welcome to "amanpour" on pbs. tonight, can starbucks' one-day shutdown for racial awareness training crack the unconscious bias code? i'm joined by william jawando who worked on these issues for president obama. plus, the writer and activist angela davis. also ahead, america's opioid addiction crisis. i speak to the journalist barry mayer who says farmer executives knew that prescription opioids were being widely abused. good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program.

i'm christiane amanpour in london. as america continues to grapple with racism, today abc has canceled its highly rated sitcom "roseanne" after the star, roseanne barr, posted a tweet that the network calls abhorrent, repugnant, and inconsistent with our values, aka racist. this as a rare and massive effort got under way today in the united states to root out ingrained sometimes unconscious prejudice across the entire starbucks workforce. the global coffee empire closed more than 8,000 of its cafes around the u.s. for several hours so that some 175,000 employees could take anti-bias training. starbucks ordered the nationwide training day after what even its founder calls an unbelievable incident that took place in philadelphia last month when a store manager called police to arrest two black men who were

waiting there to meet a friend. it kicked off angry protests and now the starbucks founder, howard schultz, acknowledges that he has his work cut out for him. >> we need to have the conversation. we need to start. we realize that four hours of training is not going to solve racial inequity in america or anyone coming into our stores that may have a problem, but we need to start the conversation. we have also said we are deeply committed to this being a long-term journ in which we are going to integrate this training not only in every starbucks store from here on, but the on boarding of new people every year. >> so this is the start of things to come? >> yes. and we're going to do this around the world. >> indeed, that conversation must start and to be fair, starbucks is not alone. in recent weeks, blacks were targeted by police for supposed infractions rating from #diningwhileblack, to

#sleepingwhileblack. we'll explain in a deeper discussion with writer michaela angela davis joins me from new york and also william jawando, attorney, and worked in the obama white house and worked on an initiative called my brother's keeper, designed to help young black men climb up the ladder of life. and he, of course, joins me from washington. well, welcome to both of you, and i guess let me start by something that has just broken as we came on-air. that is abc canceling what has been a very highly rated, if controversial, sitcom called "roseanne" after roseanne barr made that tweet and i'm going to read for viewers exactly what she said, and it was about an obama, very close obama official valerie jarrett. she tweeted, muslim brotherhood and planet of the apes had a baby equals vj. i mean, honestly, it is unbelievable that that kind of

tweet could even be posted by somebody on a network television show, no matter her political views or cultural experience, but michaela, first to you. what do you make of that and did abc go far enough? >> at first it actually hurt. this is the first i've actually heard someone read it out, christiane. so i'm experiencing it in realtime. and i do think that this is a significant step, because there have been so many injustices and indecencies and things said about someone as brilliant as valerie jarrett. let's be clear who this is that she made this tweet about, but also, we as a nation have been trying to navigate tweets coming out from the oval office about women. and so -- it has become popularized, but if the head of the country can also insult

everyone ad nauseam with no accountability, with no -- with no repercussions, what's to stop roseanne? so this is a significant and symbolic step, but we're in a called ron of this from the very, very top. >> so william jawando, let pe ask you. you obviously i assume knew valerie jarrett well. you worked in the same obama white house together, and she was as tough as they get for officials in the white house? >> yes, yes. and she was actually my direct boss. so -- i worked for valerie in the office of public engagement, mikha mikhail -- michaela is exactly right. this is what happens when you have a culture that has been permeated by donald trump, where anything goes and there's no repercussion for it, and good for abc for taking quick action, but you know, this really comes from the american story which is that of subjugation of black people, particularly a woman of color.

you're able to historically here do anything, say anything, treat black women any way, and if you're a man of color, similar. you're chattel and you're scary and you're something to be feared. so it's a part of our ingrained culture, but donald trump has really given it a public voice and where everyone feels they can do it, and i think it is good that abc took this step, because -- you can do all the trainings you want in the world and i know we'll talk about that, but if there isn't real accountability from institutions like abc and others, that won't allow this to be propagated, that's the only way you're going to see real change in the public square. >> yeah, it obviously leads on to the starbucks training. roseanne herself apologized and the tweet was taken down pretty quickly. nonetheless, it had to be thought up, it had to be typed up, and it had to be posted. so take the apology as you may. let me ask you, then, about what we were going to focus on mostly, and we are, the

