on the opioid crisis. >> the world changed in 1996 when purdue pharma bought --

brought out oxycontin. it became the go-to prescribed opioid that promised hours of relief from severe pain. the controlled release formula was supposed to have less abuse potential because it won't be absorbed slowly and there was not an instant high. wrong. in 2001, 107,000 to 108,000 died from overdoses. i will quote the "washington post" scott higman that is the equivalent of a 737 boeing crashing and burning and killing everybody on board every single day. today's three authors all have

spent hours with interviews and research and the unraveled millions of strands that created the opioid crisis. first is sarah horwitz. her book is the american cartel inside the battle to bring down the opioid industry. she unearthed the cartel-like pharmaceutical. when we think of cartels we think bad things. she revealed a complex back slapping network of big pharma, policy, politics and power. she's been with the "washington post" since 1984 and among her numerous awards she is won the pullitzer prize four times.

can you imagine having one of those? her shelf is really full. she's a graduate of tuscon high. she left tuscon at 17, attended bryn mawr college and later studied at oxford university on aatu son rotary -- on a tuscon rotary. most importantly, she was inducted into the tuscon high badger hall of fame a few years ago. yea! david and rich dell was into the -- delves into the history of law and in service of the law firms, donald trump and corruption of justice. he had a cleveland law firm

turned super size jones day and uses it as an -- illustrates the broader trends and complicated ethics -- complicated efforts or lack thereof of the modern legal industry. jones day presented purdue pharma in protecting and enforcing oxycontin patents and walmart's distribution practices. he zeroed in on zones day and when you read the book you would recognize many of the names because many of the jones day attorneys populated the trump administration. he is the business investigations editor at the "new york times" and was previously finance editor. before joining the times he was reporter and editor of the "wall street journal" in new york and london and previous books have addressed the deutschebank and

trump and a financial scandal. he grew up in boston, lives in new york but did come west for college and attended clermont mcken -- mckenna college. you know, basketball. beth macy is the author of the third opioid book which builds on dope six, dealers, doctors and drug company that addicted america. you might have seen her built sick on the peabody award winning series in which she was the producer and co-writer. raising lose -- lose reft

helped raise the crisis. her first job in newspapers was delivering the urbana daily citizen from other bicycle. she is the first person in her family to attend college a batch horse in journalism from bowling green state university in ohio. her masters in creative writing from the university of roanoke, virginia. came to virginia in 1989 and has worked for the roanoke times about 25 years and covered the opioid crisis on and off for about a decade. let's give them a little hand to start off. i'm going to ask serrie to give us a brief view of the situation to these cartels. >> first i would like to say

i'm thrilled to be back home in tuscon. it is so fun to look out and see so many friends from child haotd, from -- childhood, from high school. from the shanty group. thank you for coming. two years ago i moved here for two months. my mother was sick but i also was working on writing the chapters of this book and some of you had me for dinner, took me out for drinks, took care of me and i thank you for that, too. so, we are in the midst of the deadliest drug crisis in american history. in 2021 more than 108,000 died of drug overdoses the vast majority from fentanyl. every seven minutes someone dies from a fence signal overdose. the 2021 figures were the most

over in one year. an hour from near in nogales happens to be the epicenter of fentanyl seizures. so, american cartel, this back really explains how our country got to the point we are with fentanyl. when most people think of the opioid epidemic they may think of the sacklers and a company they owned purdue pharma. you may have read the best beth's book dope sick or the movie. if not i highly recommend it. it is ground breaking work. this -- my partner scott and i spent two years looking at the opioid epidemic and we found that there was a second phase. as ann said in 1960 oxycontin

was introduced, a blockbuster drug and many believe it sparked the opioid epidemic. but there was a second phase and i would argue it was even more devastating. it involved many more american companies. some of the companies are household names. walmart. walgreens. c.v.s. johnson & johnson. but some of the companies we had not heard of and i think most haven't, one was mallencrot based in st. louis. at the time of the epidemic they produced 30 times the number of pills that purdue pharma produced. the drug enforcement administration said in interviews they were like the drug kingpin of what the d.e.a. called an american cartel of companies. over this time period we look at, the companies that i just

