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♪ >> to be up-to-date on the latest in publishing with the book tv podcast about books. with current nonfiction book releases. plus, bestseller list as well as industry news and trends through insider interviews. you can find about books on c-span now our free mobile app or wherever you get your podcast.nd >> author sam, what is portsmouth ohio, los angeles, boston, and columbus, ohio all have in common? [laughter] great question, good to be with you peter. they all have in common that they are kind of part of the large tapestry of the addiction epidemic that is now coast-to-coast. i would have said a few years

ago the opioid addiction epidemic. but ith do believe that his chae in the last few years with the edition of a methamphetamine to the mix. both of these drugs now are internal and methamphetamine which is taking the place of the old school not that long ago, of opioid painkillers and heroin. what connects all those towns and many others as well both of these drugs are now coast-to-coast. this is the first time you have ever seen that in the history of our country. you have never seen one source cover the entire united states with one drug let alone two. that source is the mexican drug lord principally on the western coast of mexico but also most of

the pacific northwest of mexico. they have such an enormous in production capacity for both of these synthetic drugs. they have covered the country. vermont has some they didn't use too. l.a. has fentanyl, did noton usd to. all the cities in between towns, rural areas et cetera are covered in the stuff now. this is what ties a lot of these towns together. we are all part of the same story. it used to be drug use was a very regional. use of one story here in 500 miles awayy, the story would be very different. that is no longer the case. they have covered the entire country and methamphetamine and fentanyl largely because the drugs are synthetic but you can

make them from chemicals no plants involved. you do not need to grow them under the sun. note farmers are needed to harvest them, that sort of thing. the production capacity down in mexico has outstripped anything we have ever seen before and that has allowed them to cover the country and these two drugs. that's one of the main things that connects the towns you mentioned and many others. when could you have chosen any five cities in america given what you just said? >> pretty much, sure. there are some times and knows methamphetamine not made inroads, baltimore's one that i understand, new jersey maybe not so much. but by and large, yes. i think you can find the same stories with varying degrees of intensity all across rural parts of the country, indiana, ohio,

west virginia, oregon, albuquerque, l.a. skid row on and on. one of the things that's absolutely new about what we are seeing and that is they are drugs and they areth everywhere. and of course they are extraordinarily potions. sentinels in a deadly drug we've ever seen on the streets in the united states. methamphetamine drives people to symptoms of schizophrenia. i'm trying to think of some areas i could not include other than what i mentioned. think every part of the country has these issues. splint let's go to fentanyl for amendment that was developed in the lab in the night since the 1950s, correct? >> know it was developed in belgium in 1959 by one of the great scientific minds of the 20th century, paul janssen.

he owned jensen pharmaceutical in belgium it was a compound in a small town. the man was one of the most fertile minds when it came to developing drugs. he developed many drugs that were of enormous benefit in kind. fentanyl is one of them. fentanyl revolutionized surgery. it made it so you could do all kinds of surgeries that were not possible because it allowed you to bring people into anesthesia and out of it very quickly. that was a revelation. i've had fentanyl had a heart attack five years ago they gave me fentanyl. it is a a standard drug that has been applied in surgery tens of millions of times all across the country.

it was initially controlled only for the use of anesthesiologist in surgical settings because they knew its potency was where the keys to its success in the surgical environments, made it extraordinarily dangerous in the hands of people who did not know what they were doing. that is effectively what has happened since 2013 but certainly 14, 15, 16 you've seen explosion of fentanyl in the underworld. and of course the underworld people don't have a clue if they are' doing it becomes extraordinarily deadly. as do the analogs the chemical cousins all of these different little tweaks, molecular tweaks you can make this a molecule that will change it into a slightly differenttl drug. a slightly even more potent paul janssen predicted these drugs as well.

he wrote about the in a chapter in a book that i did not understand terribly well about chemists. he saw the enormous potency of these drugs something to be aware of it. and i would say in the last 10 years the underworld has simply discovered fentanyl and its enormous potency its enormous profitability in the sense to that you no longer need. -- michaelke fiore irwin trafficker you no longer need to grow poppies. according to whatever season they have you can make the stuff all year round. all you need now are the chemicals to be able to make this stuff. but fentanyl itself is a lurevolutionary drug. and did wonderful things for surgery and patients like me

since the 60s. we want in your most recent book that least doubles drug overdose which alleys each year surpass the total of american deaths during the vietnam war. i would a little immune to this? >> you know, maybe i guess it is hard to say. i know families who have been affected by are not. they feel it viscerally every day. it lingers it does not go away the death of a loved one due to this. but i would say there is a feeling like well, these are drug users so who cares. i think i would argue that. there is a feeling like this is one more year of another statistic more to the ever rising statistics of the ever rising death tolls.

and i am afraid that maybe blunting a little bit our response to this problem. it feels to me on the other hand there are more and more families every year affected by this problem. more communities, more businesses, more churches, more social groupings of every kind. so it seems to me too be expanding. i used to think when i wrote my first book on this topic, dreamland, everybody was about four -- 5 degrees remove from an overdose and death. and anecdotally speaking it feels more like two. you know somebody who knows somebody you had a relative who died. it absolutely feels to me it has expanded all over the country therefore cannot be ignored anymore. that's actually what's happening all across the country. i don't think this can be ignored. we may not have the same urgency

of response that i think we may need to have. but i don't think it can be ignored anymore. >> according to the national institute on drugor abuse, if yu look at this chart. we are showing a chart on the air right now. you can see the rapid rise in fentanyl overdose deaths. it takes off almost any direct line straight up. yes exactly. that begins once the underworld figures out fentanyl. that happens beginning about 2013, 14, 15.n china by then the chinese chemical company i should say our advertising on the web and the darkk web fentanyl and there's a lot of dealers in the united states by the stuff, get sent to them through the mail. this is how the initial invasion fentanyl began to happen in those years.

when it comes to people who view fentanyl as their lottery ticket. develop a sudden one the lottery the prophets are going to be through the roof. the problem is fictional is the first drug the profits of which are then tied to you being able to mix it. fentanyl is so potent the equivalent of a few grains of self-defense who will make you high a couple more will kill you. you cannot sell a few grains of salt from the three it's not logistically commercially possible as a street dealer. and so what you need to do is mix it with a lot of inert chemical sometimes covers it for anything. the problem is nobody on the street knows how to fix the stuff. they have proven themselves to be on the comp. absolutely miserable at mixing fentanyl. one of the chapters in the least

of us talks about the occurrence. how often narcotics officers with grades these mixes i think i would have an excitement in his basement, whatever. a guy in his underwear whatever that kind of thing. they this guy over there fighting this, people were mixing their fentanyl magic bullet blenders. know your audience with no magic bullet blenders from target, from infomercials are greatly over magic bullet blender third wonderful instrument when he makes movies and all the suffering he was really awful when you p try to mix a powdered surveyor for mixing liquid. when you try to mix a powdered is a very bad job. but folks were mixing fentanyl magic bullet blenders coming up

with lovely evening some parts of with a mix had nothing in. the other parts had an offense to kill three people. steve began to see these clusters of overdoses i remember back in 2014 and 15 saw a nanny akron and places like that. the areas first hit by the opioid epidemic of the deals were very moving next opioid horizon. they begin to mix the fentanyl they are getting mailed to them from the u.s. mail from chinese they've mix them with magic bullet blenders. that's why you began to see this really awful mixes. when you begin to see these clusters 50 in a weekend, 75 overdoses in a weekend. that begins to change once the mexicans kind of take it about 2015 and 17. funnel fairly shamefully get

away from egregious effects of all this. so fentanyl is now been discovered by the mexican underworld. they are producing in catastrophic quantities. they are smuggling it through the border the share of the country as as free-trade agreement with mexico. if you are getting enormous quantities of these drugs just coming through. mostly interests through border crossings hence the quantities are geometrically larger than the ever work in the chinese chemical companies were sending a pound at a time through the mail. two books ofr churchill's from another mexico and antonius in gun and delphine's dream felt a little more the quirkiness of some mexican cultures.