starbucks training for several hours over 8,000 of their stores across the united states. is that enough accountability, both of you i want to ask you, because the manager in question who called the police to arrest two black guys who were waiting for their friend in a starbucks store, which is meant to be the third safe place in everybody's life, he was fired. you heard what howard schultz said. he couldn't believe it when he heard the story, and this is the opening of a conversation. michaela, does this go far enough? >> well, i think it's a start, and again, i think it's a significant start. it could be a symbolic start, again, whether this is just, you know, damage control, or whether it's a true commitment, and what is so surprising is how surprised people are. when black folks are talking about what they have to navigate since they've arrived on these shores. and what it does, it shines a

light, christiane, on how little american history people are aware of, how there has been an intentional ignorance around anti-blackness specifically. lots of others, muslim, immigrant, but anti-blackness is an actual strategy woven into the foundation of this country. so whether you're a student at yale holding her computer sleeping, whether you're a sister at the waffle house, so it's everything from the waffle house to yale, you were endangered as a black body in that space and that is part of a strategy. this isn't just random bad people. this is a very bad structure that all of us are trying to navigate. some of us more than other, but it's complex. there's history around it. there's context. there's conscious bias, unconscious bias, and there is a participation because it was designed that way. i think it takes more than just a day, but it's a step. >> it's a step, and it's a very

public step from a very public company that holds itself to very upstanding and progressive and morally correct values. >> correct. >> just to point out, the black woman who you said who was violently arrested at the waffle house is what we call -- what social media called #diningwhileblack and the black student you're talking about is #sleepingwhileblack, creating movements of backlash on social media. william, i'm struck by what michaela just said. that this is a strategy in america. this sort of bias and this sort of anti-blackness, and yet the training is called to correct unconscious bias. so can you tell us -- is it unconscious? is it deliberate? is it strategic? >> sure. no. and, again, michaela is exactly right. every person, black person, in america has a dining while black, sleeping while black story. i came up on the cnn elevator

just 20 minutes ago and a woman grabbed her purse and moved to the other side. >> oh, no. i can't bear it. >> everything -- so these are daily things that happen that every black person in america deals with on a daily basis. we wake up and consciously decide how we'll approach the day. >> that's right. >> and take our blackness in, with us, and we know we're going to encounter racism, conscious, unconscious, and so that's part of our daily routine, and so you have to understand that it has been baked in to the cake here, and the unconscious bias training is a good step. it's a good step, but there has to be accountability. there has to be real conversation about white privilege and racism, and just because you have the unconscious bias, doesn't mean you're a bad person. right? okay. >> that's right. >> step back. i think to have these conversations, too often people run away from them because they think oh, no, you're saying i'm racist. no.

you can have this and still be a good person. let's deal with the majority of people that are in that category so we can move forward on it. >> william, you speak from experience -- sorry, michaela. i'll get you in two seconds. you were arrested as a law student yourself. >> yes, yes, i was. and one in two african-american men by the time they turn 25 have been arrested in this country, and we know one and three, the more commonly stated stat spend some time in jail. so this -- and that's not even counting all the "almost" arrests. getting police called and it gets diffused by some officer who says okay, i'm not going to arrest you on this. and those happen a lot too. whether it's the young girl at the pool party in texas getting 100 pound girl getting flipped over on the ground, 18 months ago in texas. that officer was fired. these are constant things that happen and we have to address them in a systemic way and hold people accountable if we're going to move past it. >> michaela, how do you address fellow black americans,

activists, philosophers, those who are actually basically saying this is just a masquerade, this starbucks, four hours, one afternoon. what is that really meaning? i mean, i know you said it's a good start and we have to have the conversation, but how do you address the many criticisms of what looks to be what they say just surface? >> you know, i acknowledge them because we're all coming at this with different levels, degrees of pain and history. and will, i'm sorry that happened to you. it happens to so many of our brothers, fathers, our sons and we have to go about our day. i think that we would be really well served if this meeting could have happened on the first floor at the national museum for african american history and culture in d.c., or to watch "13th" the film. you must see how it is part of the american construct, that this is not -- again, if you know your history you don't feel quite as helpless. you are not a bad person.