mentioned and others manufactured and dispensed a shocking 100 billion highly addictive and dangerous painkillers. the d.e.a. referred to them as drug dealers in business suits. so, i'm going to tell you a little bit about some of these companies. actually, i will wait until questions. i will tell you what we did with the book, we didn't want to make it a boring policy book so we tried to write it as a thriller and through rich and colorful caches the main one joe ranazizi, joe ran. he was a d.e.a. agent 30 years, pharmacologist. he went out in the field 2005, 2006, 2007 he was shooting down

pill mills but saw it went so much higher so he started going after the drug distributors. the way the supply chain there's drug makers, johnson & johnson there are distributors and others you have not heard of, then pharmacies. he believed that the drug distributors were breaking the law. so he started to go after them. he warned them, wrote them letters, shut down some of their warehouses and what happened is they ended up paying enormous fines but they are basically speeding tickets. a couple years later they did the same thing. illegally -- let me explain. these are legal narcotics and he was running the unit in the d.e.a. that policed the legal narcotic industry but they were distributioning them illegally. he went after them over and over

again and pretty soon the companies got pretty angry and decided to go after him and the d.e.a. first they took the drug enforcement -- enforcement administration to court and lost. then with highly paid lawyers and lobbyists and campaign contributions they took the battle to congress. unbelievably, they managed to -- they hired d.e.a. agents to help them. they managed to get a law passed that at the height of the opioid epidemic undercut the ability of the d.e.a. to go after them. it is a shocking story. then they went after joe and went to high levels of government at the justice department to undercut him. he was eventually, because of the companies and our own government, forced out of government. his career was ruined.

he was kicked to the curb after trying to protect all of us. that is the first part of the book. the second part gets into the opioid litigation. joe renazizi gone but a man named paul farrell in west virginia took up the battle. he was devastated by how his hometown of huntington was ravaged by opioids and he started suing on behalf of counties and cities of west virginia and ohio river. other lawyers in new york, washington, chicago started bringing similar lawsuits and paul applied for the m.d.l. multidistrict litigation and he applied for there to bring all the lawsuits together to make it more efficient. it was granted and the litigation was taken to

cleveland to a federal judge. eventually, 4,000 cities, towns, counties and indian nations sued 24 drug companies, the most complex, largest and most complex litigation in american history. what was interesting is joe renezizi gets revived and they go to him and he becomes a star witness. there were trials all over the country. last year in an historic settlement johnson & johnson and the three big distributors, mccontesten, cardinal held. another agreed to pay $28 billion over 18 years to the 4,000 cities, towns, counties and indian tribes. it is a start. it is supposed to go toward treatment, education and addiction efforts.

that was in february of last year. since that, there have been more settlements with some of the big pharmacy chains, so now the settlement money is up to about $50 billion. that is just to say since the beginning of this there's beginning to be a reckoning and the companies are starting to finally be held to account. >> thank you. david, lawyers play a big role in this. a lot of people you don't really talk about or hear about the lawyers. i would like you to talk about the evolution of the law because like we said we are not talking attica finch here and what happened and how their tactics are influence things. >> first of all, it is great to be in tuscon, which i have never been before. i do feel a tiny bit like a third wheel because serrie and

beth are like the world leading experts on the opioid crisis and i am not. so, i started working on this book because i had been covering business and finance almost 20 years and basically every big scandal i encountered there was a big corporate law firm in the background pulling strings, working their connections, spins journalists like me and it had been gnawing at me how effective the giant law firms were. so i decided to look into the role they played at not only representing some of the world's and most dangerous companies but in many cases enabling them. i quickly settled on jones day for a couple of reasons. as said at the outset they have these roots as a big produced cleveland company from the