in that kind kind of morphed into migration immigration as well. are your last two books dreamland and the least of us natural outflows from these first two books? >> oh sure, oh sure yes. the way i got onto dreamland in the first place was because i was really wanting to write about this one mexico.wa i was really wanted to write about mexican heroin traffickers. i had significant background i lived in mexico for 10 years. i wrote a whole lot about mexican immigration. visited many, many villages where people had migrated. so the migration story to me was a very familiar one. and it is because that that i happened on this story about

this one village. a small town in the small state is in mexico i had never been it had not account for much because it was sowa small. the small little town which was on the pacific coast of mexico just south of the drug central of mexico, where these guys had developed a method for selling a black tara heroin very similar to pizza delivery. it was a delivery system for black taraa heroin. he would set up a system in a town. you would haveak an operator scanning by taking orders, taking telephone orders. they do have several drivers driving around the town their mouthful of balloons of tenant of a grin of black tara waiting for your call to say meet the person at burger king parking

lot at this address or street and he was five. to get there, meet the guy, spit out five and five doses he would pay you and that was their system. this system spread throughout. i just thought at first the fascinating system and protect never seen this before.re definitely he is no guns. there were definitely about trying to be nonviolence and not worry about -- not try to be about vengeance and shoot them up and so on. and then from there though, i'm down to this village for this is very much like every village i had been four people have migrated to the united states. but along the way i began to understand the reason these guys have this new market for selling their hair when i could see it was expanding beckley across the

midwest where they had never been before wasn't because of this other story that was much bigger, huge story that i did not understand at all which was about our revolution and painnd management and the expansion of use of opioid painkillers for all kinds of pain and all kinds of ways with numerous numerous refills if you want to them. it was a very great aggressive liberalization of opioids. which i did not understand us all at the time when i started. i did not know oxycontin or a vicodin or a percocet. i was in mexico and this was going on i wasas oblivious to it entirely. so when i came back i was focused so much on the harrowing guys that for a long time did not realize behind them the reason i had a fig growing market expanding market all across the country was because

we had exploded the amounts of aiopioid painkillers have just exploded. those in painkillers per chemical cousins very, very similar to heroin and people getting addicted to them and switching to heroin. which is why the guys i was writing about had this burgeoning new market. it was a revelation to me. that meant i had a huge learning curve. for me the learning curve was nothing village in mexico. i have that down i knew that story fairly well. to me the big issue the big thing i had to cover was pain management, all connected to pain management then of course addiction and that kind of thing. that to me is the big story. i could not have started on this trek with constant thousand nine, for me 13 years without my background in mexico. in fact they don't understand

really help anybody writes about drug, drug trafficking, drug use, drug treatment honestly and america without understanding mexico. almost everything and be as in this from new mexico. sam has covered migration, duration drug epidemic for many years. he was quoted in the l angeles times in 2017 as saying i've followedhe debate on illegal immigration for more than 20 years during which time i worked as a journalist in mexico ando the u.s. the issue is dominated i have come to believe by americans desire to have itto all. we want cheap stuff and low prices. we also want to luxuriate in complaints about strangers in our midst who do not relate as fast imagine our grandparents did. defendants clearly still pretty much theha case.

i have often felt that in many areas the presence of illegal mexican immigrants is tolerated sometimes applauded because americans on one hand we like the stuff they provided, right? they work very, very hard they become very, very creative and innovative. there are of course many costs that come along fast. it is no free lunch. there's trade-offs in almost every part of life and thiss is different so you do have peoplef who suffer because of that and have suffered and historically this is particularly focus at the lower end of the economic spectrum of the united states economy. and it struck me when i was living in mexico that we had a

fairly, how to put it a beat like a child this attitude. we wanted everything and wanted to be able to complain about everything two. we wanted cheap labor. we went to the houses painted in l.a. it's pretty much if you want anything done up your house is pretty much going to be my friend that does it. we went all of that and we wanted cheap and they're extraordinarily talented guys. they have learned, and education for all of those guys. the men of course. and then at the same time we want to complain. it sounds like a malaise of america some times where people want everything and complain about it too. pursuant to thank you for joining us for book tvs monthly in-depth program one authoring or her body of work for this month we are talk with author and journalist sam about his issues you've heard discussed here drug epidemic, illegal

immigration, migration et cetera. your participation is a big part ciof this program you can participate. the area code 202 if you want to dial-in, 748-8200. for those of you who live in east and central time zones of the mountain or pacific time zone you can call in (202)748-8201. you could also send a text message20 if that is easy if you please include your first and your city if you would. this is for text messages only (202)748-8903. who will also scroll through our social media context. at book is what you really need to remember how it comes to facebook or twitter et cetera. you can also make a comment or ask a question on socialqu medi. we will get to those in just a few minutes. most of your stories are about men. he mentioned mostly young men in

mexico are the ones working in this area. but most of your stories in your books are about men, rashan trayvon martin, will? >> guest: rights. yes. although i would say they are probably significant about women of course, angie odom, and their daughter bella is first and foremost that was the story that began the book. i think when it comes to drug dealing and drugg trafficking it's basically a man's game. as is migration honestly. not too say women don't do it bt often times, every village i've been to ask the men who have led. for mexico is what i am referring to. and so those stories are a bit

part topics i am writing about. however, the stories of angie odom's and bella picture kind of the thread to the lease of this all the way through the common thread all the way through, and some other joe trayvon martin is one who develops tattoo removal nonprofit. folks like that i don't think i leaving women out of my stories. i think the drug trafficking world as it stands is largely a masculine that is reflective sometimes on stories i went to sam's book dream land on the national book critics circle award for thatna year. what do you mean by dreamland?

