the quiet military resumes on the line who. did zimri. reasoning with and it's. the moonlight and the music. tovan 1st 2019 from september 6th to september 29th. a protest against a prescription painkiller that triggered a wave of addiction in the usa oxy cotton. it's a synthetic opiate with an effect similar to heroin which has been prescribed to millions of americans.

the protesters were calling out greed for profit in the past 5 years alone almost 200000 people have died from overdoses related to prescription opioids. patients can become addicted to painkillers like oxy cotton in just one month when swallowed the pills active ingredient oxy coat on is released gradually but when chewed crushed inhaled injected or abused they can cause respiratory arrest. on happening again like. the average man had handed me. oxycontin was the drug that helped the sackler brothers arthur mordor mar and raymond expand their company produce pharma and to a pharmaceutical empire. the sac lawyers are often thought of as art. friends like

here in new york's metropolitan museum they made generous donations to promote culture worldwide from montreal to copenhagen paris berlin and london. their company purdue pharma made over $35000000000.00 in sales with the painkiller oxycontin alone by the end of the 1990 s. the drug had become a household name due to aggressive marketing and false claims regarding the risk of addiction. 20 years on 1900000 americans are opioid addicks and more deaths are caused by overdose than by road accidents the epidemic is also due to authorities shortcomings. west virginia has the state with the highest a drug overdose rate in the us this is the epicenter of the opioid crisis and. it was a good chips at any drug really cold ones who ever served for. the good but uncommon

and. on average throughout the course of a year been one of 8 cases for cases there are several addresses in town the that we've been to over and over the hostile remember me personally i was 11 around the same guy same house 11 cops. cars gas in a grocery stores a fast food restaurant. people go the drop through line or a strong warning from the town they order their food tonight to pick up one to. pass out. without a public bathrooms bus stops playgrounds we've had an intersections of traffic. spilling traffic lanes people just pulled was gone. i put it all over

a mass out on the wilbur car and i hit my kids and jobs used to back the cars. been very poorly kept homes middle class homes were mansion it was straight up everywhere i didn't care for your business. a schoolteacher a lawyer. it's a hey there's bad doctors bad pharmacies out there and we're going to we're going to shut those down books nothing was done for the didn't already use the people that were addicted were still addicted so the drug dealers they moved him now here we are. from the outset rural west virginia was a major target for the oxy cotton campaign and. the many minors there not only suffered frequent accidents but also chronic joint pain making them find targets for marketing the painkiller too. in

a region impoverished by the mining crisis there was also a lack of medical care this made west virginia particularly attractive for the painkiller industry pills were welcomed in this area where few therapeutic alternatives are available. at the same time the euphoric effect of oxy cotton helped numb the rampant depression among the many unemployed the prescription drug became known as hillbilly heroin. numerous people have become unemployed through addiction like former nurse jennifer walker she is one of the victims of the purdue marketing campaign her addiction led her to a life of crime and she ended up in jail she was released 6 months ago and is currently undergoing withdrawal therapy. i had no life i was involved in everything in school i was in every t. ball game i was my next really you know it's like 2 lads i started one to a doctor and they started prescribing me thank you notes. below where i

stored it sail and i'm not trying to justify it for any reason whatsoever but you know here there's not a lot of jobs there are scarce if you're in for in-between so you have to do what you have to do in order to provide for. the very 1st time that i once was on service hold on that my life was hard and they were at least out for pretty much no. nothing no questions and i just this was i went back and then well they're not of help and excuse was they were coerced and i came in water and their mother to my room all help with and worse and then i came in more and it was like an all my prescriptions was wrote down the doctors weren't even there nurses firsthand. everything's already trained before you get there and then i had

a search on my 2nd one and he continued to write me the pain pills so that was an excuse me every month for years. little small town pharmacy over the basic i paid cash for my mans therefore there was nothing to run for ever how they do it in a pharmacy and i ran your insurance to see what you've got or they know your faces they are 9 and a lot of it's luck wish. and you knew what i was doing in. about 5 point fields is what i'm 3 different towns i was bringing up prime around 8 else already on us. but since the doctors kept way back brightened para one as for them being anything else it felt like $13.00 to make a batch of me and. i have lost a lot of my friends of both of those package me this yr and give you the number

