From Oxycontin to Fentanyl - Mariana van Zeller on Being at the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis

The Joe Rogan Experience people have a hard time you know keeping it together yeah and when something like marijuana comes along but that doesn't mean that it should be illegal that means there should be some real counseling and there should be places that people can go where they can talk to someone and therapy and there's there should be a way to make it legal I 100 agree I mean one thing we know is that the War on Drugs hasn't worked the billions of dollars that the United States has spent on the War on Drugs has actually had the reverse effect and as you know well the biggest drug epidemic in America's history was created right here in America by the pharmaceutical companies yes well that's how I found out about you from the Oxycontin Express that that was so eye-opening and when you did that what channel will you guys on back then current TV was Al Gore's television channel it was Al Gore's that's hilarious it was it was actually a really interesting experiment so it was right before YouTube started and basically they were trying to the idea was democratizing television it was giving young kids out there a platform to go out there and explore the world and come back with these stories so that's how I started what year was this this was 2005 or six oh wow 2005 when was when I started yeah um a long time ago and then YouTube came around it turns out that YouTube was a bigger success but I really the show that I worked on was called Vanguard and it was all these young journalists who most of us had just graduated but they basically gave us cameras and in my case get my husband at the time with my boyfriend we both applied they hired us both and then we traveled all around the world he would film I would be on camera and then we'd come back I'd edit he'd write we'd do these stories together and one of the stories we did was the prescription bill story The Oxycontin Express which is how we met because yeah tweeted about it well I think your work really changed the way people were aware of that problem in Florida and they it changed the laws because they didn't have databases back then which was 100 on on purpose yeah so you could go from yeah you could go Doctor shopping you could go from pill Mill to pill Mill or pain clinic to pain clinic to buy prescription pills the amazing thing is my husband is still reporting on this his actually had a film on CNN that's coming on HBO Max uh in April and it's called American pain so I don't know do you remember the the twins that were running American pain it was the biggest uh pill Mill or prescription pain clinic in in South Florida it's called American vein and it was run run by these two twins who were born they were born conjoined twins at Birth and then they ran a steroid business and they got in trouble and then they realized that actually they could make a lot more money from selling Oxycontin they could from selling steroids so they opened this little small strip mall pain clinic and as you saw you know people started coming in from all over the country and buying and the doctors wouldn't even look at them and they were prescribing pills like it was Tic Tacs and this we we found out about them because we were reporting in Kentucky and we were the sheriff who was you know overdoses all around them people you know dying devastating his community and a lot of the pill bottles had this name American pain and we started we went down there and we took out the camera and my husband took out the camera and we the first shot we got immediately within minutes this big SUV came with two big guys who were threatening us and started yelling us and telling us to leave that we weren't allowed to film so we drove off and I'm driving and this is actually in the film but I'm driving and my husband's filming and they're right behind us and we we decided to film this as the last thing we were heading to the airport and we're driving down 985 to head to the airport and they start following us and then I realize I have very little gas so I stopped at the gas station and they stop right behind us and they come out of the car and these were big guys and the day before we'd been watching The Sopranos so in my mind they were coming out guns of Blazing and they were going to kill us both so I drove off I was so nervous and I drove off and they continued following us and I didn't put gas in the car so we're on 9.95 and we called 9-1-1 and said hey we're being followed by this car and explain the situation and then I ran out of gas as we were filming and I pulled over to the curb but they were so sort of surprise shot they had no idea confused about what was happening that they just parked behind us and came out of and they never came out of the car and then the police arrived and then they made up an excuse that they thought I wasn't an old girlfriend or something like that but we my husband took down their license plates and found out their names and it was the George Brothers Jeff and Chris George who were running the biggest prescription or pill Mill in America's history they were making I think something like 40 million dollars a year out of this small little pill Mill paint you know strip mall clinic and uh and it was incredible and then and then a year later they were they're now do they one of them just left prison and the other one was still in prison so those were the guys that were following you the guys that owned the organization that owned American pain the organization was just a strip mall Clinic pain clinic with thousands of patients that would come in and out and you know tons of doctors writing prescription pills and when we were working at the time where we'd been interviewing off the Record a D.A agent who didn't want to go on the record that we later found out was actually investigating them and they had wiretaps so in Darren's movie uh is he got his hands on all the wiretaps so you could hear them and part of it there's a part where they talk about us and our film and how we were trying to look into them so it all sort of came yeah that's it South Florida yeah so South Florida pain clinic and then they changed to a new location a bigger location and called it uh yeah that's it called it American pain such as what a great name by the way yeah and those are the two brothers down there with the fish yep that's the two brothers those are the guys that were chasing you yeah wow well they found a loop it's a crazy story so they're in prison and Darren he sends them an email and says hey guys remember that guy they chased on 995. I'm doing a film about you do you want to be interviewed and they did it's a great film what did they say did they just spill the beans about what they did and they talked a lot about sort of how they grew up and why they did it um it's yeah I think it's interesting when they'd already gotten in trouble so they had really nothing to lose at that point but what wasn't what they were doing legal no it was uh what they were so that is the difficulty and that's why actually so little people so there should have been