>> guest: oh wow, great question. first and foremost of course, dreamland refers to a a swimming pool and the wonderful town in ohio. shout out to all the folks in portsmouth, ohio. wonderful folks down there. it was a swimming pool that largely galvanize the community for p decades. back when they had a lot of jobs. steelt manufacturing, shoe manufacturing all the kinds of stuff. they had a lot of jobs and therefore could support a finding main street and a lot of downtown churches. and an enormous swimming pool that really became the heart and soul of the town. a place where people came to socialize really as much as

anything. there is an enormous pool almost the size of a football field. everybody went there. all the white people went there let's put it clearly there's a small percentage of black people in portsmouth. they were segregated fromou tha. and evil in the pool was integrated they did not feel quite at home there. but this wasth a story about ths pool that was developed as a town blossom in a sense. give allison mexican terms you have people coming together, seeing one another, losing their religion and while virginity romance is forming. it's a remarkable place of people coming together. and then as the town began to weather, jobs left. the manufacturing went elsewhere. soon the main street was emptying out. half of the population leaves and in 1993 the tail end of all of this the dreamland pool no

longer has people enough to make a gogh of it they can to get upi and turn it into a strip mall. to me this was i thoughts, a remarkable example of what i believe to be at the heart of our addiction epidemic which is shredding of community. all across this country. it was a place where people came together. when they didn't have it, it wasn't dug up they all went indoors. the only place you ever saw anybody again it all was at walmart now because main street was a shell. and to me this became part of the theme of the book which was to say the roots of the opioid addiction epidemic at that time were really in our own destruction of community the

shredding of community. he sought youth sports become club sports. now some folks coming together to watch people play. trying to get to be professionals and college scholarships. we saw a lot of sf community bs ...s. by larger banks. if you go across the country see all of these ways people leave t the free market was some type of god whatever happened with the fleamarket was destined to be and so on. it seemed to me that was a remarkable story, powerful painful story for that film. it was also almost a metaphor for what we had done to the entire country by shredding the things that brought us together we make ourselves enormously vulnerable. of course as i got into it in the book i was writing, i feared

cold dreamland about six months before he finished the book. most of the time i did note the book was going to be called. it seems to me dreamland was the perfect title iv. it also fit of course it's about narcotics. so you drift off into an adobe dreamland when you're on dope. the mexican guys i was talking about earlier, they live their own dreamland. it is to make a bunch of money selling dope in america. ninety back home and be the boss, thinking, the big guy from whatever six weeks, three months, something like that. be the best friend of everybody's a guy who buys the beer for everybody. it's an enormous iconic in and of itself. once the money is done you don't have much choice. you're not going to go back to work in the sugarcane fields were going to go selling dope up in the unitedta states. everyone has their own dreamland. maybe this is also part of the

thing. maybe we are all looking for this dreamland. easy answers to complicatedam questions. how doqu we solve american pain? how human pain? the easy answer is how but opioid painkillers for everybody that kind of dreamland as well. one should begin to extrapolate off the idea to begin to see how it fits in this topic in many ways. course it starts in the great jena portsmouth, ohio. >> springer collars into this conversation as we can. michael is in miami. we were on with author and journalist sam. xes, wow. you spoke earlier, it was discussed why we accept by deaths from drugs and suicide and covid. i want to hear if you thought of

working with w neurobiologists r deplete toxic self interest which is also in your books toxic self-interest during group interests. capitalistic and western surviving survival of the fittestt ideology originated to try to justify scientifically racism and white primacy in the 60s with the first libertarians. but they were trying to show was is not how evolution works. on both sides wrongly think it's a competition that is the magic. it's not it's cooperation. also they wrongly view the benefits of evolution. sue and michael he got a lot of impact there. let's hear from our guests. text thank you michael. this is a very interesting idea

and one i am still wrestling with, thinking about, writing about. i do believe you are right. there is a. i try to give the beginning of the reagan administration receive one in england the beginning of the margaret thatcher administration they are. you begin to see this move away from the collective ideal. all government is bad, government is part of the problem. addressing real issues. there is significant overstepping. that does not mean of course the pendulum has disclaimed all the way where it did. my feeling was as time went on we lost sight because we were so prosperous especially in this country. we were so prosperous for us because we had every service you

could possibly need. we are somehow exceptional. all those rules do not apply to us. and i think that is what begin to happen. certainly with the reagan administration pendulum began to swing a good example is okay you want free trade there's arguments for that. but you have to do something for those towns thatfa have lost factories for they go to mexico code malaysian colossal numbers. i mostly felt as if well, you lose. time for you to suck it up and rebound. hold goes away is a bummer it's not ours. i think that was an attitude a prevailing attitude in, this country that i think became very

damaging. the thing about self-reliance is, it is coming on other people. it's come to fruition. you cannot be self-reliant help of otherhe people. we left that i think a great victory. a symptom there, a symptom is the enormous very entrenched drug addiction epidemic we are think coast-to-coast statistics, suicide, depression, friendless necessary people don't have friends. loneliness. you see a lot of things like this is the big develops and builds up in the middle of nowhere. for me too buy a loaf of bread he have to get your car for 5 miles and that sort of thing. all these things for him to be baking for american culture in the last 40 years.

the effect has been to preload that community feel that we took so for granted. so for granted. enormous benefits to us. one of those is as a bulwark of defense against things like drugs. when you think about it we evolved to be community beings human beings evolve to a need. we don't survive as a species without that movement towards each other that is essential. in this country in the last 40 years we believe it did not really apply to us. and so you're seeing a lot of things from sociologists and mental health experts and on and on and journalist are noting about our culture i think

because we. the jobs that went mainstream buckled under to walmart. all of that student sam you brought up walmart which is a role in your writing what is the rule? >> oh well, first of all a sign you have no more main street in small-town america. it's a sign it's a dead, dying or may have been the reason that your main street is dying. but it is also very important thing people don't understand about walmart is it is also the place of the lubricant of the drug trade. in many towns. her district too many addicts to convince me of this.

the reason for that is, walmart does not put muchll money at all into preventing shoplifting. if you go to a target it's pretty common. you go to target the isles are wide the lights are bracing target employees and the redshirts five, six, eight every time he was in place. go to walmart the aisles are narrow, the lights are dim you really see a walmart employee. which means is extraordinarily easy to rip off walmart. this is a widely known i want to assure you. remarkably unknown. every addict on the street who i've ever talked to his come up with stories of how they ripped off walmart or their boyfriend or somebody that's close to them ripped offff walmart. it was i think may still be.

but some elders were checking out the late '90s to justat a couple of years ago it was ridiculously easy to rip off walmart. mean?oes that all of those things stolen from walmart are traded for dope. in portsmouth i wrote about how dealers would make lists for the addicts. you make me stealing this ohmic you have to list price inf pil. it is an 80-dollar chainsaw i'll give you $40 worth of pills that i amme selling. certainly in the town of portsmouth had shops made up of certain kinds of items they would rip off walmart.p one woman and an entire apartment for baby stuff.