5060 and you never get used to it. he was a really close friend. to having him and more so. if they had got it from a wonderful somewheres else but pat you gave it to me it would be out robin it's still a bright boys in my house. and i want to blame it on. the general population you know what this person selling there but what how are they getting loans bills. water they put in new pills to make them so if they. were in there say oh we're going to prison for it our lives are being taken our freedoms we are like you and then right learn.

oxycontin was sold over the counter of larry's dr in pharmacy in madison like fast food 10000000 times in 11 years in a town with under 3000 inhabitants. in the past few years u.s. law enforcement has closed hundreds of the so-called pill mills pharmacists who fail to report suspicious prescriptions to authorities have lost their licenses doctors have had to pay heavy fines and been given jail sentences for over prescribing opioids. one major party responsible for convincing doctors to prescribe opiates not only to cancer and palliative patients or following major surgery was produced the company sent a pseudoscientific video message to more than 150000 practices. there's no question that our best strongest pain medicines are the opioids but these are the same drugs that have

a reputation for causing addiction and other terrible things. in fact the rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than one percent. they don't wear out they go on working they do not have serious medical side effects and so these drugs which i repeat are out there strongest medications should be used much more than. marketing lies like the made americans today feel outraged purdue and the family are facing a lawsuit. there was already a federal investigation of the pill manufacturer some 15 years ago. back in 2007 the company its executive board and its owners the sackler family faced charges of misleading doctors and patients about the drugs risks. but their lawyers among them brought off giuliani the former mayor of new york

reportedly had good contacts to the department of justice. in a move to keep the name produced pharma the oxycontin manufacturer unsullied and the sac lawyers out of the picture produced frederick and 3 board members guilty to misbranding the drug. they were given a total of $634500000.00 in fines but no prison sentence. it was a clever move by producer. around this time carol canara began working as a sales representative for produce. they basically were willing. that around company per day of. their billing the government through medicare care through the department of. the lawsuit i don't think the producers necessarily

stop their marketing tactics they reckon that they did everything they need to do to me. here is if they were following what they need to do but underneath all that . it was still business as usual and then you come up with an. addiction which is. not based on any kind of scientific information. pseudo addiction was a term produced pharma introduced after doctors had begun flagging more and more patients with addiction and produce said it was caused by too little oxycontin their advice to doctors was to increase the dosage. and i think now in retrospect looking at that whole idea you're essentially up to create added over time we're going to become tolerant. to that dosing strengthen they're going to need a higher dose and strain so from the company's perspective you're creating

a nice market for yourself. per script unhappy doctors were given an all expenses paid trips and invited to speakers receiving fees of up to $2000.00 perception produce innovative marketing strategy relied on the doctors credibility. i've had situations where i've had doctors in my territory say to me because they know what the deal is as far as getting compensated for so for speaking if you need any speakers id interested so the way we were trained to handle that was to say to the doctor. that you know the speakers that they are the people that they were selecting for speakers were people who generally had more experience with our products. that was a polite legal way of saying you need to prescribe more the implication is if you prescribe more then i think maybe i can hook you up so these are some of the bonus

statements or what they call sales incentives i'm looking at a quarter $125000.00 that's just in one quarter in one territory. over 7000 prescriptions and just in my territory the greatest growth i had was in the 60 milligrams which would make sense because the whole thing of titrating the patient and titrating them because of pseudo addiction that type of thing would make would make sense that you know people with patients would end up in that and those higher dosing. produce aggressive marketing campaign went unnoticed by the press even the drug enforcement administration the da hardly took note. time and again former d.c. investigator jim geldof was thwarted by top officials in his investigation into purdue purdue knew pretty early on drug was being abused by crushing it and then you're injecting your story chicago and actually the sale of their drug became its own economy don't you have a need you know rahm built was worth

