This is the Kader Daily Podcast for Monday, April 1st, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Policymakers working to address the opioid epidemic may be well behind the curve in understanding the problem.

According to Daniel Chichorone, a professor of family and community medicine at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center,

much of the best data is itself outdated.

He says there is now a growing appreciation that policing alone is not going to make things

much better.

What are some of the underappreciated aspects of the the

opioid crisis as you understand it? So the first one is that people are lumping

it all together. It's a singular title wave, you know, monolithic crisis. I break it up into three.

Other people are breaking it up into three. I'm calling it a triple wave epidemic.

And the reason why I'm doing that is not only does it look like that when you map out the deaths due to opioid pills and then heroin and then fentanyl separately, it looks like a wave phenomenon.

But if you understand the supply and demand drivers

for each wave, you actually get pictures that look somewhat different.

The picture for the opioid pill overdose wave looks different

than the subsequent heroin wave and the fenced in a wave which is third looks very different

than the two waves that came before that. So in terms

of policy, in terms of treatment, in terms of approaches, we need to understand the drivers,

both supply-side drivers and demand-side drivers of this triple wave epidemic.

That's underappreciated.

I think what's also underappreciated is exactly what is fentanyl.

And where did this new drug come from?

...