the guy hadno hardware. but what you find is it is ridiculously easy to rip off walmart. that is what is stolen feeds the drug dealers. and it adds to it, lubricates the ripping off of walmart because they are so common. because in many areas it's almost the only retail option. it sells everything food to x boxes and everything in between, automotive and whatever. it has become a place people know i get ripped off easily and i can take that stuff to my dealer and my dealer will give me dope for it. it becomes many walmarts have very well documented as well because of this become a huge drain on the police department's time in whatever town you happen to be as talking to people in paducah, kentucky. they found the two walmarts in the county accounted for 15% of

total officer time and one year because handling shoplifting. walmart hasn't built into it stores almost an ease with which people can rip it off. one woman told meet some people are stealing enough they have enough toin each. a lot of people are stealing for their dope. i think to the loss frankly comes from people who work at walmart. they are the ones also ripping people off. i'm not going to disparage folks working there but for a long time anyway they are not paid enough to care. they cared too much when they see people walking to the doors with walmart stuff not going to confront some guidance they'll let them go whatever. but walmart became to me a crucial element in why particularly in certain areas

appalachian rust belt areas upper midwest weiss on the spread of the opioid endemic so quickly because it was lubricated by all the shoplifting that goes on at walmart. that walmart really has not done enough. may be doing more now certainly. but has not done enough to put a lid on. sue and sam is joining us from nashville. rick is calling in from irwin, tennessee go ahead rick. rick hung up, sorry about that. manny kamala jolla, california on bookc tv. >> caller: hi sam. i am a retired law professor here in la joya, california. i was at yale before i was a lawyer. i will be 70 in a few months.

i did studies on heroin users. i did a couple of articles that i just want to say for you and for folks and get your comments on. what do we do now kind of thing? i have a study i wrote with david musto at gales it is called a follow-up study of the new haven maintenance clinic of 1920. it was published in the new england journalal of medicine, april 30 , 81. and soon after that the "new york times" didn't editorial comments. it is called all the way to help addicts about the way or addicts

were not stigmatized. they were allowed to buy their morphine for actually the police in the police stations. this existed up to the present day in places like vancouver and someplace in europe and. we went manny i think it got enough there to work with let's get a response. >> i would say that is an approach continues to this day. in fact part of it is under the heading of what they call medically assisted treatment. which involves certain medications occasionally opioids of a lower potency to com cravings are blunt overdoses, that kind of thing. it's very, very important i

think. it needs to be out there. it needs to be far wider use it seemsse to me because particulay now you have dimensional out there doing an enormous and damaged. you do have experiments now beginning vancouver, new york city with what are called the safe consumption sites. meet you, the attic go into this place. use your drug and the presence or nearby nurse. who can then revive you if you overdose on what ever it is you are using. and supposedly, i have not visited one yet. this is also a place where you are introduced, nudged perhaps,

urged to consider drug addiction treatment. i would say this approach is an interesting one. i do not think we are in a situation where we should say no to anything. however i would also say this. there is a saying on the street fentanyl changes everything. from my vantage point that could not be more true. sentinel means very, very quickly. there is no long-term user fentanyl on the street. people die very quickly. heroin collapsed 20, 30, 40 years using heroin. not a great life but they are not dead. that is not happening with fentanyl. and so the idea being we will revive them with this drug called nokia which is known by the brand name. it revives you want your having

opioid overdose. very good, very helpful extraordinarily helps people, keeps people alive. the problem is with this i think they come to pass is that you have people who are using. they are going into overdose and every time you overdose that is not a neutral event. your overdosing takes you into the definition of an overdose you are deprived of oxygen. your brain shuts down gradually deprived of oxygen. any time you do you're going to risk brainbr impairments. every time someone is revived that person risk brain impairment. we find people getting revived on the street nowadays a half-dozen or doesn't dozen

times sometimes within the samei day. it's not an uncommon thing. so we have to find a way of making sure the second part of that safe consumption sites. to get people into treatment is roughly what this is all about. there is an idea we should meet them where they are. they are not at a moment they're going to want off to get off dope okay, we should say okay. the problem is with that we know where those people are. they are at death's door. they are using conventional, they are going to die. that is not a debatable point it seems to me but i cannot imagine someone who is debated honestly. you are going to die on fentanyl the longer you use it. the idea of being behind safe consumption sites just keep using whatever strikes you is a good idea we will have treatment available for you.

those folks are not going to live long enough for that to happen.. so again this coming event perfectly fine option 80s with morphine, with sentinel it's a very different beast fentanyl is a very different beast. even with the live in our revived they still over a period of time have this perceptible imperceptible sometimes brain impairments. a fellow group meet the other day that our clients come with eighth grade reading level mostly. those who have had six overdoses reading level drops to the second phrase treats those who had two doses they just may be reading level for grade or two something like that. what i am saying this is not harmful free free city council

people for improving the process of pushing well, nudging people, getting people aware they are not going to live with fentanyl on the street, it just happened. sees, what threat your writing u talk about mexicanee crystal me, p2p meth, crack, opioids, heroin, fentanyl, pot and the potency of marijuana today. hard drugs that are happening today the so-called designer drugs a lot more potent and addictive than 20, 30, 40 years ago? cooks without a doubt. and crucially prevalent. it is about supply. it is about how easy it is to come up with the stuffed bird or how easy it is to find where this is. marijuana is a separate issue. but when it comes to things like

meth and sentinel which have largely pushed away, crack is like a footnote now honestly. they are so prevalent because they are synthetic. it can be made with chemicals all year round. it used to be in the cartel world and mexico was most important was control of land. anyone who is involved in drug production plant is what you need you need to throw yourna marijuana, your opium poppies all that kind of stuff. don't need any of that anymore with synthetic drugs pretty don't need land, johnny's sun, rain, farmers harvesting, none of that he is a very you need a left jewelry away from the prying eyes off helicopters. you don't need land. what you need is shipping ports there are two very large shipping ports on the western side of mexico right close to

this region this drug essential for mexico. this one and there is another port south of that and these two ports from these two ports they controlled a lot of the flow within those ports. they can get access then to all of the chemicals in the chemicals they want made in china or india or anyplace else. they can get through those ports almost unlimited quantities. so that means they are now able to make these drugs and quantities that we have simply never seen. as i said at the outset of the show i said they have covered the entire country of vermont, l.a., skid row coffee cup was to drugs everywhere fentanyl and methamphetamine. that is largely because they control the chemical flow into those ports are other ones as well but certainly those two

ports a bullet all of this. those ports are where these chemicals come in. you can therefore make simply staggeringca quantities of these drugs.s. enough again to the unprecedented thing of covering the country with both of them. and at the same time we do not have much history with fentanyl that we do have a history of methamphetamine. in the price of methamphetaminer as a cover the entire country has dropped by 70 or 80%. national is $19000 a pound. not something on the order of $3000 a pound. it is a remarkable, remarkable thing and very scary too. it is everywhere. that is the problem. and to me once when i lived in mexico iiv never really wrote mh about the drug world when they lived in mexico i was a freelancer preferred to let other reporters part of some big

immediate corporation, people backing them up. i'm a freelancer and independent and the loner i don't have a backupel i'm not going to cover that a covered immigration which was a more important topic at the time. you ask about drugs and drug traffickingug, i pretty much age with the typical mexican idea that all drugs again with demand and supply follows demand. i would say the last 12 or 13 years writing these two books on this topic has totally changed my opinion on that. i believe nowt supply is paramount. supply certainly is the reason supplies the story when checked with opioid epidemic but we did not have this enormous population of addicted consumer. or before the expansion of thed opioid painkillers all manner of pain and that kind of stuff promoted by pharma companies and prescribed by doctors. just a catastrophic supply the

stuff. nice to underworld taking over from that we will just supply basically almost the entire united states with the stuff. all about supply preview cannot get away from it. it affects everything it affects how people get addicted, how would people die, how to treat it, law enforcement on and on and on. to me that's an idea that occurred to me after i left mexico and as i was writing about this topic. we went to sam both dreamland and in the least of us, looks at the business organization of how drugs arrive in the united states. how they are distributed et cetera. chris is in indio, california. chris was going to question or comment. >> caller: in a country that spends more money on drug sniffing dogs, the researchers up with may be the silver

bullet. it came out in october 21 the university of california irvine research and ancient chinese herb and it was found to inhibit tolerance. which means that it can be used to t abate addiction? have you heard about that? that is my question for. >> have not heard about it easy to find online if you want to send me a link to that study. i'm very interested in this kind of stuff so i apologizing for not heard about that specific study. but feel free to look me up if you do not mind and shoot me a link to it if you do not mind. the event cornelius alexander, virginia please go have your question or comment for. >> hate sam, i am just curious because i have been listening and stuff.

