How America Got Hooked on Opioids | The War on Drugs

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[Music] 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 and 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 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 could 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 paid 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 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 a awesome year and uh the game before the playoffs i tore my name 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 he said these fives aren't working right i need something stronger so he gives me 7.5 and some dilaudid by the time opioid prescribing peaked in 2012. 255 million prescriptions were written and over 10 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 to 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 you know some people used to hang out with a lot of them uh you know started on the oxycontin on the percocet and ended up becoming a heroin addict and i've like 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 um you know they played sports and they they hung out with good people um and and now we're dead back in 2010 authorities began cracking down on doctors in florida who'd been over prescribing 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 over-prescribing 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 heroes and 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 and medication treatment is absolutely the gold standard for treating opioid addiction you know 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 just 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 gonna draw up the contents of this pop 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 it's essentially like it's 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 easy 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 pickard 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 like the third time i got high and um 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 gonna 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 i wouldn't be here and not only like would i not be here but my mother would be without a son we've seen how pharma companies made 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 u.s and canada as dealers saw an incredibly cheap and easy way to cut their 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 sees 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 car fentanyl which is a hundred times stronger in that one gram that's actually 50 000 fatal overdoses 50 000 that's that's a city so where does that leave us the data hasn't yet come in but early reports that the covert 19 pandemic has made the opioid crisis even worse overdose deaths are expected to break 70 000 this year perju farmer is being sued by over 2 000 american cities counties and native american territories for its part in creating the crisis poju have 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 u.s 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 you
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Channel: VICE
Views: 2,573,137
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Keywords: documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, film, short film, movies, VWN, Vice World News, world news, news, the war on drugs, war on drugs, drug war, prescription drug epidemic, heroin, fentanyl, oxy, oxycontin, opioid crisis, covid-19, drug use, weed, speed, coke, cocaine, MDMA, ket, ketamine, Benzos, hash, purdue, purdue pharma, sackler
Id: GJc-YI7OWfY
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Length: 11min 10sec (670 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 20 2020
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