Pushkin.

Hey there, it's Michael Lewis, author of Going Infinite, The Big Short, Moneyball, and Liars Poker.

On the latest season of my podcast, Against the Rules, I'm exploring what it means to be a sports fan in America, and what the rise of sports betting is doing to our teams, our states, and ourselves.

I'm heading to Las Vegas and New Jersey and beyond

to understand America's newest form of legalized gambling.

Listen to Against the Rules on America's number one podcast network, iHeart.

Open your free IHeart app, search against the rules, and start listening.

From Pushkin Industries, this is deep background, the show where we explore the stories behind

the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. In 2017, more than 70,000 people in the United

States died of drug overdoses.

Two-thirds of those deaths were linked to opioids.

This opioid epidemic has cost the United States $2.5 trillion between 2015 and 2018,

according to an estimate recently released by the White House Council of Economic

Advisers.

Now we're addressing this crisis by trying to hold the companies responsible to account

with the help of the law.

In order to begin to understand how it's going, it's worth looking back to the tobacco litigation, which is the last time

that the United States tried to address a major public health crisis via lawsuits and litigation.

That litigation took place mostly in the 1990s, and the way it happened is that in almost every state,

the attorney general of the state, a government official,

filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state

against the major tobacco-producing companies

...