midwest kind of nice people for the most part and become over the past 20 to 30 years one of the biggest law firms in the world with offices in i think 40 or 45 countries and thousands of lawyers and they have taken on a who's who of corporate bad boys. i -- and one other important distinguishing thing about them, they represented the trump campaign in 2016 and we trump won a bunch of their lawyers went into the most senior jobs in the trump administration. so the white house counsel was a jones day lawyer, top figures in the justice department including the solicitor general and civil division which is the one that is supposed to be enforcing laws was stocked at jones day lawyers and they kind of represented in a lot of ways, it kind of

captured the nature of the legal profession the last 30 or 40 years as we used to think of them as atticus finch and my dad was a lawyer and i became naive ly in hindsight that they were committed to ideals like truth, honesty, justice, which is a nice thought and also completely not true, unfortunately. but as a legal profession morphed into the legal industry in the past several decades for a number of reasons a lot of those ideals with high minded ideals fell by the wayside. that is not to say all lawyers practicing today are terrible but it is the incentives and cultures in the joined law firms

that dominate the leland scape -- leland scape they prioritize getting as big as possible and making as much money as possible and toes are incentives that -- those are incentives that really do not align well with idealistic notions. as i was looking at the many of the naughty corporate clients that jones day had taken on two jump out. one is purdue pharma which is the manufacturer of oxycontin. and jones day basically all of the major elite law firms in the world represented purdue pharma in one way or another and jones day's role is fairly flair -- narrow because they were representing them on patents. i spent a lot of time talking to

jones day lawyers and understand their perspective and i was struck by their main defense -- which i kind of bought until i dug into it more -- the main work they were doing is enforcing the patents and kinds of creating the patents on the supposedly tamper proof, addiction proof newer iterations of oxycontin and one regaled me about the stories of how they got the first batch and they could see how destruction proof they were and they were encouraged to pour the pills on to the table and take out a hammer and try to smash it and you can't smash tell or grind them or snort it. it would be harder to ingest and the lawyer said it was so great he was smashing it and the pills would go flying but remain intact. but his view was in a vacuum if you can create a financial incentive for a company like purdue to create a drug that is

safer, that is good for the world and without the patent protection that prevents copycat drugs there's no incentive to keep innovating. the only problem with the argument as i researched a little more is the tamper proof addiction proof are not tamper proof or addiction proof and were worst. so i went back to the lawyer who was telling me and with a smile on his face he said you know what, david you are not understanding what lawyers do. and we represent who we are told to represent and we do what we can to help them and anything less than that is kind of an anti-democratic, antipatriotic view of lawyers so now we understand each other. the bigger thing that had nothing to do with power interview -- purdue. but walmart. it is the biggest pharmacy chain

in the united states at the time and even though pharmacies are in all of their super stars and not surprisingly since they were the biggest pharmacy chain in the world and extremely profit driven companies that has had some brushes with ethical problems which is past they were not super interested in safeguarding the opioids that we were distributing to the extent that there were concerns that they were filling prescriptions for pill mills and things like that. if they had to choose between policing the use of the drugs and distribution of drugs or making money, almost always it seems based on the reporting i have done they have chosen the latter, profits. so i focused in particular on a prosecutor in texas named josh russ who was an appointee in the trump administration and he and

his boss in plano started investigating a particular walmart super store and they realized it was a distribution center for doctors writing prescriptions and they started looking more broadly and this is not a problem with this particular walmart but with walmart in general and happening all over and as they subpoenaed documents they found this was something not only was it widespread but walmart brass in been tonville, arkansas, knew what was going on and that pharmacists had raised red flags saying we appear to be filling thousands of prescriptions that are bogus and i'll legal. those at -- illegal. those at headquarters would say keep filling them. it is not our job to crack down on rogue doctors so josh russ and his because feel like they

have a good case they are bringing a criminal and civil investigation. walmart gets winds of this and hires lawyers at jones day and get a partner who is a former u.s. attorney and jones day played there absolutely perform. -- played this absolutely perfectly. there is early in the trump administration. she got in touch with her recently departed colleagues now in the justice department and started leaning on them to slow down the investigation in texas and they complied willingly. first they shut it down all together and then at every stop they slowed down the civil investigation basically telling the folks in texas that their theory on the case was half baked, they are not understanding walmart's perspective so walmart through their lawyers in jones day had found perfect vehicle it slow walk the investigation and it

