I'm Jonathan Capehart and welcome to Capehart. The opioid epidemic that we were all focused on

before the COVID pandemic swamped everything continued unabated during it. Today,

fentanyl is now driving the unprecedented number of drug overdoses in the United States.

Dr. Rahul Gupta is the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy,

informally known as the drug czar. In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post

Live on October 26th, Dr. Gupta talks about a range of issues, including harm reduction and

treatment. But the bulk of our discussion was about the evolution of overdoses in the United States

and why today synthetic drugs like fentanyl are not only dangerous, they're a nightmare.

Almost going away are the days when we had organic drugs that we've had for thousands of years,

like cocaine, marijuana, and others and heroin, especially, where you had crops, farmers,

fertilizers, you can measure those crops and get an estimate of what's being produced.

Today, all you need is a small closet and the imagination of a chemist to produce this synthetic,

deadly substances that could come in very small quantities and kill a lot of people, unfortunately.

Dr. Gupta, the fentanyl overdoses are an evolution from the prescription

pain meds epidemic from the early 2000s. Talk about that evolution and where does fentanyl

come from and what is the administration doing now to stop it coming into the country?

Well, you know, as a practicing physician for the last two decades plus what happened was we

started to see people started dying because of overdose from opioids, prescription opioids.

And as we moved forward to make really good policies to prevent that from happening,

the consequence was people moved to the cheaper, more readily available alternative on the streets

often times, that was oftentimes injection use of heroin. And as you know, I was a practicing

physician and I saw full time and emergency room sometimes there would be hardly a shift that I

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