58,000 Americans were killed in the Vietnam War.
In 2018 alone,
over 67,000 were killed by drug overdoses.
In 2017, it was over 70,000.
In 2016, over 63,000.
The war on drugs is a Vietnam War every year.
Most of these staggering numbers have been driven by
what’s become known as the “North American opioid crisis.”
Narrowed it down to literally two overdoses a month.
At the rate I’m going, I may not see 32.
But how did we get here?
How did a toxic mix of the war on drugs
and a profit-driven medical system
get us to a place where overdoses now kill more Americans than gunshots
or road accidents?
[The War on Drugs Show]
[Prescription Drug Epidemic]
America has had a heroin problem for decades.
But around 2010, something changed,
shifting it from a national problem to an epidemic.
Opiates have always been used for pain relief.
And fair enough,
no one wants to go through an operation without morphine.
But because they’re potentially addictive,
traditionally these drugs were tightly controlled.
Doctors would keep a close eye
to make sure their patients weren’t becoming dependent.
But then, in the 1990s,
researchers at a pharmaceutical company spotted an opportunity.
They began pushing the idea that opioid pain medication
was actually much less addictive than previously thought.
And why were these companies so desperate to convince doctors that
they can prescribe far more powerful opioid medications?
Because there were billions and billions of dollars to be made.
Pharmaceutical companies began sending sales reps
across the US and Canada,
aggressively marketing much stronger opioid pain medication to doctors.
The market leaders in this, though by no means the only ones at it,
were Purdue Pharma,
pushing their shiny new pill, OxyContin.
So I used to call on a doctor in this corner suite right here.
And so I started calling on him on a frequent basis
and talking to him about OxyContin, and he started writing OxyContin.
They were wildly successful.
Between 1997 and 2002,
prescriptions for OxyContin increased from 670,000
to 6.2 million.
Playing football, I had an awesome year.
And the game before the playoffs,
I tore my knee.
I just had a **** doctor that wanted to give me all these pills.
I kept going back to the dude,
and he was giving me, you know, whatever.
Said, “These 5s aren’t working right...
I need something stronger.”
So he gives me 7.5s...
and some Dilaudid.
By the time opioid prescribing peaked in 2012,
255 million prescriptions were written.
In over ten percent of US counties,
enough opioid prescriptions were written
for every single citizen to have one.
But there was a problem.
If you hand out hundreds of millions of opioid pills,
a lot of people are going to get addicted.
Since its very beginning,
the drug war has been targeted at ethnic minorities and the poor.
But now, with opioid prescribing,
millions of people were getting addicted
in white, suburban neighborhoods.
I’m 39, I grew up in Quincy.
And people I used to play sports with
and some people I used to hang out with,
a lot of them, you know, started on the OxyContin or Percocet
and end up becoming heroin addicts.
And I've lost track now,
but it’s over 25 people that are no longer with us, they’re deceased.
And it wasn’t just people that were coming from tough backgrounds,
it was people that had good families
and they played sports and they hung out with good people.
And now they’re dead.
Back in 2010, authorities began cracking down on doctors in Florida
who’d been overprescribing opioids.
So, millions of people who’d become dependent on these medicines
were suddenly cut off by their doctors.
And this is where the true opioid crisis really begins.
The greatest myth of the opioid epidemic
is that the whole thing was caused by overprescribing.
But it’s not a true crisis until you add the war on drugs.
Those addicted patients didn’t just stop needing the drugs
because their prescriptions ran out.
So millions of them turned to the black market
and started buying heroin.
Inevitably, some of those users started dying.
This is the point on the graph where heroin deaths begin to climb.
Now, if there’d been suitable treatment options available,
this crisis might have been averted, or at least eased.
But unfortunately,
authorities in both the US and Canada chose to deal with it
the same way they’ve tried to deal with drug addiction for a century—
as a war.
There's really two ways that people try to deal with opioid addiction.
One is to try to basically get people to a point where
they are completely abstinent of any kind of opioid in their body.
The problem with abstinence only treatment is that it
doesn't really deal with the biology of addiction,
the fact that people's brain changes after they've been using opioids
for long amounts of time.
And so even if people have
all the right motivations and desires to change,
they still have to deal with this biological change in their body.
Opioid medications,
methadone and buprenorphine in particular,
address that biological craving without giving people
the experience of euphoria.
Medication treatment is absolutely the gold standard
for treating opioid addiction.
They cut overdose risk in half,
compared to abstinence only treatment.
There has become this mentality that taking these medications
is substituting one addiction for another.
