Hey, NPR politics. This is Megan, the maceadal expat who lives in a very flat Midwest, home visiting my parents, gazing at the beautiful Olympic mountains,

I'm about to dip my toes into put it sound for the first time in more than three years. This podcast was recorded at 129 pm on Tuesday the 23rd of November.

Things may have changed by the time you hear it. Okay, enjoy the show.

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Love, love family gatherings. Hey there, it's the NPR politics podcast. I'm Tamra Keith. I cover the White House.

And I'm Domenico Montanero, senior political editor and correspondent.

And we have a difficult topic today for the first time drug overdose deaths in the United States surpassed a hundred thousand in the span of just one year.

That's more Americans dead from overdoses than car crashes and gun deaths combined. And that's been driven largely by the rise of opioids in this country.

NPR is Brian Mann covers this for us and he's here to talk us through it all. Hey, Brian.

Hey guys, thanks for having me on. Yeah, we're really glad to have you here with us because you are you are the expert.

You are so immersed in this. Yeah, for better or for worse. And we just got this report from the CDC last week about the number of deaths.

Why are these numbers so high? Yeah, these really were terrifying are terrifying numbers over a hundred thousand people dying in a 12 month span.

And really it's driven by a couple of things. First, there's just been this explosion of this very deadly form of opioid called fentanyl.

It's a synthetic opioid that's really powerful comes usually in from Mexico, Mexican drug cartels that are also shipping and really powerful methamphetamines.

And these drugs, both separately and taken together, are just extremely dangerous. Some people talk about this being a poisoning of the street drug supply so that people who were once able to maintain their addiction and sort of live with this illness these days.

It's one shot of heroin, one pill that you think is oxycontin and you can be dead. So it's a whole new world and a much more dangerous world out there than it was just a couple years ago.

So Brian, when you talk about fentanyl and it being synthetic and how it's a more dangerous world, if someone's thinking about okay, they had back pain, they went to their doctor, they prescribed something.

So is this people going off label and trying to get something to get more and the fentanyl is sort of laced into what they think they're getting or people seeking out fentanyl on its own?

Yeah, those are really good questions. So the basic narrative that we think that public health experts think happened here is that there was this big push back in the 90s and over the decades that followed by drug companies by the medical community to use opioids much more widely.

So that's why we created this big reservoir of addiction. People out there in America who are dependent on opioids and once those pills started being pulled back, people with addiction started looking for other sources and a lot of them turned to heroin, other street drugs.

And now what these Mexican drug cartels have found is that the cheapest thing that they can produce is this synthetic fentanyl. It's cheap to make, it's easy to smuggle. And increasingly what we're seeing is that they're lacing it into these other drugs in part to get people even more addicted.

And the other thing that's really troubling Domenico is that we are seeing people who are starting to seek fentanyl. They're actually looking for this as their drug of choice. And that just puts them in incredible danger, incredible risk every single time they use.

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