Division Keeps the U.S. From Effectively Tackling the Fentanyl Crisis
Consider This from NPR
NPR
4.2 • 6.2K Ratings
🗓️ 27 December 2023
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
Like the pandemic before it, the fentanyl crisis has divided Americans along political and cultural fault lines.
NPR's Asma Khalid speaks with three reporters — NPR's addiction correspondent Brian Mann, WBUR's Martha Bebinger, and KFF Health News' Aneri Pattani — about the depth of the crisis and possible solutions.
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Transcript
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| 0:16.3 | Fentanyl has killed an unprecedented number of people in the United States again in 2023 and any hope that the fentanyl epidemic would fade along with the COVID pandemic has not panned out. |
| 0:20.0 | Here's Dr. Norvalkov, head of the National Institute on Drug Research, talking within PR in October |
| 0:27.1 | about the wave of drug deaths hitting families. |
| 0:29.7 | He continues to go up and I had been hoping that after we are emerging from the |
| 0:34.1 | COVID pandemic we will start to see it go down but it's rising. |
| 0:37.5 | Volkov is one of the nation's top experts on addiction. She says it's time for policy makers to try new tactics, new |
| 0:45.7 | experimental approaches to save lives. We're not in a stable situation, in an |
| 0:51.0 | emergency situation, there's so many people dying. So I think that that's |
| 0:54.7 | forced us to being more creative and to dare to do things that may allow for better |
| 1:01.0 | outcomes. But so far Washington's political leaders haven't been |
| 1:05.8 | able to work out creative solutions to the crisis together. Consider this, like |
| 1:11.4 | the pandemic before it, the fentanyl crisis has divided Americans along political |
| 1:16.7 | and cultural fault lines. Coming up, we'll talk through just how devastating the drug epidemic has gotten and some possible solutions. |
| 1:27.0 | From NPR, I'm Wanna Summers. |
| 1:31.0 | It's Wednesday, December 27th. |
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| 1:47.0 | Human spent the 20th century making nature do what we wanted in the 21st we're now |
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| 1:54.0 | Decades into the push to fix Florida's Everglades. |
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