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The Al Franken Podcast

79: Alex Gibney Talks Opioids & His Doc “The Crime of the Century”

The Al Franken Podcast

The Al Franken Podcast

Government, Progressive, Politics, Senate, Liberal, Senator, Minnesota, Franken, News, Saturday Night Live, Comedy, Snl

4.67.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 September 2021

⏱️ 54 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Gibney traces the opioid epidemic & the criminal culpability of bad actors like Purdue Pharma, federal regulators, & doctors. It’s ugly.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Hey, everybody, we got a great one today, you know, for a change.

0:09.5

And this time, this time I mean it, Alex Gibney, Academy Award winning documentarian,

0:16.6

also Emmy winning, and many, many other awards in his long, distinguished career.

0:22.3

His latest on HBO is The Crime of the Century.

0:27.1

And of course, we're talking about Biden stealing the election.

0:32.2

I thought we'd just finally get another point of view on that.

0:35.3

No, no, it isn't.

0:36.6

It's about,'s unfortunately about opioids.

0:39.7

Over 500,000 Americans dead.

0:42.8

A very sordid tale about the pharmaceutical industry,

0:46.5

particularly Purdue Pharma, founded by the Sackler family,

0:50.7

who do not come off well, to say the least, but it's a story with a lot of bad actors,

0:57.3

including Rudy Giuliani, who represented the pharmaceutical industry during a very crucial

1:03.7

period that led to a settlement, a settlement that buried a lot of the worst practices

1:09.5

that created this crime that left so many

1:13.6

Americans dead. Some regulators look bad, doctors not so good, many of them, a few politicians.

1:20.7

Marsha Blackburn, now Senator from Tennessee, very bad. It is fascinating.

1:32.9

A lot going on up on the hill this week. Democrats and Congress overwhelmingly are for allowing Medicare to negotiate with the pharmaceutical companies to bring

1:39.3

down prices. I wrote a bill to do just that several years ago. The Republicans were in the majority at the time in the Senate,

1:47.5

and my bill really had nowhere to go.

1:49.4

And by the way, the pharmaceutical industry is far more profitable

1:54.0

than the insurance industry.

...

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