was so effective with jones day tapping former partners in the trump administration that josh rust ended up resign being in protest filing a whistle blower complaint and a bunch of d.a.'s left at the same time with him and there is one chapter but it is such a powerful example of how we you have lawyers whose only allegiance is it protecting and advancing the interest of their corporate clients at all cost and you have a situation where those lawyers have buddies in the highest reaches of the government who will do favors for phlegm, is that -- for them. it is not a fair system and deeply imbalanced system. and that is what lawyering has back in the 21st century. >> thank you, david. [applause] >> now let's focus on the people, the people who are

addicted. you talk in your book about evidence based treatments. i would like to know the status of those treatments. we have the settlements and we should have them every place, right? >> exactly. we have an 87% treatment gap in this country. that means in the last year only 13% of folks with o.u.d. or opioid use disorder have been able to access treatment. the thinking with lazarus with the money trickling down to communities, what is the best way to spend it. everybody i was talking to who was really doing on the ground work were saying we can't let did go to the same drug war incarcerate first, anti-medication assisted treatment. that is the two best medicines

and we have so much stigma against using them because of this idea if you put somebody injecting for years on one of these medications it is treating a drug addiction with another drug. simply not true so there is a lot of abstinence and only a judgment against these medicines -- and i knew that going in because my book, "dope sick" it charged the begins of the crisis in a appalachia. it ends with the death of a young woman i had been following 2 1/2 years. she was initially prescribed opioids at an urgent care

center, two 30-day prescriptions for a simple case of bronchitis. she was 24 years old, a waitress and had a baby and she was arrested and i called it dope sick because at the end of their journey they are not doing it to get lie but not -- not to get lie but to is excruciating hangover. as she was not welcome at home, as she was doing sex work on the streets and getting exactly the wrong kind of treatment ultimately her grandfather a retired account attendant at i.b.m. takes money out of his retirement, the family sends her to an be a continue tphepbs only

place and when she bombs out she is homeless and doing sex work on the streets of las vegas which was a lot different than roanoke, virginia. she was brutally murrayed on christmas eve of 2017 her body found in a dumpster. that is how she died with her mother saying goodbye at a funeral home to her battered body, just a moment as reporters i never thought i would be in that situation. so, as i was -- my doctor thought i had ptsd, turned out i just will depression and garden variety anxiety and my husband said you should write a coke book. as i went around the country talking about dope sick and worked on the show which was a great experience and i'm happy

to talk about in q and a i started hearing about really interesting fighting innovative things on the ground. they were only happening in outlier places and some were breaking the law to bring evidence based care to folks so i said i'm going to stay in this especially as money is coming down people need to noah works and it -- know what works and what really works for the largest group of the seven million americans addicted is this harm reduction which is we will meet you where you are even if you're in active use and treat you with kindness, love, which with no judgment and we are going to help you improve your life as you want to improve. sometimes that means giving them fentanyl test drugs or housing or medicaid. sometimes it is just passing out

clean needles. so the new book begins in a parking lot next to a dumpster in mcdonald's in hickory, north carolina where the jobs went away and pill mills came in. there's a nurse practicer who works at federally qualified health center treating addiction and at night by choice under the auspices of a harm reduction group called olive branch he meets people and gets them on what he calls low bearer m.a.t. it begins with him meeting them. he is high, late. height of covid. his mask is broken and he is crying saying if i don't get off this needle i'm going to die and he says let's get you help.

text me and i'll come to you. that's what they do. and i wanted to show them in their fullness. so followed i thought well this is pretty awesome. north carolina is a non-medicaid expansion state. and if they can deliver why can't we be doing it?

