Spencer Pratt on "Fentanyl Zombies:" Cruel Language or Brutal Reality? | DarkHorse 327

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:00]Pratt is taking, of course, a lot of sh from a lot of people because they don't want someone coming out of nowhere doing whatever chaos they think he's gonna do, but people are specifically objecting to the word zombies.

[00:00:13]And I will say that that term, the fentanyl zombies, is not a Spencer Pratt invention.

[00:00:19]And I'm surprised if anyone thinks it is.

[00:00:22]And if you've ever been in one of these places where you stumble upon a scene where the feet lean that he sort of does, it's real and it's terrifying.

[00:00:34]Like a tent lean can't do anything to you.

[00:00:38]They're not going to hurt you at that point.

[00:00:40]It's not that kind of zombie.

[00:00:41]They are not in themselves.

[00:00:44]It's a particular effect of this drug that has taken over that is not an analysis of who the people are.

[00:00:59]It's an analysis of the fact that the drug has taken the people from themselves.

[00:01:03]And no, I don't think that, and I'm sure Spencer Pratt has sometimes spoken to broadly and claimed that all the homeless are the fentanyl zombies and they're not and no one thinks they are.

[00:01:15]But as I've been saying to you for over a decade at this point, the homeless are not who they used to be.

[00:01:21]When we were growing up in LA, we saw homeless people for sure, but it always seemed to be, and things changed in the 80s when mental hospitals had to release a bunch of people onto the streets, right?

[00:01:35]Who were on the streets and who were homeless changed somewhat.

[00:01:38]But increasingly, even before we lived in Olympia and then when we lived in Portland, a lot of the homeless population appeared to me to be at some level, faculty.

[00:01:49]These were people who had made life choices in which they preferred to not take the bed, the needle exchange, the whatever it is, and clean themselves up and figure out how to live a life that was in keeping with a society in which all of us are allowed to live our best lives.

[00:02:06]I just wanted to say on this issue of fentanyl zombies, the idea of policing somebody over speech, when what you actually have is a physiologically novel condition, that this draw, in fact, when I went to Vancouver and encountered multiple people in the stance just right in the middle of the sidewalk as I'm walking to dinner, I looked it up because it's so surprising as a biologist, what exactly happens that leaves you standing?

[00:02:38]I can imagine collapsing from hard drugs.

[00:02:41]What is it that leaves you standing but effectively paralyzed?

[00:02:45]And anyway, the answer is interesting.

[00:02:48]It has to do with the fact that the way the drug takes out your consciousness, it leaves mechanisms, your proprioception is effectively left intact enough to keep you on your feet, resulting in what I think is technically called the fentanyl hang.

[00:03:04]But the point is this is so extreme that we don't have the proper language for talking about it.

[00:03:09]And zombie isn't the worst term you can come up with as you point out, these are people who are kind of not in there anymore.

[00:03:15]In fact, what they have is a fatal addiction, right?

[00:03:20]This, you don't go very long addicted to a drug that causes you to become unconscious on your feet before something terrible happens to you.

[00:03:31]It's not a reasonable condition to embrace.

[00:03:35]So the fact that you have these people who are, caught in this tractor beam headed slowly to death on our streets and lots of people are making excuses for them.

[00:03:45]Making excuses for them.

[00:03:46]And our longtime listeners will remember that we talked when we were still living in Portland about the new injunction that we should all really be doing was carrying Narcan around.

[00:03:56]Because if we find someone who's overdosed, what we need to do is bring them back to life.

[00:04:00]So to do what?

[00:04:03]To overdose again and again and again and again.

[00:04:06]Like this is now our responsibility to simply keep those who cannot be bothered to try to keep themselves alive.

[00:04:13]And what about the rest of us who are actually trying to live productive and useful lives?

[00:04:21]Yeah, it's shocking and it's shifting the burden.

[00:04:25]I don't wanna take too long a detour here, but I was thinking somewhere during my recent travels about the number of things, the number of pseudo-sophistications that we currently embrace from trans to abortion on demand at any stage of a pregnancy, to estrogenic compounds, to delaying the production of family late in life.

[00:04:56]All of these things are population reducers.

[00:05:02]It's interesting, we don't have anything that points in the other direction.

[00:05:06]So many of the confusions result in a population decline that one question is, is there something out there that instead of having its fingerprints on something ghastly is actually distributing that ghastly thing in such a way that it takes people out because that's the point.

[00:05:23]And oh, then we're gonna hold you responsible.

[00:05:25]That person died because you weren't carrying Narcan.

[00:05:27]And it's like, hey, wait a minute, try running civilization in a reasonable way where the person who suffers from these things really didn't have a hand in inviting them before you get around to our responsibility in the public to be reviving fentanyl addicts who are frankly placing a huge burden on the emergency medical system that is there to save people who have actual misfortune.

[00:05:58]And I'm not saying I don't have sympathy for a person who has fallen off the bottom of the ladder and ended up in that cesspool, but you can't make them our responsibility as members of the public when you have embraced policies that created them in the first place.

[00:06:15]Fix the frickin' policies.

[00:06:16]Yeah, no, and over and over and over again, and this is a theme in Pratt's messaging, what we are seeing from the leadership of these West Coast cities and from the states as well is this suicidal empathy for those who have found themselves in a position where they cannot help themselves.

[00:06:42]And in some cases, they did that to themselves.

[00:06:44]And in some cases, society and the conditions into which they were born were working against them from the beginning, but regardless of how they got there, they are in a position where they cannot help themselves.

[00:06:57]And it is presumably our responsibility as a civilization to help those who cannot help themselves.

[00:07:06]It is not our responsibility as citizens in a civilization to prioritize their needs over our own.

[00:07:13]It is not, it cannot be, it never should have been.

[00:07:16]And the idea that we have been, many of us, not us, but many, many, many citizens, many individuals have been conned into believing that it is an honor, it is a virtue to value those who have less than you above your own success, above that of your own children, above that of your friends and family, that's absurd.

[00:07:44]And that is a big (Music)