you are talking about how america has essentially changed. i was a big ross perot patriot and stuff. he said that with the giant sucking sound because both the democrats and the republicans wanted to connect canada, u.s. and mexico. so do you think this was the downfall of america? thank you sam. thanks for the question. it is a great one. you could spend a books discussing. it's a very valid question. i would say free trade, like everything in life is about trade-offs. it is about trade-offs. it's just how you respond to those trade-offs is crucial. so we lost at many jobs because d of that. we also gained many jobs because of that i think of. we have a lot of people working in different industries now that

never would have been there before, i think. you have communities that did very well, particularly in the west. parts of the atlantic assessment. various places you could find, austin, texas places like that. also find places that were hammered, were just hammered by this. the problem that i think took place was we did not important to deal with that. my feeling was i think this is largely true the jobs that left to mexico might well have left elsewhere as well. i didn't think i ever did enough to make sure that you like to see what we could do as a culture as a country to prevent those jobs are leaving. we were taken by this free

market which i think it amounted to.we never made that step. i testified in one of the more surreal moments i testified before the u.s. senate. friends of mine will think how did he do this before the senate about i did thanks to lamar alexander and his health committee in the senate a couple

years back. it's appropriate to think in termsma of a marshall plan for those parts of the country that have not been able to rebound the way we thought the woodwork code from what they lost due to this free trade and what have you. it's not a surprise in a lot of areas where we also find the opioid epidemic as well. so we all pay the price. again it's about this idea that it doesn't concern me. i am over here in phoenix in the silicon valley. that doesn't matter to me. it absolutely does. we cannot, we are our brother's keeper. we can say that's somebody else's problem. no, it's our problem. >> you likely referred to the

hidden cost associated with illegal immigration would that include child rape, murder, dui, drug trafficking, gang activity et cetera and what would you propose as a solution to illegal aliens in our country?sa >> a lot of that is part of a mix, you're right. i was also thinking frankly of schools and education. again illegal immigration has been an enormously i would say frankly vibrant economy. i don't think it's a good idea of the people here illegally are easily exploited. they are providing competition to american workers. i think frequently, but they are there because we believe in the freeee market there's these othr

issues which are huge and affect american lives very clearly. it depends what i think frequently it depends on is the absolute position that one holds in the economy if you are in the upper-middle-class as you would see immigration one way. if you're toward the lower end or bottom and you're going to see it g differently. in san bernardino years ago largely mexican-americans and people who came over from mexicm in the 1920s now with their great grandchildren who were there that's one of the staunchest we've been and because of the mothers that

spent an hour telling the perspective that they greatly valued. of these folks were invading. they shouldn't be here. they are stealing the jobs kids need to have in the carwashes and restaurants primarily. there was a deep resentment. we speak english. there was this definite feeling we are not these folks even though we have similar last names and we may go to the same catholic church what have you we arefe definitely different and it's from which point of view in the economy you view immigration colorsn everything. years ago when the issue was

hotter than itth is today were extraordinarily articulate on this issue that folks were coming here living five or six guys to an apartment. they are taking jobs that we can't compete with for hours and hours a day so all of that is part of this very, very complicated mix. what to do about it, i don't know. it has to happen nationally. there can't be a move with one country doing one thing and the others doing nothing. it's about what mexico and the united states need to do. >> you are on booktv with author andre journalist.

>> caller:. it is a breath of fresh air. i don't hear it put in quite those terms. my question is do you make the connection between the howling out of the industrial base, the job market and the racism used as a catalyst to get people particularly white people to go against their best interest. >> my books are very narrowly focused on lord is that, for the

reagan economics. although i can see the connection and treatment of the free market. i studied economics in the 1970s and 80s and found it tod be very rigid discipline. free-market economics was the religion. it didn't take into account anything human almost. and i regret having studied it. back then a far more interesting topic than 1980, 81, 82. i would however say there is a a lot to what you're talking about. there was a remarkable ability for political marketers it seems to me to push buttons that they

very keenly understand will move people to do certain things even if it doesn't make sense that they are doing it because they are benefiting people when these folks are working class. and you can see it is still even more pronounced today. you can name several issues that would be those pushbutton issues, homosexuality and critical race theory and other stuff. it doesn't matter what you actually mean byat that or the people who agree with you what their policies are on that. it's just a way of pushing people's outrage and the science of outrage is a fascinating

thing. we all evolved to have outrage because it is what police to thn communities early on and as a way of saying calling people out. you can do this because your behavior is hurting our community. in order to doin that, you had o step out into the public and publicly accuse somebody. there had to be this cost to bear. outrage now is not borne by the people who feel it they just think it feels goodgo and they e this on the entire political spectrum of cable tv news we see people saying they are bad you're right they are bad. it gets into complicated topics. now it's taken to a whole new

level almost it seems to me where people are just being prodded and pushed. social media, cable tv news whichca is one of the most toxic influences and i'm referring to fox news and cnn both. this is not journalism. this is like media personalities prodding us with outrage to become like those mice in the cage to hit the water over and over again because it alarms our brains and we can't get enough of it. we don't have cable tv news in our family at all. we turned off cable tv because of that. we couldn't stand it anymore. i do believe that this is part of where we are now in this drawing to outrage and what that does this frequently make people

vote or support ideas that are contrary to their own best interest. i would simply say c-span is funded by the cable industry and wend appreciate that very much. rick is calling in from erwin .ennessee okay we have given rick two tries. this is a text message from peggy in lancaster pennsylvania. since fentanyl is used medically, at what point is the fentanyl illegal as it comes across the border? how is it packaged and how is it cost? >> it is illegal for most because it is made illicitly, not in a factory with inspectors and following fda guidelines et cetera and abides by you can bet that it's not being made that

way. one of the big stories i would say today is the amount of supply they've been able to produce in mexico has forced them to innovate in terms of how it's packaged so now what you're finding the last few years, you're finding counterfeit pills coming over by the tens of millions i daresay starts in the thousands and now it is pretty clearly in the tens of millions you're finding counterfeit bills that look like percocets or xanax or tylenol or oxycodone generic 30 milligrams blue pills. they make them look almost like the real thing except for these pills that have nothing but fentanyl. they are looking for a way to make so much that they are

