Welcome to Wellness on Mass. I'm Dr. Nicole Sapphire, and we have a really good guest joining us today.

Today we are talking about fentanyl, not about a political issue, but as a public health emergency and what we need to do about it.

This synthetic opioid is now the leading cause of death for Americans, ages to 45, killing quietly, quickly, and indiscriminately.

Just a small dose, the size of a few grains of salt, can be fatal.

This isn't just about addiction, it's about poison supply chains, failed policies, and the urgent need for accountability, prevention, and real solutions.

So let's unmask the spent mental crisis and dive right in. Well, with the president's war on

drugs right now, there is nobody better to be joining us on wellness unmask than Dr. Stephen Lloyd,

internal medicine and addiction medicine, physician, president of the Tennessee

Medical Board, and he has many more titles, which I'll leave to him to tell you all about. But

Stephen, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for having me, Nicole. So, I mean, big news

out of the White House. Obviously, President Trump has had a war on drugs, but he's now declaring

fentanyl to be a weapon of mass destruction. What's your thoughts on that? Well, you know, I'm not

sure what all that entails, but from an awareness standpoint thing, Nicole, I'm all for it. You know,

we know that we're losing about 220 Americans today to drug overdoses and the large percentage of those

are fentanyl. And so, you know, if you look at 220 people a day dying, that's a 737 crashing

and killing everybody on board every day of the year. And so anytime that, you know, you can raise

awareness about that, then I'm all for it. I think it's the right move. I don't know what some of

the ramifications of that are

from a military standpoint or a border control standpoint. That's not my area of expertise. But I am

certainly in favor of it because interdiction efforts do help us keeping daily drugs out of the United States.

Yeah, I mean, you make an interesting point. So as physicians, we think of drugs as a medical condition. It's a

physical health issue, but also a mental health issue. From a physician's perspective,

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