Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and I'm here today with the fourth episode of our new short form news show, 16 minutes, where we cover recent headlines, the A6 and Z way offering expert takes on the trends involved and more. You can follow the show in its own feed in your favorite podcast player app. Our other episodes cover multiple news items and topics, but this week,

we're doing two separate but short deep dives connected to recent headlines, one on

e-sports gaming and the future of entertainment, which you can find in this feed, or at a16.com

slash 16 minutes, and this episode, which is on a sad but important topic, the opioid crisis.

Just to quickly sum up, important topic, the opioid crisis.

Just to quickly sum up, the issue of the opioid crisis has been around for years, which is this prescription opioid epidemic that resulted in nearly 100,000 debts from 2005 to 2012.

And what makes it even sadder is that it just proportionately affected people from regions that are underserved economically.

For instance, Native American tribal regions, towns in West Virginia and so on.

For what opioids are, as a reminder, remember the word opium?

There are a class of drugs that include heron, fentanyl, pain relievers like Oxycontin,

Vicodin, Codine, Morphine, and most of those are pain relievers that are legal and available by prescription.

This crisis has been around for years, but here's the news.

The Washington Post and the publisher of the Charleston Gazette Mail, which is a West Virginia paper, one of the regions that's most impacted by this crisis, waged a year-long legal battle and won

a court order for access to the Drug enforcement administration's database, which is this

automation of reports and consolidated orders. It's the ARCO's database. And basically, the Washington

Post's work helps visualize how much specific drugs went to individual states and counties and who

the top distributors, manufacturers, and pharmacies that were involved. And according to the post,

high-level findings, just three companies manufactured about 88% of the pills and just six companies

distributed 75% of them. And over the past couple of weeks, a number of lawsuits have been filed

as a result of those findings. Arizona just filed a case against a maker of OxyContin.

Unusually, they did it directly at the Supreme Court level,

while towns and cities are suing pharmacies like Walmart, CVS, and Walgreens.

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