The free market economics of synthetic opioids (with Sam Quinones)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2021

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The opioid crisis in the United States is a textbook example of free market economics. The powerful lie, manipulate, and skirt regulations to make buckets of money, while innocent people suffer. Journalist Sam Quinones joins Goldy and Paul to unpack the economics behind the opioid crisis, and the new threat of synthetic opioids like fentanyl. Sam Quinones is a journalist best known for his reporting in Mexico and on Mexicans in the United States. He is the author of the award-winning Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. His new book, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth, is out today. Twitter: @samquinones7 The Least of Us: https://bookshop.org/books/the-least-of-us-true-tales-of-america-and-hope-in-the-time-of-fentanyl-and-meth/9781635574357 What did the Sacklers know? https://newrepublic.com/article/162148/sacklers-know-patrick-radden-keefe-purdue-opioid-crisis-review The 'Secret History' Of The Sackler Family & The Opioid Crisis: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/14/987195464/the-secret-history-of-the-sackler-family-the-opioid-crisis State-Level Economic Costs of Opioid Use Disorder and Fatal Opioid Overdose: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/wr/mm7015a1.htm Massive Costs of the US Opioid Epidemic in Lives and Dollars: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2780313 Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
0:11.0	I'm Paul Constant and I'm a writer at Civic Ventures.
0:15.8	So Paul, we often talk about economics as the study of who gets what and why and one
0:22.0	good example of that is America's opioid epidemic, you know, different people are getting
0:28.0	different things out of it.
0:29.8	The the Sackler family has earned billions of dollars selling prescription opioids.
0:38.3	And the rest of America has gotten this opioid epidemic.
0:44.4	That's economics.
0:45.4	So I'm a child of the 1980s, so I grew up in the middle of the war on drugs.
0:50.7	I very clearly recall Nancy Reagan's just say no campaign.
0:56.3	Like many of the Reagan administrations policies, the war on drugs was a very libertarian
1:01.2	idea that ignores systemic truth about drug abuse and drug addiction and instead cast it
1:08.5	as a personal choice.
1:10.8	And so for me as a white kid, the war on drugs just meant I had to sit through a few
1:15.8	embarrassing school assemblies, you know, and then they would pass out dare to keep kids
1:20.8	off drugs, t-shirts at the end.
1:23.5	But for black and brown communities, the war on drugs resulted in skyrocketing incarceration
1:28.1	rates with whole generations of especially young black men sent to prison and communities
1:34.0	basically ravaged.
1:35.8	There's the cost to human lives.
1:37.7	That's the big cost.
1:38.7	The pain that it causes people's families the lost lives.
	...

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