they come out. when you come out of jail if your addiction hasn't been treating, you're 40 o times more likely to overdose and die. so who are the jailers who have figured out that if we treat them in jail we give them more fin or meth done we give them the prescription we get them connected with peer recovery specialists who do we have any peer specialists in the room today? they work with folks in jail, they pick them up at the moment when they get out and are so vulnerable and they help them arrange their next pieces of

care. so i really thought of the ghost of tesz as i was working on this, the young woman who died at the end of dope stick. she really informed all of my steps because she said what we really need is urgent care for the addicted. and that's what these pierce are doing. that's what your harm reductionists are doing. no treatment for her substance use disorder, and now you're starting to see some e.r.s start to offer this life-saving medication.

i asked one what happened? what happened you changed your mind you're doing this? and he said well we read your book. and -- [applause] thank you. and then we looked at the research and how can we not be doing this, research is so clear. i didn't really understand needle exchange at the beginning that this is this idea that we're going to treat you with love. maybe you're just hungry the first time. i'm going to give you a sandwich, right, and you're going to get them back into the

systems of care that we've knocked them out of. and that's really what it all is about. unfortunately i said why can't we just wave a wand? but that's not the way it works. health care is very local, it's very community based. and so that's why we have to get involved at the community level because unfortunately we do have to reinvent the wheel it seems. [applause] >> i would like to ask you a little bit about the revolving doors that helped create this between the drug companies and the revolving doors. and then secondly, in our discussion we talked a little bit about how this laid the foundation for illegals. i would like you to address that as well. >> sure. so there's a well-known revolving door in washington

alive and well where people in the government move on after their government works to private companies. and the worst of that revolving door occurred at the height of the opioid epidemic. so these companies were very smart the once i mentioned but they were very smart about wanting to get expertise so they lured agents from the drug enforcement administration including people who worked with our hero joe to come work for them for much higher salaries. and so the people who were once protecting us against what was happening with dangerous narcotics went to work for the drug companies, dozens of them.

one man worked to protect us loeft and worked for the drug industry and helped write the law that led to undercutting what they were trying to do. so that's the story sort of the revolving door. what was the second question? >> about laying the ground work. >> well, so as people have talked about millions are addicted because of what these companies did. before i answer, i just want to say something that beth said. we have gone out the two of us have spent a lot of time going out to communities whether it's west virginia, virginia, pennsylvania, ohio, and talking to family members who are suffering and are in grief about

this addiction and losing so many young people who had sports injuries and were given huge ridiculously huge amounts of oxycotin. and you spend time with these families and juxtapose that against what we were able to get by suing these companies internal document where the people in the company when they know what's going on, laughing at the addicts, making fun of them, laughing about the crisis and talking about -- >> to the tune of beverly hill billies. >> we write where there's a parity of the addicts in appalachia to the tune of the beverly hill bilies theme song. so that cals sis of the companies who may say publicly oh we didn't know what was going on, we were able my colleague

scott and i through legal means to get documentation that they definitely knew and they were making fun of it. so this work of addicting millions of people really set the table for the mexican cartels who have now, there are so many addicts in america they have moved in with fentanyl, which is so much more dangerous. as i said in my opening remarks, that is what people are dying of today. and it is just pouring over the border, we went down to san eseed ro and the people on the border the agents, just throw up their hands. we can't stop it. we can catch one car, we can catch one truck and ten more get through. the supply issue is not where we can stop it right now. it has to be control and demand because it's flooding into this country. and actually wrote a story part of a seven-part series in

december called cartel rx where -- and this is so important to know and to tell young people who like all of us go to parties, all of us when we were younger, went to parties and there are illegal substances and now i wrote about a party in colorado where five people got together actually six people got together, they all were in their 20s, 30s, they had families, they had jobs and were doing cocaine and it was laced with fentanyl. they did not know. and they all dropped dead, i'm sorry one lived. the amount of fentanyl was just the equivalent of a couple grains of salt but it was laced into the cocaine. and this is happening all over the country and it's such an important public health issue. but an excellent question. this started with what we have all written about which is