a $100.00 to $120.00 on the street. it was a phenomena we hadn't seen before the diversion was so massive that the only way you're really going to attack it has with the distributors and manufacturers and that's why finally d.e.a.'s initiated to distribute our initiative but whatever we did it was never good enough and we chris couldn't achieve canales and move on the case they were always want somebody else interviewed volume was and often even though with the volume was off the charts they want us to be specific as to what order was suspicious this was the one i really i couldn't believe i said their chief counsel terry they ship you know 5000000 pills to this particular pharmacy and you want me to tell you which one is the suspicious one i mean they're all suspicious and. they did not want to take these cases and we saw more and more d.e.f. tourney's moving into the area defending the drug companies we also saw

a lot of deviate 1st the gators moving in to work for drug industries attorneys that work also not just with the e.a. but the partner of justice that nuada system or the new standards that we're using so these are people that they've worked with they knew any kind of weak points there might be in a lot of the regulations. the american public will never know what really the pharmaceutical industry did to where people didn't have to buy their oil and and you know i'm just i'm sort of a case went the way that. there is currently an entire generation in the us growing up apart from their parents because their parents are addicts custody hearings like this one happen daily in west virginia as well as in most us states. this hearing concerns the fate of 3 children of an addict on withdrawal they have been living with foster families since his wife died of an overdose. off. off.

actually. the scary part of. this plate hearing. her work her. way simply of. course is. part. of. the normal my kids are experiencing is for kids not to be raised by their parents shocking that that's not shocking and it's very very difficult to find relatives for the children to be placed with it's now fairly common for the grandparents the best positives for drugs themselves i had a case here where the grandfather was selling drugs to his grandson so fairly

common to see 3 generations dealing with substance abuse addiction in a family and the conditions of these children are raised i've had family members back to bought. i've lost classmates people at the hospital with us away from it so there's not anyone in our community can say that not also because of it i had to say it's the new normal but it is it used to be that you know if you had a 20 or 30 year old pass away you know the entire community would mourn now we expect people to die at that age because we have the overdoses and you don't see long lines of support for they were just faked and there's a stigma associated with that as just another druggie who died. i kicked myself switching out of the war early on a steal

a look back things on the x. we have a problem become an epidemic and we should the face. you know it was a problem it's hard to put it back in the bottle. to go after a doctor or a pharmacist it takes being able to show that there are going insane medically unnecessary way takes a lot of resources like your local law enforcement site won't force a prosecutor journalling doesn't have. a requires the federal government prosecute and even. it's difficult. the problem has gotten so big that i request our law enforcement everyone's which system or prosecutor's office and they to problem as long as the demands they are.

this is hemline another town marked by the opioid crisis. every thursday there are hearings at the local drug court. it's a reserve that richard. you never know would be when you mean it could be over. but you. know. this court strategy is not to punish addicts who have committed minor offenses but to reform them through rehabilitation. once a week charged addicts must appear before the judge if they pass the drug test they remain free. amber bias has been an opioid addict since she was 15 she and her

school friends even through so-called oxy part. he's right. we all go to college this fall well in the spring when everybody was at the paper you know. relationships and recovery are very very bad so i will lie a lot but. be careful all right back. campers boyfriend jared was also an opioid addict for years he 1st went on the medication after back surgery following a car accident his addiction cost him everything including custody of his children just like amber. it's a life they say maternal love is going to typically like this it's not. judge myself and them i. stepped up and was the mom that i didn't need she went to the courts and got the

