Hey, quick question. What if the scariest drug in American history was never actually that scary?

Tonight we're cracking open the story of PCP, a molecule that got named after peace,

then spent decades being used to justify the opposite. You've seen the headlines,

you've heard the stories, and almost all of them are wrong, not a little wrong, spectacularly wrong,

like history textbook level wrong, drop a comment right now, where are you watching from,

what time is it? Because wherever you are, this story's about to change how you look at every

drug panic you've ever seen on the news. Lights down, let's go. So before we get into the dark alleys and the

five dollar bills and the newspaper headlines screaming about monsters, we need to go back,

way back, to a place that sounds a lot less dramatic than a street corner but was, in its own

quietly terrifying way, just as dangerous. The operating room. It's the early 1950s. America is riding a wave

of post-war optimism. Factories are humming, suburbs are expanding, and television sets

are appearing in living rooms like mushrooms after rain. On the surface, everything looks like

progress, and in medicine there genuinely was progress.

New antibiotics, new surgical techniques, a growing understanding of how the human body worked,

and more importantly, how to fix it when it didn't.

Surgeons were attempting procedures that would have seemed like science fiction 20 years earlier,

open chest surgeries,

organ repairs, operations that required a patient to be completely still, completely unconscious,

completely somewhere else. The problem was getting them there. Anesthesia in the 1950s was,

to put it diplomatically, a work in progress. To put it less

diplomatically, it was a gamble that occasionally paid off. The drugs available to anesthesiologists

at the time came with a package of side effects that would make a modern pharmacist visibly

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