prescription drugs getting americans addicted to opioids and the cartels were able to move in with something so much more powerful. >> i was going to say something about the revolving door. to complement what you just said. the industry, whether it's the drug industry or the energy industry or the banking industry and the law firms and the accounting firms and people in government at the same time, everyone kind of makes the argument that this is a healthy constructive cycle where people go from the private sector go into the public sector, they know where the bodies are buried, they know the loopholes that the private sector uses and they're therefore best positioned to go close those loopholes and enforce the law and write policy best designed to actually serve the public. the reality, i think there's some truth to that by the way, but what that doesn't take account for is the fact that the industry, whatever industry it is, is often doing this with a

very specific and often explicit purpose which is that they are trying to embed their people in the higher reaches of government. i have seen this in particular with law firms but i think this is probably true throughout. so the notion of the revolving door is healthy part of the functioning government and private sector maybe theoretically true but what i have seen in my reporting and what i've seen in yours as well is when it's done explicitly designed to exploit the weakness of government for the sake of the predecessor, it's hard to overstate how toxic and damaging that can be especially to kind of the integrity of government and to the public trust in government to do the right thing when they're literally often doing things on behalf of their once and future employees. >> i just want to add one thing. but when we try to take legal action to get ahold of a confidential data base and documents, we, "washington post"

often partners with lawyers from outside law firms in washington and so we went to the law firm that we usually go to and they said no we can't, we're conflicted out, we're representing the drug company. so we then went to basically all the big firms in washington to get someone to help us get this confidential data base, they were all conflicted out. every one of them represented a drug company, represented the drug industry. and we actually had to go to akron ohio and found a lone practitioner who helped us. but again that just shows where the law firms are in this story. >> they tell me it's time to start questions from the audience. so if you've got a question, please raise your hand and look for the person in the blue sweater, she's got a microphone that will help you. anyone have a question for any of our panelists? the guy with the blue shirt.

>> ask you hear me? >> you need the microphone. >> thanks for an excellent presentation. i want to rephrase how this is affecting america. you talked about a 737 going down every day. i would guess that most of the people in this room have been personally affected by this crisis. in our family, we're an upper middle class family. our son is an aspiring chef. his mentor was found dead less than a month ago. he had used drugs before but he said he was off of them, found dead. another one of our close friends had a son working as a software engineer for amazon. he showed up for work on monday, didn't show up the rest of the week. they called and found him dead in his apartment. both in their 30s, 30 years projected life ahead of them. what could be done to stop these kinds of tragic deaths? >> let's plug you into that

question. >> yeah, in that case it sounds like those folks got ahold of illicit drugs that had fentanyl in it. so i think we need more awareness. the series you did in december was fantastic. it really showed it very clear. and right now we're having i think we lost 1,000 teenagers which was a record to similar kind of thing. people who weren't addicted, they were just experimenting, and they got ahold of some i will listic drug. if you're opioid naive you're going down at that point. by far the large majority of the 108,000 deaths last reported were among people who were addicted. that's why i think it's so important that we get these

medications, particularly meth done is more effective for people who have been injecting for a long time. so at a scale to match the scale of the crisis. president biden signed a law called the m.a.t. act in december which made it so that doctors didn't have to get a special waiver which was an eight-hour training class, they were capped at 100 patients and i think it got up to 275. so they're trying to get the word out for doctors and when i speak to doctors i used to carry this picture of tesz around in this locket. and my voice would shake. i would say look i know you all didn't take a free trip to scottsdale, arizona, on purdue to become a paid speaker for the company. but 5,000 of you did. and you participated in this system that got 7 million people hooked. you ought to participate in the

system to get them unhooked. and so i never miss an opportunity to say to people of good will in this room that if you know judges who have drug courts that won't allow people to be on m.a.t., talk to them. i'm not just trying to sell this book, give them this book. i want them to know what's in it. i profile judges who have put their overdose rates down by 50%. there's a judge in rural tennessee who has a 50% improvement rate of overdose deaths and 80% on nas birth, babies born. unfortunately we can't make everybody learn the research but there are people including the doctor i talked about earlier who is now teaching other e.r.s how to incentivize the doctors to give these treatments. i think the most important thing is this harm reduction concept. because, as i said, most people