looking for ways of providing an administrative vehicle and they are these little pills that look exactly like the legitimate versions that you see in pharmacies so it's coming across like that and through very heavily monitored border crossings butth we simply don't have the staff to search more than a small percentage of the trucks that come across the border in a single day. >> host: steve in lincoln nebraska sends a text. it seems obvious the complexity of the mexican government is

essential to the operations of the mexican cartels. are there any conceivable scenarios with the government complicity? >> i would say that is true. when you say elements of the mexican governmentli are complit and as a total i'm not saying that's true, but enough to make this a major problem. i do believe having lived in mexico for ten years i don't view it with any kind of rose coloredd glasses. i spent many years down there and i'm clearly aware of issues the country has with regards to corruption. i would say that we need a sustained collaborative, collective kind of approach betweenot both countries because both countries bring something

to this table. the criminal justice system that is not only corrupt but it's been o underfunded, corroded, it does not have the same stability and morality and training that we enjoy here in the united states. and you can see the difference if you go to el paso, a place i've been to a dozen times more than that. el paso has a 15 to 20. many many more even though there are 200 yards across the river from each other. you can see the differences and

disparities where they've invested in local government very important. we enjoy the remarkably resilient and flexible and innovative local government where in mexico we've covered as many places it still is backward even though they've come a long way there's far more to go. it's important toit understand e reasons why that impunity and corruption, one of the reasons that exists is because they have armed themselves with guns that were bought legally and illegally primarily assault weaponss that become the weapon of choice for the mexican drug cartels. a ball to easily and cheaply here in the united states and smuggled to mexico. they are being fought 60 to 70%

purchased in the united states. the assault weapons we've been talking about lately because the mass shootings, because they are now legal and you can buy them very cheap and easy they are the fuel down there in mexico for a long time so to fuel that impunity that allows for massive supplies of math, massive supplies of fentanyl to be produced and funneled appear. it's about supply.

ozark on netflix and clean off the south deal with the mexican cartels and drug use in the unitedte states. they killed off all the characters i like to so i stopped watching it. was there reality and what we were seeing? >> guest: the reality when you begin to see torture and public murder in the united states that doesn't correspond to reality for a very good reason. the mexican drug trafficking world which is cartels and a bunch of smalltime operators and family networks and

village-based networks selling drugs, some of them very organized and less so but they are all very clear that you don't commit these kind of heinous crimes because you will go to prison. there is a rule of law when it comes to that and that is extraordinarily important and a precious thing. when you lose it, you lose so much and the rule of law was a tenuous thing. i would say that you've got these depictions of people in the united states committing horrible torture and i love saying it never happened but there is good business reasons why that really is notth the no.

on the contrary, in certain areas that have been reported in the past i would say colorado is one you have different cartel groups and trafficking organizations that may be ats each other's throats in mexico. coexisting and sometimes collaborating in colorado or in other parts of the country because it is about a business. it's about making money. everyone is clear on that and that'sth why you don't go committing these heinous crimes. you don't see the kind of stuff that in mexico they had to get use to with piles of bodies and people hanging from the overpass and beheadings. all this stuff that never existed -- i lived there from 94 to 2004. i traveled by bus everywhere.

i went up to the border et cetera. there was no problem and now it's a very difficult, but a lot of that is because they have easy access to the weapons that are now on the news because of these mass shootingsgs and peope don't buy them here easily and smuggle them south. >> host: you are on. derek is in elbowed albuquerque by the way. >> caller: i was going to ask if you've ever been through here. i will wrap this up as quick as possible. i am a recovering addict and recovered from 2012 through medicated treatment but the problem here had overtaken the city. my uncle died of an overdose

months ago. it's so prevalent in our town and one last thing i like you said, so that is the problem and i wonder if you think there's any solution to this besides massive rehab and massive numbers. >> host: before we get an answer, you say you got sober in 2012. what was your drug at that point? >> guest: >> caller: i started using the pillss that he was talking about but the prescription started to get harder and i changed over to heroin and had to go on medicated assisted treatment using methadone to get off of the heroin. >> guest: congratulations. good for you. very impressive. i know how hard it can be so you

keep going and feel free to get in touch. i would love to talk further about this later but i think what you probably know to be true is if you had been using nowed you might not have surviv. that's the point fentanyl changes everything. if you're on the street you're going to die. the only option is you must get off the street. get treatment. we have toe provide that for people it seems to me and you that live in albuquerque, my first two books were published by the university of new mexico press. as well as new mexico and i think that the dope that comes in is paid for and of the money

goes south along with the guns. it's very important for americans to understand how many that we buy and sell and on are so easyel to do. how many are ensuring that they can produce these catastrophic amountsic of dope, drugs. it's all part of the symbiosis between i the two countries. you cannot produce this kind of dope without vast weaponry. it just keeps coming. that's what theyy get into the assault rifles, the cartel that we are experiencing now we allow

the assault weapons ban to expire. that may be a coincidence. i don't know but what i can say the guns that are being purchased and smuggled south are making it certain that they can use the corruption and a variety of other tools at their disposal to produce enough so the price drops from 19,000 to $3,000 a pound. that is the price of those guns going south. that is the price of those easy to buy guns particularly assault weapons going south. they are in a war with each other, sometimes mostly in the military. so keep this in mind.

>> host: something you write, this is a text message to you. what would happen if drugs weree legalized perhaps treated like alcohol? >> guest: that is an excellent question. i have a few things to say about that and i've gone back and forth on this topic many times and it's always worth bringing up because it's important. clearly illegal drugs fuel of mafias. mafias. we've seen that with prohibition. clearly illegal drugs result in far more use you can see that with alcohol i think and a lot of different things when you make stuff legal and go from

there it becomes easier and socially acceptable to do it and therefore you have to plan for the inevitable side effects from that increased use. we will always need to jail because jail is -- the drug that lands people in jail the most is alcohol. we will always need jail because of that. we need some way of dealing with the after effects or side effects of legalization. i would like to see i guess personally and let me say i would like to see us legalized one drug well and right now we are manglingre the job with marijuana. what is one of the great lessons of the opioidof epidemic?

