This is the Kator Dilly podcast for Tuesday, March 20, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's proposal for dealing with opioids was more

emotive than substantive according to Cato senior fellow Jeffrey Singer.

He argues that focusing enforcement on physicians and patients is the wrong approach.

We discussed what he sees is the wrong approach.

We discussed what he sees as the right approach today.

What did you take away from the president's speech on opioids,

which the branding on it is the crisis next door which presumably refers to the fact that

you know anybody in this in this country who may have received some sort of prescription for

opioids could find themselves addicted at some point. Right. I was very disappointed but not surprised.

Almost all the advice that the president is getting is probably from the echo chamber

that most of the policy world and media sees itself in.

So everyone is completely bought into this narrative that the

opioid crisis, I like to call it the opioid problem, is the result of a doctor

describing opioids to patients who then become hooked

and become addicts and their lives are ruined and that couldn't be further from the truth

and all of these people really need to do is look at the government's own data.

This is their data.

So for example, their data shows that since 2010,

the prescription of opioids, the high dose opioids is down 41 percent.

Their data shows that the overdose rate despite that continues to climb,

...