This is a HeadGum Podcast. I don't know what to think

I don't know what to say

Yeah, that's all right

Yeah, that's all right

Yeah, that's okay

I don't know anything. Hello, welcome to factually, I'm Adam Conover.

And, uh, you know, America knows the impact of disease.

Now, more than ever, don't we?

It's destroyed our collective year with more than 200,000 people dead

and at least 7.25 million Americans infected with

the COVID-19 disease is the central fact of 2020. I think we can all agree

with politics running a close second for now, could overtake it if we are that unlucky,

but the truth is, COVID-19 is hardly our only epidemic right now, because for the last 20 years, we've actually been facing an opioid crisis that is so bad, it's led to the decline of American life expectancy.

Something that hasn't happened in a century.

We've been going up, up, up, up, living longer and longer for the last 100 years, and now we're

going down in part because of the opioid crisis.

The death rate from overdoses has gone up six times

between 1999 and 2017. It has sex-toupled for you cross-re-puzzled

for you cross-re-puzzled doers out there in just less than 20 years and that's

resulted in nearly half a million deaths and thousands more in opioid-related

suicides. It is a true epidemic that is costing us countless lives.

So how do we get here?

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