guardianship i was supposed to give sound guardianship to her but i was too high to go to the court day and i wasn't even worry about them. it was my daughter bailey grew up knowing that i had to have it that next day there was no getting them to make him breakfast or get them from playing or even me unhappy when we wake up and she would even come and asked me mom if you took your medicine yet and if i hadn't she's like you know i want to hurry up and take it because then i can be a mom after that. i was sure i had been sick are they left or no bad old days telling her that i was sorry i mean i'd had enough you know i was sick of being sick all day. but all those bad memories are kind of like

a positive motivator for me because i mean obviously and i'm not do them that way again. because i'm better than an. hour i had 16 months clean i thought i was in control and you're never in control of your addiction i thought i could go to work and be around some i that got ha and and you can't but that's a trigger and i end up backslide on. my daughter she's seen things she shouldn't same the o.d.t. 4 times in a corps and then i would be in my wife's mother's house but after every time that are. all i was thinking was going to get to me it didn't matter whether i lived or died ok there's probably been 20 people and just this past year that i've lost to o.d.'s even get on facebook like every day and you'll see the rest in peace some

a's name that you know resolve. any and we both understand addiction because we've been there so we can both work our recovery together. like it would be hard to get with someone that's not an addict if they don't understand the situation and what you've been through or why it's not so easy to just stop you know you can just stop it so that you got to work on the rest of your life it's constant work but it's worth it. because the only alternative is to go back seizing and that's that and then and then. we were in cleveland for a hearing so i go pull up to the federal courthouse and out in front 2 or 3

dozen women with side protesters say make them pay hollering we will forget we won't forget they were mothers that had lost a child and they said please. please remember us when you go upstairs. for raul is one of the 3 leading attorneys preparing the largest ever class action lawsuit against the pharmaceutical industry more than a 1000 towns and communities are suing the largest drug distributors the aim is to achieve long term compensation for damages these would be an estimated $500000000000.00 a year for all of the u.s. fines became a cost of doing business produce paid $600000000.00 and they continue doing business it was a slap on the wrist it was business as usual so if they're engaging in this conduct because it's profitable i'm going to make it less profitable and

because part of the cost of doing business is going to be repairing and fixing the damage public entity has the right to bring a public nuisance and tell these companies fix it there won't be any movement in this case until the stock price starts to reflect the risk of these lawsuits and the reason is is because when those that have made the money begin to fear that they'll lose their money that's when they'll make that decision. money drives it all the cockroach always finds a way and so you can. figure out another way that's the thing about. breaking the real. dream making it is that we can affect policy change and we're doing it by

impacting the margins by which these companies operate and that will have a much longer and dramatic impact than any rule or regulation. in the past rules were not only circumvented. april 26 team at the height of the crisis the pharmaceutical industry succeeded in pushing through a major change in legislation unnoticed by the press and the public. this change stripped the d.e.a.'s of its power to freeze suspicious shipments of opioids. i'm sure it was influenced by the pharmaceutical industry bill significantly reduce the enforcement efforts as far as holding drug companies accountable the drug companies were started to feel the heat both through d.n.a. and also in public opinion and so they want to head they couldn't justify what they

did so they want to head in and got a lead and got the legislation changed i mean it's you know on main lyndon barbour who was our number one guy going after these drug companies now he writes a piece of legislation and he knew what it was it was what that piece of legislation was intended to do it wasn't about insuring patients having access to drugs it was about getting d.n.a. off the backs of these drug companies that's exactly what was. in joran as soon as he was in charge of the diversion program joey iran is easy absolutely object to it and when they didn't like what they heard it like it the way it sounded joe was removed from disposition toward was willing to play nice with industry i mean that was absolutely the new policy. but even before that bill was passed the d.d.a. had not been able to reliably stop suspicious shipments which were clearly visible

