Checks and Balance: The 20 year epidemic, part 1

Checks and Balance from The Economist

The Economist

Politics, News & Politics, News, Us Politics

4.6 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2023

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

More than 650,000 Americans have died of overdoses since the start of the opioid epidemic. Fentanyl, easily available and dangerously powerful, killed seventy thousand people in 2021 alone. Now, as the federal government estimates more than five million people struggle with an opioid addiction, states are increasingly looking for sweeping solutions to the crisis. What solutions are there? And what’s stopping them being enacted?

Keith Humphreys, drug policy advisor to George W Bush and Barack Obama, talks us through the state of epidemic. And The Economist’s Stevie Hertz heads to Oregon to see how its first-in-the-nation policies are working in practice.

This is the first part of a short series looking at the opioid epidemic in America. This episode considers the demand for the drugs, and in a few weeks we'll delve into the supply chain.

John Prideaux hosts with Charlotte Howard and Idrees Kahloon.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It came in a stout little bottle just an inch and a half high.
0:07.8	The colourful label on the cough medicine promised it would be safe and effective.
0:12.5	It was stronger and cheaper than morphine.
0:15.1	It was the heroic version.
0:18.1	Introduced in 1898 by Bia and Co, heroin was sold as non-addictive.
0:25.0	Two decades later, it was reported that 98% of all drug addicts in New York were reliant on heroin.
0:32.8	Now America is two decades into another opioid epidemic,
0:36.5	fueled by a painkiller, fentanyl, that's 50 times stronger than the heroin in Bia's stout little bottle.
0:43.7	It's one of the worst public health crises ever to hit America.
0:47.7	And it's getting worse.
0:50.7	I'm John Prado, and this is Checks and Balance from the Economist.
0:56.6	Each week, we take one big theme, shaping American politics and explore it in depth.
1:09.0	Today, can America solve the opioid crisis?
1:21.2	More than 650,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses since the start of the epidemic
1:29.6	just over two decades ago.
1:32.0	Fentanyl, easily available and dangerously powerful, killed 70,000 people in 2021 alone.
1:39.6	Now, as the federal government estimates that more than 5 million people struggle with an opioid addiction,
1:45.1	states are looking for new solutions, any solutions to the crisis.
1:49.8	What are they?
1:50.8	And why isn't there more political pressure to find them?
2:05.6	With me this week to discuss America's opioid epidemic and how to slow it down,
2:10.4	are Charlotte Howard in New York and Idris Calune in Washington.
	...

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