i really believe this is one. be careful what very potent drug you make legal and widely available with outlandish claims about its risk-free nature, that is the whole story of opioids in the country. and also you can say maybe we should makee all these drugs legal, yeah but the opioid epidemic starts with illegal drugs. it's not an illegal drug that starts at its doctor's promoting the hell out of it and this brings me to another part of the topic that i wrote about a little bit and that is that i'm not sure i don't believe in fact that we have the kind of culture in america that will tolerate, have much appetite for the kind of government regulation that would be required to

successfully legalize a drug in america. other countries might be able to do it. i don't know that we are there as a culture. i think that we have too much -- we rivaled too much against government intrusion and regulation and we are in the remiddle of climate change. it's an existential threat to this planet and yet we are in california and other places we have made itia literally illegal to sell marijuana that's been grown indoors. we are growing it indoors with an enormous carbon footprint. why? because you have economic interests pushing it. it benefits them, not anybody else. so my feeling is we don't have in this country the appetite or the kind of serious regulation that would be necessary to

legalize drugs successfully. marijuana is a disaster it seems to i me. itit loses track of all the lessons we should have learned in prohibition. in prohibition we didn't -- we didn't legalize all this bathtub hooch and stuff that made people blind and all that kind of stuff. the pot world is filled with marijuana versions like that. thirty, 40% thc, 90%, the active ingredient in marijuana. it seems to me like we need to step back, go very slowly, very cautiously take our time and be aware that we are really bad at this. we don't know what we're doing.. instead we are just opening up the door. i would say to me it feels right now in some states anyway it feels very much like were

generally like alcohol pre- prohibition like anything goes. it's's fine. 99% vape. they are fine. that kind of thing. so i think it feels to me like before we started talking aboutt legalizing heroin and methamphetamine i would say how about let's do marijuana cautiously, humbly, slowly, and do it right instead of just rushing and because certain economic interests it's in their interest to want usc to do that and finally one of thing. a great book called blitzed. the one country that literally legalized methamphetamine this book is about that country. about the third reich nazi germany. they had legalized methamphetamine it seems to me like it is less apt lessons about the societal control when you start doing this as well. anyway, there's arguments on this. i just think that when i view it

from the perspective i have been in the last few years, it gets me. people say shouldn't we legalize because the opioid epidemic and i would say it started with illegal drugs. soh maybe not. i don't know. >> host: all four of the books are about people and at the end of the least he does opine a little bit on what he was just talking about, the legalization of drugs and i just want to read a few selected sentences to kind ofel add to what he just said. business combines are now everywhere. we call them big pharma, big tech and oil. now emerging is big dope. i don't trust american capitalism to do drug legalization responsibly and he goeso on to write that decriminalizing drugs also removes the one leverage we have to w push men and women towards sobriety. waiting around for them to decide to offer treatment is the

opposite of compassion when the drugs on the street are as cheap, prevalentdr and deadly as they are today. this is a text message. i am 73-years-old and have to use opioid prescriptions for pain management to control osteoarthritis, which can be disabling because of the abuse ofof opiates. i have to sign a contract with my general practitioner. he's the only prescriber and no other dr. can be involved. i take the prescribed amount. no more. my insurance company also monitors myce prescriptions. like me who need them are subject to these rules, so why aren't abusers monitored? >> i would say that we have changed a lot. i remember writing dreamland. when i was writing dreamland, none of that was true. it was fairly wide open.

you could get refills for almost anything. sometimes it was almost pushed on you. i remember i had my appendix out a year or so before i was involved and they would give me two vicodin a day in the dahospital then cut me loose the third day and give me an enormous amount, 60 saying take as needed and i didn't know what it was. i didn't really know what it was at that point but i don't like taking pills, so i took two of them and the 58 remained on the back of my medicine cabinet. i think the strict regulation of those pills is a good thing. ipi do however think we need to understand there are people like the gentle man that wrote to you who are clearly not abusers. clearly they are a benefit to their lives and this is the case all across the country that many

people like that. so cracking down on them to the degree sounds like he's able to get his medication and i'm happy he is, but often times people cannot get their medications because of this abuse. because the pendulum was here ande now it's more over here ad i think that is something that also needs to change. we need to modify that and take into account the person and this has always beens the story. before the opioid epidemic and very rarely did anybody get these pills or pain meds even in hospitals you had to have doctors sign three different doctors sign off on the use and no one was getting refills are taking stuff home or any of that kind of stuff. then you have this period of just the freeing up entirely of

the prescribing practices and so on and then everybody's got a refill and all you have to do is say i have a pain here and they give you anotherer refill into that kind of thing. it seems to me that we treat everybody the same. it's like all or nothing. it feels like we need to think more deeply about this and also provide inn the medical structue time with doctors. patients that are suffering from chronic pain and there's a lot of them that need time with doctors. they need a wide variety of treatment. you know, they can't just be one thing. but when that one thing works pretty well, they can't then be told no you are a drug abuser or this, you can become addicted. this person the history has shown this person is able to handle it and i don't think that we yet have this happy medium

where we ought to be and i'm not quite sure all the reasons why not but honestly it doesn't seem to me folks like the caller were taken enough into account. certainly some that lost access to the pills need to be. these issues need to be addressed and i'm not sure they are. >> host: mike from san bernardino, you are on. >> caller: my question is on fentanyl. i know there's a lot of money being made on shelves, but do you think there's a more sinister motive for introducing it to the country and also how widespread is it? is it worldwide?

>> do you think there is a more sinister motive? >> caller: you did come from china. >> guest: i would say i haven't done reporting on theg question you're asking but it is valid. absolutely. and i may try to do some reporting on that if i can maybe after the paperback version of the book comes out in november because i do think that it's an important issue. i do think from anecdotally speaking with people on the border that there are signs of the cartel world in mexico that essay we make fentanyl for the gringos and anybody selling fentanyl will be killed and that kind ofbe thing. not sure how widespread that is either. but you have to kind of view fentanyl and of course the 100

times thousand words as almost weapons of mass destruction. in fact i frequently review what we are going through right now as a drug problem. it's a drug issue and preying on people who are already drug addicted but it feels as much to me likeke a poisoning than a simply a drug issue when the drugs were far more accommodating, forgiving, speaking of heroin it's amazing to think about heroin like this, but i think it was moreer forgiving. live for 40 years on heroin. you can't on illicit fentanyl. so i haven't done any reporting on this. i have an inkling as i can't really talk about right now some of which may be true. it's hard to know because china may cut back on fentanyl. the company there's only a few

allowed to make it now but they haven't cut back on the amount of precursors that the companies in china are allowed to make so that's where a lot of the trafficking gets their chemicals is to make fentanyl from china soa it's a good question. i may try to get back at that topic once some of the hubbub dies down regarding my latest book. >> host: overdose deaths hit records last year. this is the recent headline in "the wall street journal" and many other papers over 100,000 people died of overdose deaths last year. as you write, for people die of poverdose than died during the vietnam war. fill in portland oregon. go ahead, please. >> caller: thank you, c-span.

just wanted to ask an opinion. under the constitution of the usa, we are the only government country with the rule of law, liberty and pursuit of happiness given that, your opinion, given your decade of exposure to mexico, usa cultures, can a movement of merging america and mexico occur to use illicit drugs as a motivational enemy. thirty years mexico joins usa, two-tiered wages gmp become the largest market in the economy and this would pursue to abolish cartels and mafia. >> host: what made you think about this? >> caller: because we are so inclined already and both are corrupt to one extent or the

other that we join forces and work together to become one and we would be bigger than the u.s., china or russia. >> host: anything there you want to address? >> guest: i'm not sure i have anm: opinion on that. sometimes as a reporter you just have to say i don't know. alan fromti georgia says do you see a resolution to the war on drugs particularly in mexico? if so, how long until it's over? >> it's got a lot of roots but i do believe that the mexican government needs to step up and do a wholean lot more than it hs been doing recently for most of

its history. really it's not much of a partner. that's not to say we don't have our issues as i've spoken at great length about the weapons here and smuggled south from mexico already but i have to say that the country that really needs to address this problem most deeply as mexico it seems to me because it gets to the bigger issues of the kind of gross economic inequality. it gets to issues of investing in infrastructure, local governments, all that kind of stuff is part of the story.

