shines a spotlight on heroin use in america a bigger problem is heroin in america and what can we do to prevent thousands of overdose deaths every year also when ex new york city mayor michael bloomberg announced his proposed sugary drink ban for the big apple it was met with a lot of outrage especially in our control room but could regulations on fast food consumption actually be the key to fighting america's obesity epidemic and one city in tennessee has found the winning formula for providing high speed internet access to the masses at affordable prices the sense of the secret and how can we make high speed internet access available to all americans. in the bowels of the us the news hollywood and movie fans alike are continuing to mourn the death of actor philip seymour hoffman was found dead sunday morning in

his new york city apartment after an apparent drug overdose oftens tragic passing has brought new attention to the one of the don't like in america in pennsylvania more than a dozen people have died over the past few weeks thanks to overdosing on heroin laced with the painkiller fentanyl and in vermont governor peter shumlin spent his entire state of the state speech addressing that state's heroin problem each year there are thirty eight thousand drug overdose deaths in the united states and seventy five percent of those are heroin and opioid related although the vast majority are prescription drugs and most if not all of those overdoses are because we criminalize drug addiction in america so what can be done to prevent overdose deaths in america and or move the stigma from drug addiction joining me now for more on this is meghan ralston harm reduction manager with a drug policy alliance meghan welcome. thanks thanks for joining us i'd like to

start out by playing as a short clip of philip seymour hoffman talking about his addiction back in two thousand and six checked so. you said you don't know i don't. in fact you would into rehab at and fairly early yeah i did i did i went. i got sober. i was twenty two years old. yeah so this was drugs or alcohol or both yes as often as all that stuff yeah. yeah yeah i like that all yeah and why did you see the side stop you panicked your palate was. i was twenty two when i got pounded for my life really what was. your most radical reason article mojave and post is about how we can prevent overdose deaths like kaufman's how do we do this.

you know the death of philip seymour hoffman is just a failure and a tragedy on so many levels and you know you talked a minute before about stigma and the criminalization of substance abuse and addiction and all of those things are major factors but i mean really it's as simple as just a couple of things that if we did them it would make an enormous difference number one i mean top of the list is we have got to start having more fact based science based conversations about drug use and drug safety period it is not enough anymore to just simply tell young people just say no and drugs can really hurt people oh dionne molly at music festivals that is totally inadequate we have got to do more and we've got to start telling people if you do drugs we don't have to like it but we have to keep you safe we have to keep you alive and here's how to not die

if you use drugs well and that implies a certain acceptance i mean there's a fairly good body of science that indicates that some small percentage of us somewhere between you know what one percent and thirty percent are disposed to addiction of some kind whether it's alcohol caffeine to nick nicotine or heroin or something like that and in a much smaller slice of that will be predisposed and all of that would probably never get away from really serious addictions like heroin or cocaine and things. so are you suggesting that instead of dealing with that it's small as slides with the criminal justice system that we should instead be dealing with them with the public health system. yeah that's exactly right i mean you just made a really crucial and important point there is that we're talking about two totally separate groups of drug users right there are you know the eighty to ninety percent

of us who are able to experiment with drugs or try drugs a few times or maybe use drugs sporadically or occasionally throughout our lives and we'll have no problems no overdoses no crimes committed life will go on normally for that majority of us so we need to have one set of policies to help those people stay out of the criminal justice system and then we also need to deal much more effectively with people who we know will get into trouble with drugs and unfortunately what we have now is a one size fits all system that lumps together both of those groups and basically treats them equally when really there are some differences there you know what are your thoughts on the european or at least you can swear small and up until november the canadian model of heroin by prescription. i think it's genius and i think that it's just yet another example of other countries around the world dominating the u.s. in innovative approaches to serious problems you know for whatever reason the u.s.

really lags behind i mean the way that we handle serious problems here compared to the rest of the world is unusually antiquated you know you have countries like switzerland and germany doing these really innovative things like establishing supervised injection facilities which gets the public nuisance of heroin injection off the street where doctors can see it happening and then you have. programs in other countries throughout europe which are having tremendous results with people who urged only want to get off heroin but have failed with methadone and other ways of traditionally treating drugs so we have examples and f y i there's so much research i mean there's this is not pie in the sky fantasyland drug policy in europe this is seriously reese. it's incredible u.s. medical journals like jama new england journal it cetera so there are these incredible policies with tons of research that are working throughout the rest of the world why do we drag our feet i don't know but that really needs to change time

to stop the jingoism and declare nixon's war on drugs lost and let's reboot meghan ralston thanks so much for being with us. thanks tom. it's the good the bad of a very very capper annoyed hedley oddly the good american congress of american indians organization has released an absolutely amazing ad calling on the washington redskins n.f.l. team to change its name the ad is so profound and so effective you really need to see it in its entirety. forgotten. indian.

