I'm Hannah Rosen, this is Radio Atlantic. I came across a few stats recently in this book,

Quick Fixes by Benjamin Fong that really confirmed a sense I had about how much we Americans love our drugs.

Fong pulls together data that shows that at 4% of the Earth's population, we use 80% of its opioids and 83% of its ADHD meds.

One in three Americans suffers from anxiety, depression, or both, and one in six is on psychiatric medication.

Fong calls these numbers truly world historical.

Why us? I mean it can't just be biological that these drugs somehow work differently on American

bodies than they do on other bodies. It must also be cultural. Something about the way we think about them. Earlier this year, one of our

reporters, Ethan Brooks, got really interested in this idea. In particular, what happens when you combine powerful medications with powerful stories about those medications?

And we're going to spend the next three weeks looking at that question, in a series of episodes we're calling

scripts for the next two weeks we'll get into popular meds like stimulants

antidepressants and anxiety meds drugs we are currently taking a lot of.

But this week, we're going to start with a different type of story.

A mystery, about a medication that Americans are avoiding taking, even though in another country it saved many, many lives.

Ethan will take it from here.

If you would have just imagine a medicine or a chemical compound that could put a stop to the opioid epidemic.

That medicine would probably look a lot like buper-norphine.

Hiding behind a borderline unpronounceable name is a real life miracle drug.

It's a drug that allows people who struggle with opioid addiction to live normal lives,

and it's a proven winner.

When France was dealing with their own opioid crisis back in the 80s and 90s, they pushed this treatment.

And overdose deaths dropped by 79% in four years.

79%.

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