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Explain It to Me

Understanding the opioid epidemic

Explain It to Me

Vox Media Podcast Network

Politics, Society & Culture, Education, News

4.48K Ratings

🗓️ 7 July 2017

⏱️ 47 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Drug policy reporter German Lopez joins Matt for a close look at the biggest drug overdose crisis in American history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

What can we do?

0:01.2

Can we build a wall?

0:02.4

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Weeds on the Box Media Podcast Network.

0:19.2

I'm Matthew Glacias and we got a special episode here.

0:23.0

I'm being joined by Armand Lopez, one of our top reporters here at AdVox.com.

0:29.2

A lot of people have been asking past couple months in the Facebook group and elsewhere for us to talk about the opioid epidemic issue.

0:37.2

I've sort of wanted to do it, but really all I would be doing is loosely paraphrasing stuff Hermann has written that I've read.

0:44.4

So that would be good to have him on and talk about it while the team is a little short staffed on people's

0:50.8

notifications that we can pop some pills and enjoy ourselves.

0:55.0

Let's not pop some pills.

0:56.4

No, no pills.

0:57.4

Enough people are doing that.

0:58.6

You know, our first thing to think about here just to kind of set this up is like, what kind of scale of a problem are we talking about?

1:06.4

I was on vacation last weekend.

1:08.4

I was driving around in rental cars.

1:11.2

We had the serious exam set, like radio and I was listening to my 90s alternative rock station, which I wouldn't normally do.

1:18.8

It was a reminder, like half the songs are about heroin overdoses from the early 90s.

1:24.4

There was certainly like a cultural perception that like there was a huge problem at that time.

1:30.6

And then earlier in the 70s coming out of Vietnam, there was like a big wave of heroin usage.

1:37.4

There's a certain cyclical element to these things like they come and go, but we're looking at now is actually much big, right?

1:46.4

So yeah, this is just just to get like the top number out is that this is a deadly struggle overdose epidemic in recorded history.

1:53.8

So an America anyway.

...

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