Drugs are bad, and the best way to be free of drugs
is to completely be abstinent of anything.
So it’s the “just say no” mentality.
Just say no.
Just say no. Just say no.
Denying drug users effective treatment
might seem cruel and arbitrary—
not to mention self-defeating,
seeing how catastrophic results have been.
But in fact, it goes to the very heart of
what the war on drugs really is.
That urge to dehumanize drug users, to punish rather than support them—
no matter the consequences—
has defined the drug war since its very beginning.
And there's perhaps no clearer illustration of this than
the debates around naloxone.
So naloxone is the antidote for an opiate overdose.
So what happens when somebody overdoses on an opiate?
The part of your brain that tells your lungs to breathe turns off.
So you’re going to draw up the contents of this,
pop it into the thigh.
By that time, hopefully emergency help will have arrived,
and you’ve bought the person a lot of time.
Naloxone or Narcan
is a drug that can save people from an opiate overdose almost instantly.
It’s like magic.
I mean, it’s essentially like bringing someone back to life
and giving them another chance,
saving the lives of people who deserve a second, third, fourth,
fifth, sixth, seventh chance.
Narcan is aasy to use.
It can mean the difference between life and death,
and yet there are police forces across America that actively resist
even carrying it.
To administer the Narcan,
you have to get down on your knees,
you have to take your eyes off of who you’re administering this to.
And these people, for the most part, don't like the police.
I wanted the word to get out that you don't want to come to Middletown
to have an overdose because we might not respond.
That was Sheriff Richard Jones and Councilman Dan Picard
from Butler County, Ohio.
In 2017, when they made those statements,
overdoses killed more people in Butler County
than all other causes combined.
I’d be dead if it wasn’t for Narcan.
When I relapsed,
I OD’d the third time I got high.
And... I almost didn’t make it.
I don’t want to live like this.
This is terrible.
What it does is it saves lives,
and that’s sort of the bottom line, you know?
People are going to relapse and get high
and maybe need it more than once.
It’s a part of recovery, it’s a part of addiction,
people going back out there.
If there wasn’t Narcan available, I wouldn’t be here.
And not only would I not be here,
but my mother would be without a son.
We’ve seen how pharma companies make billions
getting people hooked on opioids.
And we’ve seen how millions of people were driven from
oxy onto heroin.
But in fact, the true horror of the opioid crisis
had not yet even begun.
Enter fentanyl.
Most people working in addiction were expecting that
heroin would make a comeback when OxyContin went away.
And that’s the worst that I think most of us saw coming.
We didn't expect fentanyl to come.
Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid around 50 times stronger than heroin.
Two milligrams can be fatal.
From around 2014,
this nightmare drug began flooding into the US and Canada
as dealers saw an incredibly cheap
and easy way to cut the heroin supply.
When we say that fentanyl is 100 times as toxic as morphine,
what we’re saying is that a pound of fentanyl
is the same as 100 pounds of morphine or about 50 pounds of heroin.
So if you're a drug trafficker,
you can move a million doses of fentanyl in a shoe box.
It’s fentanyl and other ultra-powerful synthetic opioids
that have triggered the astronomical spike in overdose deaths
across North America.
From 2015 to 2017,
we’ve tripled our fentanyl seizures across the country.
In 2017, in New York City alone,
the DEA seized 193 kilos of fentanyl.
That's enough to kill the city's entire population 11 times over.
And it just gets scarier.
The explosion of fentanyl has been followed by
an influx of carfentanyl,
which is 100 times stronger.
In that one gram,
that’s actually 50,000 fatal overdoses.
Fifty thousand?
That’s a city.
So where does that leave us?
The data hasn't yet come in,
but early reports said that the Covid-19 pandemic
has made the opioid crisis even worse.
Overdose deaths are expected to break 70,000 this year.
Purdue Pharma is being sued by
over 2,000 American cities, counties, and Native American territories
for its part in creating the crisis.
Purdue reportedly offered to settle those cases,
and in 2019, they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
But that’s a small consolation for
the victims of this battle in the war on drugs.
Every 15 minutes, a baby is born in America addicted to opioids.
Every day, 128 Americans die of an opioid overdose.
Experts project opioids will kill
over half a million people in the US over the next decade.
That’s about one in every 600 of the population.
Unless there’s a radical change of policy,
this is likely to get worse before it gets better.
We’d like to congratulate drugs for winning the war on drugs.
[Perdue Pharma, along with Endo, the makers of Percocet,]
[deny any wrongdoing.]