Everyone, welcome back to the Jackamon Show. I'm Jen Pan, here with my friend and your

co-host, Aurela Thornhill. Aurela, what's new?

Good to be back on the show. I feel like I missed a couple things. I'm slowly getting restarted after

maternity leave. In fairness to you, we were all off last week, so all, I think, I don't get it.

That shows you how much I'm focused on. But anyway, it ends up going to be to see you.

Yeah, it's great to see you, too, right before the holiday season.

We have a good show today. We're going to be talking to Megan Day, who of course is an editor and

a writer over at Jackamon. She's been covering the opioid crisis, which at this point is basically

now a fentanyl crisis. That's going to be our topic for the show today. Aurela, I know that you

have been looking or following the opioid crisis and the fentanyl crisis for a while. I know

that you really love Sam. What is it? Sam Quenonis? Quenonis. He's a journalist who wrote Dreamland.

And I think he's been more recently covering the spike in fentanyl deaths as well.

Obviously, earlier this week, very grim news that the US has now passed, I believe, 100,000

drug overdose deaths. Most of that is driven by fentanyl, so a real crisis.

Yeah, absolutely. It's reached a point where I think we saw

municipality struggling to keep up with the amount of deaths, the amount of care that people

needed, and it's a fiscal and a social issue. And now it's just compounded to a degree that is

not only incredibly costly, but incredibly scarring for communities. I think there's a statistic

that one in three people know somebody who is addicted to opioids, and we're going to have

communities with holes over and over and over again, because these drugs are so

widely proliferated, and now in pretty much every drug you can buy.

Yeah, the opioid crisis, opioid slash fentanyl crisis, is also extremely widespread.

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