Tasmanian Alkaloids and the Johnson & Johnson Opium Poppy Monopoly w/ Peter Andrey Smith

Media Roots Radio

Abby & Robbie Martin

News

4.6 • 814 Ratings

🗓️ 31 August 2019

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

Robbie Martin interviews Peter Andrey Smith about his trip to Tasmania investigating opium poppy farmers who supply the licit aka legal pharmaceutical opioid market in the United States. This DEA sanctioned legal opium market is largely dominated by Johnson & Johnson, using a subsidiary company Tasmanian Alkaloids, that produces large quantities of opium poppies (over 80% of the market) potent in thebane, an important ingredient for the manufacturing of Oxycontin. Johnson & Johnson was recently ordered to pay over $500,000,000 in fines by a judge in an unprecedented ruling for its role in contributing to the opioid epidemic. Peter Andrey Smith's article 'How an Island of the Antipodes Became the World's Largest Supplier of Licit Opioids' can be read here: http://bit.ly/2lv0G53 Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed this podcast, please consider donating to Media Roots Radio @ www.patreon.com/mediarootsradio FOLLOW // twitter.com/FluorescentGrey

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Hello, welcome to Media Roots Radio.
0:27.5	I'm your host for today, Robbie Martin.
0:30.2	Today I'm going to be interviewing Peter Andre Smith, a journalist who wrote a pretty amazing
0:36.0	article about the legal, aka. Licit opium market.
0:42.5	With all this talk about the opioid crisis lately, most people probably don't know that most
0:48.8	pharmaceutical opioid drugs are actually manufactured using the precursor of actual opium poppies.
0:57.4	What this means is, the same precursor used to make illicit heroin and illicit opioid drugs
1:04.3	is the exact same precursor used to make pharmaceutical drugs on the illicit legal market.
1:11.7	So without further ado, here's Peter Andre Smith.
1:15.9	So Peter, you've written this incredible article for Pacific Standard MAG, and it's called
1:24.6	How an Island in the Antipodes became the world's leading supplier of
1:29.3	licit opioids.
1:31.6	Just tell us a little bit about how you came to reporting this story in the first place and
1:35.8	a little bit about your background as a writer or journalist.
1:40.6	Yeah, so I'm a science and technology reporter based in Brooklyn, and so a couple of years ago, probably in 2012, I went to Australia basically just to visit a family member.
1:54.4	And during that time, I learned that Tasmania, which is the island off the south coast of Australia, like grew all these
2:02.6	illicit legal opium poppies.
2:05.6	So my dad's a pharmacist and I guess I was just sort of fascinated that not only were pharmaceutical
2:13.6	drugs still made from a agricultural crop, but such a high concentration of this
2:20.1	crop was located in this place that, you know, I think a lot of Americans would probably have a
2:24.9	difficult time putting on the map. So I just started to look into it. So your family, your, your
2:33.7	father was a pharmacist, so he had already had some familiarity with
	...

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