you are operating in a really bad system. but bad people exploit that. right? so we're looking at people like roseanne, or trump that exploit this terrible part of our history that we are now just beginning to reckon with, and the american moral future relies on us having the stamina, having the awareness to continue to interrogate this like black folks have, particularly we've just, you know, celebrated 50 years of a brilliant, consistent civil rights movement. right? and we've had a movement for black lives for five years. had a women's movement. we have the parkland movement. we have people all over storming senators' offices. we have to have the stamina to deal with hundreds of years of a plan for black bodies to be either contained, controlled or killed if they're not in service. >> william, i know you want to jump in, but what do you think

this training looks like? what do they have to tell starbucks employees about 40% of which, by the way, are people are color? >> right, right. one of the things we know, unconscious bias and bias against black bodies is present in black people. you know? if you look at studies of police officers who pull their guns quicker on black faces in training, the white and black officers do it around the same rate and much quicker. so that's good that it's being applied to everybody, because that has been so ingrained in our culture it has brainwashed many black americans to think blacks are more violent, less smart and all the things we know are perpetuated today. the training was done by some great people. sherrilyn ifill and heather mcgee, some really smart people that put it together. and as angela said, it's a good start. really what has to happen, it has to be embedded in the culture of every work place,

every entity and be a part -- when you hire somebody you need to talk about it. it needs to be talked about in the culture how your policies, the fact starbucks moved to a policy to come in, use the bathroom, sit there if you want, those are things that are biased within themselves that are rolling back. and we need to really look at it. >> yeah, but not many. not many establishments will let anybody in to use their bathroom willy-nilly, so that's pretty good, and to congregate there. so they have made that stride. but on a bigger level we see in the recent primaries, for instance, in georgia, unbelievably, you know, stacy abrams, a black woman, has won that race over there and is the first black woman candidate for governorship in america. do you think that is the kind of game-changing future, michaela, for instance that will have just as much affect as training? >> yes. well, now you just made me smile

because stacey abrams historic candidacy, we needboth of these, right? because it gets so hard every day to take on this barrage of news. but all kinds of new candidates are entering. there's the first latina gay woman in texas who was a sheriff. she's also on the ticket. and we've also had some neem people that have come out of the movement for black lives running for office. so there's an influx of new political energy that can, again, have not just the stamina but strategy around how to create new policy. how to dismantle, how to be in constructive conversation, because i think it's really important to note, because people are so afraid to be called racists. they're more afraid to be call rayes -- racists than to stop racist activity, right? >> right. >> we're saying if you're in a structure that is designed for you to operate this way, it takes some of that personal weird onus off. so the primaries are really going to be telling, and we need that encouragement to keep going. >> yep. and we will keep -- we will have

to continue this conversation another day, but i really want to thank you both on this day for being, putting this across so forcefully. michael a angela davis, william jawando, thank you for joining us tonight. now, a mostly silent demon has been ravaging and stalking the united states for more than two decades. opioids. heroin and its prescription drug derivatives. how bad is it? listen to this -- so bad that opioids are now found in mussels. not these muscles, not in us, but in shellfish that live off the coast of seattle. washington state officials said this month that it comes from the urine of all the people who take opioids and from people who just flush the pills directly down the toilet. in a moment i'll speak with a journalist who's breaking a major news story on what the pharmaceutical companies knew about people abusing their drugs and when they knew it. but first, let us recall the human talk.

let's listen to what the top prosecutor of kentucky told me in january. that is a place which is at the center of this crisis. >> it is everywhere, and it's affecting everyone. everyone in kentucky has now lost someone that they care about. i lost a neighbor that lived eight houses down from me and you see it on our streets every day. it was about seven months ago at 3:00 in the afternoon that another individual and i had to pull an overdosing man from a car. it's that bad here. >> so awful, and journalist barry mayer is a former "new york times" reporter, author of "painkiller: an empire of deceit and the origin of america's opioid epidemic" who joins me now from new york. welcome to the program. look, first start by telling us what is the news that you're breaking today? what's new in your story?

>> basically, what we have in the paper today and what we have in the new edition of painkiller are the findings of federal prosecutors who spent four years investigating purdue pharma, the manager of oxycontin. oxycontin is sort of the symbolic drug of the opioid epidemic. and what these prosecutors discovered during their investigation was there was adequate evidence to show that top executives of this company knew that the drug was being abused. they got dozens of reports from their sales representatives. from local police officials about drug store robberies, et cetera, et cetera, and they wanted to actually bring criminal indictments against the three top officials of this company on serious charges. felonies that could have sent them to prison. but they were effectively thwarted from doing so by senior justice department officials who struck a deal with the company. >> and this is, i mean -- it's

outrageous, obviously, but tell me how that settlement happened, and why? i mean, i think, if i'm not mistaken, that was under the george w. bush administration? the justice department of 2007, and a settlement was done in secret? >> yeah. that's absolutely correct. i mean, what happened was the prosecutors who were operating in very western virginia. this was an area that was overrun by opioid abuse and oxycontin abuse in particular, and conducted this investigation from 2002 to 2006. and they forwarded their findings to the justice department. and in those findings were, was the evidence that they planned to submit to a grand jury to seek these indictments. the mid level officials at the justice department, the people that were involved in the