in places like kermit a small town with 400 inhabitants 3000000 doses of opioids were delivered to a single pharmacy here within 10 months for years long lines of cars with people with prescriptions from neighboring states passed through the town. today what remains is a paralyzed community where many inhabitants receive food stamps. kermit is also taking part in the mass lawsuit in cleveland one of the things that we like to do is to figure out based on this questionnaire that the judges ask us is what are the costs that the town of kermit has incurred or suffered because of the opioid crisis together with 30 other municipalities and 50 counties in west virginia kermit mayor charles sparks is litigating against the pharma industry he's represented by leticia chasen whose firm was the 1st in west virginia to help entire communities file lawsuits. all the money on the volunteer fire company have

they experienced increasing costs over $300.00 calls in one year they're expensive they've got to be double triple. keep honor and what does that equate to for a monetary loss the reputation that was damaged by us coming in based in the community i mean or by garment really you know you know you people are a bunch of drug related. you know bill is i guess what. i would call us that we're all on drugs we've always had a reputation in a state of being very very hard that's not you know battle and we hope to get us to fight it with this lawsuit. only. do you want your car company to get his information.

i want the federal government to give me the data they're holding in their database they are stating it's billions and billions of 0 zero's and one's in vinatieri computer code it's a record of where all of these pills went the da has the database and they speak through the department of justice and so both of them have said they will not disclose your case to i have in the federal court filings disagreed with them and i have said that this is information that should be made public because the the very best disinfectant is sunlight i want transparency.

i want them to show america exactly what it is happened. and it has taken a long time for america to truly embrace the fact that this city and the demick of our nation. there's a tremendous amount of shame involved to tragedy her and many. who are ashamed their law enforcement in the federal government didn't act sooner or ashamed it's our children and our neighbors and our family members that are going to it's touching a number of different. heartbreaking is the fact that we not only do not combat it's almost like we're just not paying attention to the misery and. my children have seen over the years we've been in the grocery store and there's somebody that is on the floor being revived by

emergency responders and then if you just look to the side my neighbors are i'm checking out. it's a t.v. that sets and in my hometown when you look at it long enough the anger goes away and so i want to bring some of that anger back i want my community fight back. the small town of huntington is known as ground 0 of the opioid epidemic. one 5th of the population is addicted and every 15th child born has withdrawal syndrome. the local hospitals cannot cope with the number of cases so more and more private daycares are being built for newborns. such as lily's place which is financed by donations. alyssa mcgowan's 4th child is being treated here for opioid withdrawal. i was 18 when i started to be

you know that exploited actually introduce it to. the world and then my dad saw a meticulous man giving me. what. i didn't realize that i was and take it into i didn't have it for a couple days and i felt my body creating. my back to my father and more. my mother and the same thing i did challenge it was something else. my husband was in recovery been 7 years on and on which i repeat. that was after my 3rd child when my interaction picked up silly and had me in my 4th given various. events over stimulated easily and then nothing will see on camera while. his tummy has been bothering him

like that where stomach but you can imagine so i feel for that because i know what it feels like. it was more like the 2nd week he started to you feel his what charles and he would tremor really hard and his body would jerk randomly and has rapid breathing feel guilty he shouldn't have had to go through. meanwhile the pharmaceutical industry is making money from repairing the damage it caused. as former director of the west virginia office of drug control policy michael bromwich ensured an antidote was made readily available a drug that can save a person's life in the event of an opioid overdose never in my life that i ever

think that we would have to use no locks on the way we have in our population. that we would have to train over 1400 people to reverse overdoses that this becomes a commonplace item among people in our community. people wrote leave them live and let them die and unfortunately that's the statement a lot of people find this actually controversy all because they think that people deserve this outcome that when they overdose they should just die and many of the worst consequences of this crisis is our attempts at solutions we shut down the pill mills without offering people an opportunity to get treatment so that they wouldn't go over into heroin. but the right thing seemed to be at the time we have pill mills let's get rid of the pills the problem solved but that's not the way it works. the mentions are so vast it's an epidemic of epidemics it's hepatitis b.

c h i be bacterial infections it's about you needle abstinent syndrome it's about the listeners that this problem has created. doing more law enforcement is important but it's not the answer we need more medication the system treat and more pure based abstinence treat and the social determinants of health clearly economics and job loss plays a role the 1st childhood experiences for those underlying social factors interfere 1000000 factors that have never been successfully addressed. most people don't understand is that this is not going to be solved in years this is going to take generations if we're fortunate weekend pope fix this problem in 2 or 3 generations. yet unborn children are going to be dealing with the consequences of this and we know this from the genetics that the the stress that comes on mothers

and on fathers is transmitted to their offspring. children whose parents are fighting the opioid crisis there are already at risk for becoming drug users themselves we have to find a way to break this you know generational cycle. if we don't focus on primary prevention we're not helping the next generation that's coming from a void in the same trap that this generation has already fallen into. for years now the. use of opioids has not just cause problems in the united states . in germany prescribing such powerful drugs is subject to the country's strict narcotics law nevertheless the number of prescriptions rose by almost

a 3rd between 262015 strong opioids are increasingly being used to treat chronic pain. doctors can choose which therapy to prescribe if a patient comes saying i have very severe back problems and opioids work no question that doctors like seeing their patients satisfied. germany's narcotics law dictates that strong opioids may only be prescribed on special prescription forms issued by the federal agency and are subject to its control nevertheless the use of such drugs is increasing. the 1st opioids bandaids came onto the market some 15 years ago they were initially intended only for cancer patients or those who could no longer swallow. but then we didn't anticipate the bandaids would be widely used but the pharma industry probably did. band-aids are easy to use just stick them on the opioid boom began with band-aids.

when you see that about 75 percent of opioids are no longer used for pain or in palliative medicine mostly the highest dosage is given with the 1st prescription we must appeal to doctors to prescribe these drugs carefully used for the right medical conditions opiates are indispensable but if i use opioids for all kinds of pain then that could lead to a situation like the one in america. perhaps not on the same scale but it could lead to too many people becoming dependent on opioids and also like in the us to other illegal drugs being used as well because addiction leads to you take. in other drunks. and. in theory the prescription of opioids is strictly regulated and monitored in france as well. and yet in 2017 alone 2600 people were hospitalized following an opioid overdose.

experts at the university hospital in claremont fare home university are researching improved opioids they are designed to relieve pain just as effectively but without causing the strong side effects. head of the pharmacology department says it will be at least another decade before they can be tested on humans his work focuses on the dramatic increase in opioid use. for a week opioid is a bad name because it plays down the risk there are no weak and strong opioids what counts is the amount prescribed in the duration of use. of the addiction can occur with all opioids within weeks or months the risk is there either way. of the 12000000 pain patients in france 11000000 are treated with weak opioids and there is this misconception that these drugs are harmless or at least less addictive.

this is all overdoses and death 7 creased here with the same tendency as in the us although to a much lesser extent so now is the time to be concerned. if we do not act now within 5 or 10 years it's possible we'll be in the same situation as the us. so there could be such a huge number of addicted patients that we can no longer turn back the wheel the older folk you feel. cool if we don't change things now the number of deaths will continue to rise. of fish.

ready bold moves crazy business. no risk no gain some i am projects can out and boost the economy while well considered ones fizzle out or end in tears. at some transformational moment to make history an economic activity. made in germany in 30 minutes more double to.

enter the conflict zone confronting the powerful. the north atlantic treaty organization nato has just tried its 70th birthday but it wasn't a happy was my guest this week here at nato headquarters is rose got so must be organizations deputy secretary general who is she now if knowledge the great so far is serious splits in its unity conflicts of. interest on the double. as so as europe the european. crisis. if it's to have a future it will be champions young champions. activists

from smaller countries. saying they are going to train their future. is to. save going to. be true as europe starts september 2nd dwi. in italy the center left democratic party and anti establishment 5 star movement have clinched a deal to form a new government the agreement includes reappointing just that they can take as prime minister the coalition would shut tight fov rights leader salvini who triggered a crisis by withdrawing his leaked paci from government.