a lot more people that went to prison Unfortunately they didn't so the government Gets You Through other things racketeering charges bribery male fraud it's always these other that's the you know the biggest I think outrage about the whole opiate crisis is that there have been almost not no pharmaceutical executive that has been gone to prison the pharmaceutical companies are the ones that were actually making the big money right and it's not just the sacklers of Purdue it's also the generic companies that were making even more and uh and no one went nobody was actually I mean nothing practically happened to them no one did time in prison and it's so sad when you find out how many people lost their lives and how many people even if they're alive their lives are destroyed I mean Joe having traveled and ex reported on this um the opiate crisis for so long it's whole communities that have been devastated it's it's horrible it's the biggest sort of outrageous um thing that has happened in America and uh and it was made here again we can blame others but it was made here and because we allowed it to happen it's just amazing the deception that was involved too they they tried to claim that they weren't addictive and and they were just passing them out to people and it's I mean I um I had I talked before about this I had my nose fixed I had a deviated septum and uh when I got out of the operating room um I was uh kind of shocked that it wasn't painful I was like this is fine this is just a little mildly uncomfortable and the doctor tried to give me two different prescriptions for opiates and I was like I'm not going to use those um because I I had had knee surgery and I I also didn't take pain pills I don't mind paying what I really don't like is feeling stupid and when I took um I think it was I don't remember it was Percocets or Vicodin I don't remember but one of my first knee surgeries they gave me one of those and I took it and I remember being on my couch when I lived in New York and uh just sitting there watching TV like this feeling so stupid and thinking oh my God I'm never taking this [ __ ] again like whatever this is doing to me first of all I don't think it really stopped the pain because I remember getting up because I had to go to the bathroom and I was it was like Liquid Fire was going through my knee and I was like if it still [ __ ] hurts like this and I'm dumb as [ __ ] like I am not taking these anymore I know the ease with which they were dispensed and are still being dispensed to some degree my doctor was trying to force me to take them he was like he was like just you really should take these like you're going to be in pain I go well it's just a little pain like is it worse than this right now he goes it could be I'm like how could it get worse why is it going to get worse yeah like if it doesn't if it just is mildly uncomfortable now and like so the doctor was just like you should take this and I was like why would I take that but I don't I wasn't I didn't understand why like I like couldn't I come back to you if I'm in pain like if I'm not in pain now why do you want it was this weird conversation where it's like I don't know if he was incentivized to try to try to prescribe them if he felt like it would be good for him I did I didn't understand it like couldn't you just if you wrote the prescriptions and I didn't take it like what do you care but he wanted me to take him yeah it was weird so strange I mean that's what was happening with Oxycontin that's what was happening later on we did another story on fentanyl that was what was happening with fentanyl too you had a company and we investigated one particular company and I think it's the only CEO of a company that he's now in in prison actually for what he was doing but yeah he was bribing essentially and he was charged with bribing he was bribing doctors and there was a quota and he was basically telling them if you prescribe more of our product which was fentanyl I have a spray fentanyl called substance if you prescribe more we will give you more money they were he was paying them out and take taking them on trips luxurious trips around the world and telling them not only to prescribe this medication to people who have headaches and back pain and the medication that is made and FDA approved only for breakthrough cancer patients but yet you go to the doctor and you say you have a headache and this guy knows that he can get a kickback from the company and so oh you should take this this drug how much of a Kid Rock was it uh it was significant it was in the thousands of dollars some doctors got hundreds of thousands of dollars and so they were incentivized yeah there was a big incentive to do it yeah and they were also invited to these luxury vacations and to go speaking fees what they said is that they were paying them for speaking fees which basically was the code bribes yeah I have a good friend who used to be a pharmaceutical representative and he explained to me how it works that he would not just know the doctor but he got to know he knew who the doctor's kids names were he would show up at their baseball games and he would give them gifts he would take them out to dinners and it was all about cultivating these relationships and that it was all about like I'm your friend and you know like and they wanted to have this sort of weird cronyism weird sort of relationship where even if it wasn't illegal like clearly he was influencing them to sell more pills so crazy yeah yeah it's uh it's it's crazy and it's crazy that it's still happening and I'm it's just shocking that not more people have gotten in trouble because what has changed in Florida because they they did change and they made a database right there's a database right now which was the biggest thing that didn't so babe you could go to 10 doctors in one day and get 150 pills from each doctor at the end of the day you'd have 1500 bills that no one would know about it and then you'd grab those pills and go and sell them to other places of the country where you could get 20 20 times more for the same drug um yeah so the databases and it's just much harder I think there's one of the things that I remember that we reported on it that you shouldn't be able to prescribe and dispense at the same location because it's a conflict of interest right if you have if you're going to make money out of the sailing selling of those pills you shouldn't it shouldn't be at the same place where you're prescribing them because then there's an incentive for you to prescribe because you're making money from the sale of those bills um so that was happening in Florida as well and it's not allowed in a lot of other states and then the horrible truth is that a lot of those people became addicted and then they had to get it on the black market so then they were getting fentanyl laced heroin yeah and massive amount of overdoses yeah the progression was Oxycontin and then it was Fenton and then it was heroin and then it became Fentanyl

Channel: PowerfulJRE

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Length: 13min 39sec (819 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2023