? And this thing's going to be worked just like a regular dope case would be, I would think. The trick, though, Dave, is... to see if the bureaucrats and the politicians actually even care and if they're going to put resources to it to try to solve the problem. Because I got to tell you, I don't see it ending.

41:43 When it comes to Kratom, Joe, again, there's not, even though states started passing laws 10 years ago, it's not universal. In Mississippi, for example, it is illegal in Oxford, Mississippi, and around that includes the campus of Ole Miss. But it's not illegal statewide. And so you could buy it legally in one part of the state and not in others.

42:09 But I do think there's an impact. I believe we're once you get the feds involved in something, you have to look for it. But you'll see some things happening. I think the direct result of the deaths in Oxford, Mississippi, led to the arrest in Alabama a couple of days ago where a man was arrested in St.

42:28 Clark County.

42:30 It was a traffic stop, okay? Where, yeah, what does that mean? If you bust a guy with Kratom and you put him in jail on a $ 1. 5 million bond, yeah, it was a traffic stop, but we were watching you from here, over here. Any way you look at it, it is starting to move that direction, but it's not illegal nationwide.

42:50 And as I pointed out, Not even illegal statewide in Mississippi.

42:54 Well, yeah. And the thing about it, you say it's illegal to sell it, but it's not necessarily illegal to possess it. So if you go from one county in Mississippi where it is illegal, and then you pedal back to Oxford where it's illegal to sell it, it doesn't mean it's illegal to possess it. Now, the police can, I guess they can question you about it, but they're not going to put you in the hooscow if you have it on your person. And they very well might ask you, you know, where you got it from. And I think that at the end of the day, that's the big question here, isn't it? Where did they get this from? And I don't just mean the vendors there in these stores that have been put in bracelets. I'm talking about what's the point of origin. And right now,

43:42 law enforcement is looking into this to try to determine where did it come from. And also on another front, I'll be very interested as these cases develop and as more information comes out, not just about the toxicology, but also about the pathology that is found as a result of these autopsies. What makes these deaths stand out? What is it? What was their mechanism of death? And what can we learn about the interactions of all of these compounds, and specifically, what can we learn about the function and form and lethality of kratom? I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags.