how to cover more than just one reality. where i come from we have a transatlantic way of looking at things that's because my father is from germany my mother is from the united states of america and so i realized fairly early that it makes sense to explain different realities. and now here at the heart of the european union in brussels we have 28 different realities and so i think people are really looking for any journalist they can trust for them to make sense of its. findings back up my work at the w.

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 protestors 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 oxycontin 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. was

happening. and it. even paying the. oxycontin was the drug that helped the sackler brothers arthur mortimer and raymond expand their company produce pharma and to a pharmaceutical empire. the sac lawyers are often thought of as art patrons 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. number needed. it was a good ships question that any drug really cold want to ever serve for is a good but uncommon and. on average throughout the course of a year in one sheet of 8 cases for cases there are several addresses in town that we've been to over and over the hassani me personally i was 11 around the same guy same house 11 cops. cars national grocery stores fast food restaurants people go the drop through lying or us strong

. much on the order of their food tonight are needed to pick up one to pass out. without a public bathroom above spa which playgrounds we've had an intersection traffic. still in traffic lanes people just pulled was gone wife got on the brakes passed out on the wheel the car and i hit my kids in child seats in the back of the car. been very poorly kept homes middle class homes were mansions it's straight up everywhere they didn't care if you're a businessman a schoolteacher a lawyer. they said hey there's bad doctors but pharmacies out there and we're going to we're going to shut those down books nothing was done for them to get more to use the people that were addicted were still addicted so the drug dealers they moved in 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 to. 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 oxycontin helped numb the rapid 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 farah peak. i know i was involved in everything in school i was there every t. ball game i was my mayster link and you know it's like i had 2 lads i started once with the archer and they sort of prescribed me pain pills i did abuse but i started sailing i'm not trying to justify for any reason whatsoever you know here there's no water jobs there are scarce they're few and for in-between so you have to do what you have to do in order to prove that you're. the very 1st time i want to lose our service hold on that my life is hard and they were at least at this for pretty much no taste or nothing no questions asked

so as i went back and went well they're not helping their skins were they were coerced and i came in more you know mother to my role in all helping schools with their words and then i came in more and it was land and all my prescriptions which were down there doctors weren't even there nurses was handing them out everything's already printed before you get there and then i had a search on my 2nd one and he continued to write thank you so that was an excuse me every month for years. little small town pharmacy i was going to be paid cash for my meds therefore there was nothing to run forever how they do it in a pharmacy you never in your insurance see what you've got or they know your faces they are nice and a lot of it's not quick. and you know what i was doing i'm. not going to feel this is one of 3 different cams i was bringing every time around 8 hours from

us. but since the doctors is that way back right parallel as for them being a man it feels like $13.00 to make a batch of me and. i have lost a lot of my friends and a lot of those activists here and give you a long face. and never get you so let. me was a really close friend. do i have to hear them more so that if they have got it from me they would get it from somewhere else. that you gave it to they would be out rob but it's still right the white house. they want to blame it. on the general population you know what this person selling

there but what how are they little things gives. one of the things pills to make them so if they. were hurting themselves we're going to prison for it our lives are being saved and our freedom is being like in the right learning. oxycontin was sold over the counter of larry's drive in pharmacy in madison like fast food 10000000 times and 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 who have. their licenses doctors have had to pay heavy fines and been given jail sentences for overprescribing opioids. one

major party responsible for convincing doctors to prescribe opiates not only to cancer and palliative patients or following major surgery was purdue the company sent this 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 obvious strongest by medications should be used much more than the. marketing lies like that have made americans today feel outraged purdue and the sackler family are facing a slew of 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 face charges of misleading doctors and patients about the drugs. but their lawyers among them rudolph giuliani the former mayor of new york reportedly had good contacts to the department of justice. in a move to keep the name produce the oxycontin manufacturer unsullied and out of the picture frederick and 3 board members pled guilty to misbranding the drug. they were given a total of $634500000.00 and. times 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 the company or do. their billing the government through medicare right here through the department of defense. to the lawsuit i don't think the producers necessarily stop their deceptive marketing tactics reckon that they did everything they needed to do to make it 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 something that pseudo 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 to produce said it was caused by too little oxycontin very

advice to doctors was to increase the dosage. and i think now in retrospect looking at that whole idea you're essenes yourself up to create over time going to become tolerant. to that dosing strengthen they're going to need a higher dosing strain so from the company's perspective you're creating a nice market for yourself. per script and happy doctors were given an all expenses paid trips and invited to speakers receiving fees of up to $2000.00 per session produce innovative marketing strategy relied on the doctor's 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 i'd be 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 product. 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 bone statements or what they call a sales incentives i'm looking at a quarter $125000.00 system one quarter in one territory. over $7000.00 prescriptions and just in my territory the greatest growth i had was in the $6080.00 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 that people with patients would end up in that and those higher doesn't. produce aggressive marketing campaign went unnoticed by the press even the drug enforcement administration the da hardly took note. time

and again former d.a. investigator jim geldof was supported by top officials in his investigation into purdue purdue look pretty early on the drug was being abused by crushing it and then either injecting or snorting nuance econo then actually the sale of that drug became its own economy so if you had an 80 milligrams bill that was worth a $100.00 to $120.00 on the street. it was of phenomenal we hadn't seen before the diversion was so massive do it where you're really going to attack it has with the distributors in the manufacturers and that's why finally d.e.a.'s initiated struggler initiative but whatever we did it was never good enough and we chris couldn't achieve counts and move on the case they were always want somebody else interviewed volume was an awful 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 to the chief counsel terry this ship you know 5000000 pills

to this particular pharmacy and you want me to tell you which one is this is the suspicious one i mean they're all suspicious and. they did not want to take his case and we saw more and more d.h. tourney's moving into the area defending the drug companies we also saw a lot of deep investigators moving in to work for drug industries for attorneys that work also not just with the partner of just those that knew out assist. more the new standards that we're using so these are people that they've worked where 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 it people didn't have to die they really don't and you know i'm just i'm sure that case went the way it did. 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. he actually said to me you did show up. for the exception rather. than the scary part of the. show i. don't participate in hearing they don't mean. they simply abandon their kids courses. for.

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 fosters for drugs themselves i had a case here where the grandfather was selling drugs to his grandson so a fairly common a safe range of substance abuse addiction and. and the conditions of these children are raised i've had family members affected by. i've lost classmates people i went to hospital with last away from it so there's not anyone in our community can say they've not lost because of it i decide 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 as we have the overdoses and you don't see long

lines of support for the edwards victims there's the stigma associated with that as just another druggie who died. i kicked myself for switching out of the war early on a steal a bit back of things i missed we have a problem become an epidemic and we sort of fixed it when it was a problem hard to put it back in the bottle. to go after a doctor again pharmacists it takes being able to show you that they're doing is in a medically unnecessary way takes a lot of resources that your local law enforcement state on force and the prosecutor generally doesn't have. requires the federal government prosecute and even blame. it's difficult.

the problem is gotten so big that i request our law enforcement every whim support system of rooms or prosecutor's office and you can't beat a 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 going through. you never know who for you when you. might. know.

this court strategy is not to punish addicts who have committed minor offenses but to reform them through rehabilitation. once a week charged addicks must appear before the judge if they pass the drug test they remain free. and or bias has been an opioid addict since she was 15 she and her school friends even through so-called oxy parties. go to college this fall well. yes because i hate it. relationships and recovery are very very bad thing so i will out. be careful. all right. and 1st 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 that's her no one is going to claim like this is not love drugs for myself 2nd and then my. mom stepped in was the mom that i mean she went to the courts and got the guardianship i was supposed to give sound guardianship to her but i was to have to go to court day and i wasn't even worry about them. taking. my daughter daily grew up knowing that i had to have it that next day there was no get them to make him breakfast or get them from playing or even me unhappy when i wake up and she would even come and asked me mom if you take your medicine it and if i happen 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'd 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 this is bad memories are kind of like a positive motivator for me because i mean i'll be damned 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 that's a trigger and i end up backslide on. my daughter she's seen things she shouldn't saying oh did 4 times in

a core and then i would be my wife's mother sounds but after every time that i didn't all i was thinking was going to get to me it didn't matter whether i lived ok there's 5 in 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 ways 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 you just stop and 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 get that

seizing and that's is that the main i mean. 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 will forget they were mothers that had lost a child. 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 conquered 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 keep enough laws and enough room figure out another way that's the thing about great so what i'm doing. is i'm 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 26th seen 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 the bill busy significantly reduced the enforcement efforts as far as holding drug companies accountable the drug companies were starting to feel the heat both through d.n.a. and also in public opinion and so they want to hear 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 all mean lyndon barbour who was our number one guy going after the 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 is easy was in charge of the diversion program joey arenas easy absolutely object to it and

when they didn't like what they heard didn't like it the way it sounded joe was removed from disposition the ward was willing to play nice with industry i mean that was absolutely the new policy. but even before that bill was passed the da 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. comment 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. want to volunteer for a couple have they experienced increasing costs over $300.00 in one year their expenses were got double triple. people 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 there are a bunch of drugs much of your 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 or let's not you know battle and we hope to get us to

fight it with this lawsuit. not only. do you want your company to get his information on. all of the federal government to give me the data they're holding ready in their database they are stated it's billions and billions of little zeros and ones in vinatieri computer code it's a record of where all of these pills went the d.a. has the database and they speak through the department of justice and so both of them have said they will not disclose york state 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's taken a long time for america to truly embrace the fact that this is an epidemic of our own making. there's a tremendous amount of shame involved the tragedy of our many. who are ashamed their law enforcement in the federal government didn't act sooner. it's our children and our neighbors and our family members that are victims it's touching

a number of different. heartbreaking is the fact that we not only do not have it's almost like we're just not paying attention to the misery in . my children have seen over the years we've been in the grocery store and there's somebody that you saw on the floor the revived emergency responders and then if you just look to the side my neighbors are very lined checking your. teeth that said send in my tell 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. now the. 18 when i start singing do you know that i exploited actually energy usage of. the word and then my dad saw that drawing in particular. given me. i didn't realize that i was and take it you and i didn't have a great couple of days and i felt i already creaming. my back to you my father and more. my mother did the same thing i did challenge it was something else. my husband is in recovery it's been 7 years on and off we're trying to be.

the most after my 3rd child and then my objection picked up silly and i can be in my for a given period. he gets overstimulated easily and then nothing will seem. to camp for a while. his tummy has been bothering him like the way stomach bug you can imagine so i feel bad for him because i know what it feels like. it was more of like the 2nd week he started to you know fill his what charles and he would tremor really hard and his body would jerk randomly and has rapid breathing felt guilty he had to go through the.

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 the 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 the 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 things seem 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 abstinence and really it's about the local it's nice 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 fact 1st 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 help 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 couple 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 we're already at risk for becoming truck users themselves we have to find a way to break this in the generational cycle. if we don't focus on the primary prevention we are not helping the next generation that's coming from affording the same trap that this generation has already fallen into.

for years now. 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 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. mandates are easy to use you just stick them on the opioid boom began with band-aids. where you see that about 75 percent of opioids are no longer used for tumor pain or in palliative medicine and 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 a action leads to you take. in other drugs. 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 fair hall 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. 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 that 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 used this is all overdoses in deaths have increased 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. there could be such a huge number of addictive patients that we can no longer turn back the wheel the older folk you feel much cooler if we don't change things now the number of deaths

will continue to rise. of fish. europe. what unites. what divides. the money and what's driving force. what binds the continent together. answers and stories aplenty. spotlight on people. minutes on d w. eco india.

how can a country's economy grow in harmony with its people and find that. when there are do workers who look at the bigger picture. india a country that faces many challenges and people are striving to create a sustainable future clever projects from europe and. eco india on t.w. . the water starts rising people cite sources. told her she's really dangerous. floods and droughts will climate change become the main driver of mass migration you could not write any going to be snide if you want and probably most of the book on. climate exodus starts september 5th on d w.

this is news coming to you live from berlin british prime minister boris johnson gets royal approval to suspend parliament just weeks before the u.k. is set to leave the e.u. the move has raged pro europeans and those opposed to no deal breaks it we're live in london as another to mulch was day. also coming up italy's 5 star movement to greece.