the trafficking world making huge amounts of profits and has actually painted itself into a very difficult corner. first of all, there is no drug in the united states that has now been safe to use. no street drug that is safe to use. every line of cocaine is likely to have fentanyl and math, marijuana now you find it as well. what is called heroin doesn't even have. it's mostly fentanyl. and what's more so you are finding an entire situation where it's really you cannot exaggerate the dangers. the other thing is they have for so many years all these different places where they

could make their drugs, grow their drugs essentially marijuana, heroin, poppies et cetera. now they have really funneled all of their production. narrowed their production capabilities through a few ports. so if you do something about those and all the chemicals coming in that are clearly designed to make methamphetamine certainly in the quantities are coming in and are designed to make fentanyl it would not be that hard for the mexican government to just very depleted into what's coming through those ports because it is only a few of them. maybe a dozen that really are a part of the issue. what they go elsewhere of course they would. they go somewhere else they are not going to be able to get the stuff in as easily into the united states as they are had they been going north a few hundred miles and going through those borders. it seems to me that they have

painted themselves into a very sticky place that we ought to take advantage of. in our schools there are simply nothing exaggerated. you can't exacerbate the dangers of these drugs anymore and that means they can see it all around them. but i would say some kind of collaboration between the united states and mexico on these issues although the current government doesn't seem interested in this at all, nevertheless collaboration on the issues of dealing with the chemicals coming through the sports would do enormous amounts. would it be 100% it would not. we don't need 100% of solutions we need 20%, 10%, 15, 30% of solutions. that's the way to move forward. there is a website that you referenced in judge for

yourselves. how did it overtake america and prevailing the narrative offered an easy scapegoat. if not perdue, who drove the epidemic? on the website it says for the opioid prescriptions. >> guest: there is a very complicated tale that itel and dreamland. one family and they are and anoutside responsibility for wht went on. there's a lot of roots to this story. there's americans wanting easy quick fixes to what a lot of

times is rooted in our unwillingness to get in shape and stop smoking and stop drinking and on and on. it's wellness, our own personal response abilityal for wellness. as a culture we point back on that and this is a lot ofa corporate economic interest about you see in the drug companies. every company that makes these pills was a part of this mix. there is numerous companies. oxycontin the role is outside because first of all that is a tin' company. that is a tiny company. the importance to the story as they were part of a massive push in pharmaceutical sales in the mid-90s to the 2,000 as they were the only company that was a part of this hiring huge numbers

of salesman to go out there and badger the doctors until they buy your stuff but they were the only company that sold a narcotic as risk-free almost as an over-the-counter medicine. oxycontin's role and what happened was that it took people because it had no other abuse determinedab it took people high daily doses so you would go for maybe 150 milligrams to 200 milligrams daily of this stuff in the attempt to control your pain and every time it lowered you had to take more. then frequently what happened people would lose their insurance or the doctor would cut them off afraid of what he's created. and those folks then would have no choice but to switch to go

into treatment or switch to heroin. you saw it building up the tolerance of the addicted population all across a the country tois the point where nothing else would do except for heroin. they went to the streets and trying to buy oxycontin at all or a milligram you can't afford $300 a day if you are doing it like that so they would switch to heroin so it created the tolerance levels nationwide for the others would never have been able to create to that extent and when they do that they end up creating heroin addicts and waiting so it's true some small percentage may be of all the pills that were prescribed were

oxycontin but the roles outside because they took people up to those high tolerances and eventually t frequently couldn't afford it and lose their insurance. there's a lot of reasons this happens but eventually are on the street have toll switch to heroin. i would also say that it's clear to me the family and purdue pharma innovated promotional techniques and strategies for selling and addictive narcotic. that's what they are doing. they are not selling antihistamine. they areis selling and addictive narcotic that is our aggressive and relentless and they pay the biggest bonuses so there's an outside role for perdue foam

pharma but there's not one person or family like i say this in the book as well there's not one route to all of this it's rooted in american culture and in commerce. >> host: let's try to get brad from international falls. go ahead,is brad. >> caller: this is a great conversation i've been enjoying listening to it. we were talking earlier about going into mexico. we talked about collaborating with the mexican government. you know, you look at some of atthe things the government has tried doing with the mexican involvement and at the first one that started, there've beenst a lot but the one i'm going to speak about was to understanding the guns and where the guns were going into the bad areas of

mexico. >> host: we've kind of cover that area and we are running short on time. i apologize. you are at the border with canada. are you seeing any similarities up there, any drug flow et cetera?? >> caller: my father started under operation went back 1965 so i understand as much or more than most people about how the trafficking or not so much the goods and services but my father was on the immigration side -- >> host: i apologize we are just running a little short on time. one of the things we didn't get to a and we always want to make sure to get to this as we always have current authors with their current books and what they are currently reading. here wer the responses. the corpse had a familiar face

buchanan, biograp of powere, by end reek a cross. never let me go. smiley people by john. currentlyng frederickre douglass prophet of freedom b the reformation history and the king james bible and i do need to bring up that last one. you write that you are not a christian, but so many of the stories that you tell about the people have been held by christians t and churches and people who were following the book of matthew, et cetera. >> host: this book was hard to write because i didn't haveve a map, like a roadmap. i wrote out a big book proposal.

i read the gospels before even though i'm not a christian i do find the bible to be an important and absolutely essential book and read of the gospel of matthew at the time i was also thinking about these topics of what does this addiction epidemic mean, what does the shredding of community mean? it means we've turned our back on the least among us and it seems like the bulwark, the way forward is focusing on the most local, on trying to make the communities easier to live in and to me we've been talking on the show about fentanyl and

methamphetamine. were it not for covid it would have been paramount for the last five years. but it was really the heart and soul of that book i feel is the story of americans in the smallest least sexy way working to repair communities. that was my focus and then the drug story kind of evolved as i was doing that. i felt like this was crucial because it showed we turned our back on this most potent and powerful idea that we need community and that is the way that we deal best with the problems we face together as a country and of these stories of americans involved in again the smallest ways trying to repair

that was a radical thing. it was a revolutionary thing in the time that it's every man for himself and it doesn't matter if we look after each other or not. i think jesus clearly showed that he knew the importance of community and he understood we could not live without it. we tried for the last 40 years and i think the symptoms of that are again loneliness, depression, suicide and most importantly from my perspective, the addiction epidemic that's ravaged all parts of the country thec last 25 years. >> host: true tales from another mexico followed by antonio and delfino's dream. unfortunately we didn't get to them as much as we should have.

the next two books the tale of america's opioid epidemic which won the national book criticsh circle award in 2015 and his most recent the least of us true tales of america and hope at the time of fentanyl and math. we certainly appreciate you joining us for the past two hours on booktv. >> caller: >> guest: i appreciate you taking the time. thank you to c-span. i love you guys. the place you call home at a stark white it's our home and right now we are all facing our greatest challenge.

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