It's Thursday, April 2nd, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions.

It's The Gist.

I'm Mike Pescott.

And I was listening to Face the Nation this weekend.

Yes, listening.

It's a podcast for me.

I go double speed, 2.2.2.3.

And Jerome Adams, Jerome Michael Adams, was on.

He was the 20th Surgeon General of the United States,

2017 through 2021, last day of Biden being in office. And he was talking about little RFK Jr.

And the current Surgeon General has been put on hold. And he said this. When I came in, we had the opioid epidemic in an overdose crisis.

Imagine if I had said, you know, if Surgeon General, it's not my place to tell people to take

Naloxone, the opioid overdose reversal agent, they should talk to their doctor about it.

And I thought, wait a minute, when you came into office, there was a crisis.

I don't necessarily think that Adams is literally saying there's no crisis or epidemic now.

Epidemic has a little bit more of a solid definition than crisis, but not terribly solid.

But I did think, wait, are we not still in, if not crisis, the near crisis epidemic-ish mode?

So it looked up the stats.

And on the one hand, opioid prescriptions have dropped from 260 million in 2012 when we were

stupid and knew nothing to 125 million in 2024.

That's good. A bunch of lawsuits against

Big Pharma did a little bit about that. But, and this is from the American Medical Association,

...