are still out there and they still think they can't get better. and i write about a woman who started north carolina, well she started the nation's first queer brashl faith-based harm reduction group in 2009, she has a tattoo on her arm that says acted non-verbo for do it don't just talk about it. and she and her wife started out in a food pantry passing out food, they quickly saw that about half the folks coming to their truck, out of the back of their truck were iv injectrs. so it was illegal then. they said if we take out half the bars of granola out of a nature's valley granola box ten needles fit in so they started underground. so when north carolina did finally pass needle exchange, they were poised to really start doing it. and they have relationships with law enforcement officers, they

have three needle exchanges, they have people who are peers in recovery including one woman that she met in jail in shackles is now driving around these rural areas under tent encampments helping people get critical connections to care. so when people ask me what could i do to help? call your local harm reduction group and they will put you to work. because these are just people working out of their own private cars, duct tape, glue, and have -- a retired doctor said what can i do to help. i sgai her the number of the person. the next week she was doing wound care in the harm reduction group. another person texted me a picture, she was packing nar can kits. this is something we've all got to start to take on because one third of our families have been impacted and it's -- you all know, it is the hardest thing for families to go through this.

and it's hard for some to even talk about it because we have so grown up with the drug war culture that drugs are bad, drugs are bad. people who do drugs are bad. i had one woman drive two hours to hear me talk outside of louisville the other day and she brought me a mug that she brought up that said drug users are people, too. and she said she had been on meth doen for five months, she hadn't used in five months. before that she used every day for 11 years. it works. >> another question. >> i'm from ohio. >> good for you. >> over and above that, what is, is there any way any of these

major players will ever face jail time? >> that's such a good question. >> everything like that that happens that the major people who are involved in this never really -- pay pay fines. that's great but they never face. >> it's not too late to criminally indict richard sackler by the way. >> the thing is that families that we talk to, i know you've heard this, about all the settlement money, this 50 billion i talked about, they're happy about it. of course, it's going forward in the future. but what they always say is why has no executive from any of these companies, not just purdue but purdue certainly, but all of them no one has mean charged. no one has gone to jail for this horrific chapter of american history. and that's why it's such a great question and families are really upset. and they've begun to rise up.

we know several people and family members are starting to organize to try to get the justice department and others to take this on. >> can i say that this is definitely a problem with the opiate crisis but it's broader than that. it's a problem with basically criminal impunity at the highest reaches of corporate america and that is -- i kind of came of age as a reporter covering the banking industry during the 2008 financial crisis, that was my first book, and the people who were held legally and criminally accountable for that catastrophe were the most senior of them were not very senior and the reality is a lot of people lost the jobs. the higher ranks but almost all walked away with 8 or 9 figure severance packages. and you see that basically in every industry that has its day of reckoning that there is a

really a get out of free jail card. that's partly because they have very good lawyers working in their corners, partly because there's a culture of kind of layering so that the people at the top have plausible deniability. even though they're the ones creating the culture that incentivizes exactly the type of behavior the results in crimes. and this is a problem that -- this is not a republican problem or democratic problem. this is something that has occurred, there's a lack of will power at the top of the justice department over and over again with these corporate scandals to go over after people at the top because the prosecutors are afraid that these are hard cases to bring and if they lose the cases that brings shame on them. and a great book called the chicken submit club that gets into this a lot but i've seen it play out in person in the banking sector, and certainly i see it now in the drug industry

and this is something creates just a complete pervasive culture of impunity. >> but until we send somebody to jail we all know young people have gone to jail, what's going to keep the next family of millionaires that wants to be billionaires from introducing a faulty product and knowing they can find an out in a bankruptcy court or with mckenzie consultants telling them what to do to get away from it? i mean, it's not over. the d.o.j. with enough public pressure could still criminally indict richard sackler or others. it's not over. >> thank you. i just got the better cut it off sign so i'm going to do that because i don't want to be in trouble, ok? so i thank you all again. let's give a round of