criminal and consumer divisions that were leading this investigation supported the indictments, but then there was an 11th hour meeting between a very high profile purdue pharma defense team that was being advised by rudy giuliani, and the top officials of the justice department balked and basically told the case prosecutors that they wouldn't support the prosecution and the prosecutors who were faced by kind of this overwhelming financial and legal firepower that purdue pharma had, had little choice but to settle the cas >> i mean, t's just pick up on what you just said. rudy giuliani was one of those who advised the company. i mean, he seems to be popping up everywhere these days. but to the absolute substance of this, you talked to dea officials, people who said they really missed a chance. this settlement robbed the country of a way to stave off this terrible crisis. >> it's actually sort of mind blowing, because when you look at the statistics about what

happened afterwards. i mean, there was a prosecutor who stood up in court that day and tried to make the bet of things by saying that, this should send a message out to drug industry officials that they're going to be held liable and they're going to pay a cost. but in the five years after that settlement, 100,000 americans died of prescription drug overdoses. doctors who didn't know what prosecutors knew kept ramping up the number of prescriptions they were issuing, and, you know, lawmakers who were also ignorant of what the government had discovered essentially allowed, drug industry lobbyists to roll over them. >> and purdue put out a statement. you'd be well aware, but i want it read it out for viewers saying that it's committed, it told us, to addressing this crisis. suggesting activities that last occurred more than 16 years ago for which the company accepted responsibility helped contribute

to today's complex and multifaceted opioid crisis is deeply floored. the bulk of opioid prescriptions have not and never been for oxycontin. i mean, that's what they say, and yet they admitted in 2007 to training sales reps to tell doctors that oxycontin was less addictive and prone to abuse than competing opioids. >> that's absolutely true, and that is a massive betrayal of trust. the public's trust, the trust of doctors, the trust of patients. today we're dealing with this hydra headed beast. we have on the one hand abuse of prescription painkillers, drugs like oxycontin. on the other hand, there's abuse of illegal compounds like counterfeit versions of fentanyl, or morphine, and it's a complex problem that requires complex solutions, but to get at that solution, to get at those

solutions, we need to know the truth of what happened. we can't allow ourselves to be blinded to the facts and we certainly can't allow our own government to conceal evidence that they had that could actually point us to resolutions for the current situation. >> i mean it does remind me to an extent of the tobacco denials, you know, so many years ago. again it took journalists, "60 minutes," right, to break that lie into the open, that they, you know, said it wasn't addictive and all, but knew it was addictive, and i guess, i'm still trying to figure out what did purdue and all of these pharma people know and when did they know it? because, as you say, they were hearing warnings from as far away as australia and new zealand and this thing was put on the market in 1996. how soon after that did they know it was a problem? >> let me give you one example. they claim they first became aware of the growing abuse of oxycontin in early 2000.

between 1997 and 1999 they received 117 reports from their own sales people after those sales reps had visited doctors in which the words "street value," "snort" and "abuse" appeared. they received tons of other reports from doctors. they saw stuff on the internet that made it clear that people were abusing oxycontin. so, you know, when did they feel it was, like, mandatory to say something? did they think, well, why don't we be cautious and kind of run up a flag? maybe if that had happened, they wouldn't have had to settle the case. maybe, you know -- maybe there would be less problems with oxycontin? i don't know at this juncture, but the fact of the matter is there was a mountain of evidence that prosecutors believed they could have easily won indictments against these

individuals for, and a trial of those officials would have brought information to light that would have helped doctors make decision, would have helped lawmakers make decisions, and i believe would have altered the trajectory of this epidemic. >> really, really tragic, as you reported. great reporting, barry, and thanks for sharing that. two really revealing conversations tonight about two demons stalking the united states, racism and the opioid crisis. and that is it for our program. thanks for watching "amanpour" on pbs, and join us again tomorrow night. you're watching pbs.

katty: you are watching "beyond 100 days" on pbs. the most senior north korean official to visit america in almost two decades is on his way to new york. christian: ken p'yongyang's intelligence officer help donald trump salvage the nuclear summit? katty: belgium's police chief describes a nightmare after a gunman kills two female officers and a civilian, then enters a school and takes hostages before being shot dead. >> i was on the street and heard gunshots. i saw people walking, others running