This is a headgum podcast. I don't know what to think I don't know what to say

and that's all right that's okay

I don't know anything.

Hello and welcome to Factually.

I'm Adam Conover.

Thank you so much for joining me on the show again.

This week we're talking about the opioid epidemic and drug use

in America in general. Now this is a really tough subject. A lot of people are

dying of opioid use right now. People I know have died of overdoses, probably people you know have as well.

But it's also one of the most misunderstood subjects in America, and today we have an

absolutely fascinating guest to tell you about it.

I met our guest today, Nab Das Gupta, at the Time 100 Next Gala, where we were both being honored

for being, I don't know interesting people doing

interesting things it was a pretty neat event it was a Tuesday night everyone got

pretty drunk and we had a lot of really interesting conversations I love

talking to strange and interesting people about the weird shit that they know at

parties that I don't know and I had the most fascinating conversation with Naps.

See I always wanted to know if fentanyl is this new drug sweeping the country it's sometimes used in medical context but now it's causing overdoses all across the country

why don't we just stop the pharmaceutical industry from making it because that's what I assumed was the source.

And he told me, no, actually, fentanyl is not a new drug, it's a very, very old opioid.

It's been around for almost 100 years and it's very easy to

synthesize. But what happened is since we cracked down on the other less

...