blood. and soon. survivor spiritual patriot. sitting. by on the. mother. father. son. daughter. political. support. under-served. script look. silly. food squanto to the written loan to come soon and resource to lose rancher to lose which are. going to turn to

lose soldiers who need. simoneau send more and. buildings to. the rogers to run a more. fun you know doing strong. domata bomb. native americans call themselves many things. the one thing they don't. amazing stuff and f l commissioner roger goodell said before the super bowl game that the name redskins honor. american indians maybe talk to some native americans before he speaks there is absolutely no reason for any professional sports team to

use a racial slur as its mascot good on the national congress of american indians for handling that point home for bad the national republican congressional committee that organization is under fire today over reports of a set of fake campaign websites to trick democrats into donating to republican candidates the websites which have been set up for democratic congressional candidates like an kirkpatrick in arizona look like regular campaign sites until you look at the fine print right below the headline it looks like you'd find on a candidate sponsored web page the site as you to make your crowd your vision a day to help defeat an kirkpatrick and candidates like her there's no proof yet that the n r c c's fake web sites have had a big impact on the twenty fourteen midterm elections but they almost certainly violate federal election law as just hope that we'll see in the cheaters never prosper holds true for republicans and still. and the very very ugly

republican missouri state senators even though governor jay nixon vetoed a similar bill last spring lawmakers in the upper house of the bellwether state legislature are moving forward with a bill to nullify federal gun laws if passed the bill would make it illegal i repeat illegal for the federal government to enforce federal law within the state of missouri. at least federal gun laws if anybody did try to enforce federal gun laws they would face arrest and possible jail time in the states jails that's right missouri republicans are so obsessed with gun rights that they're willing to start a constitutional crisis. that it's very. coming up cities across america are taking back control of the internet from giant corporations and the results are ousts own name are publicly owned internet networks the solution to providing high speed and net neutral internet access for

all. i marinate join me on thirteen get impartial and financial reporting commentary in from news and much much. only on bombast and on.

i would rather as questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question lol. back to the big picture it looks like x. new york city mayor michael bloomberg was right and our director was wrong as of the twenty ten census the percent of american adults twenty and over who are obese was nearly thirty six percent and the percentage of american adults twenty and over who were overweight including obese stood at a staggering sixty nine percent and those numbers don't even address the obesity

epidemic in our nation's children so what can be done to reduce obesity in our country and to ensure that americans live long and healthy lives then it turns out tighter regulations might actually be the answer of the report published in the bulletin of the world health organization finds that governments can slow down and even reverse obesity epidemic by putting in place simple economic regulations like mayor bloomberg proposed sugary drink ban to curb fast food consumption joining me now to talk more about that study and its specifics is dr roberta de vulgarly professor and lead author on the study dr devotedly welcome. thank you for having me here how big a problem is obesity worldwide and how does a vary from country to country based on regulation. he has you know studied you found this higher foster increases in fast food consumption was stronger

related to increases and levels. and if a liver and choose their adopted more aggressive do you regulate to close these. how do you increase and. is were you able to establish the there was actually causation not just correlation here. you know we went for a long lease took a bus through checks including the use of used to going to have been able to. get is used to. you know potential problems of confounding and. find these are for lots of those countries that we're more protective performed much better we get can you give me some examples of how america might be more

protective of its people with regard to diminishing fast food consumption would be things like taxing fast foods or defining you know is own in saying you know within a square mile you can only have a certain number of fast food restaurant i mean how do you do that. yes the neutral just like. futile policy isn't reforms you can do subsidize to some vegetables for example or farmers a small farmers then grow fresh and healthy foods as long as fresh food and fruits and vegetables cost more than a big mac. there is no way to fly. or taxation. i know it's a contested area but surprise surprise even at that it's been proposed to tax sugar in the well for the nation seventeen seventy six year old sugar rum and to walk or extremely proper subjects at the station so some corporate libertarians may not

read it but that's what the sense adam smith amazing. to some extent it could probably be argued that we are subsidizing fast foods we allow an awful lot of cattle is on government land we we subsidize you know i mean the farm bill just passed today and it's it's it's hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies for big ag which is driving much of this fast food stuff are there are there more narrow policies perhaps that we should be looking. absolutely we should subsidize more farmers like they do for example in switzerland sixty percent of their incomes come from government and alms here we subsidize small big corporations don't use corn for rocking to shoot tissue grow old with excessive purty lasers they use girls hormones antibiotics and these is not performing well

in terms of. people so uncertain and so instead of subsidizing you know the production of corn to be made into high fructose corn syrup we should be subsidizing people who are grown fruits and vegetables. absolutely though it seems very difficult to do it on the deregulation of revolutions that started the since the early one nine hundred eighty s. and you higher concentration of food companies and the merging or. nuisance be cold and some people and so the city is the natural consequence of the reagan revolution and reagan stopping the enforcement of the sherman antitrust act . example then you. wouldn't. ration it because their job is to profit there is a deregulation has led to obesity dr devotedly thank you so much for being with us tonight and for this brilliant study thank you very much. i mean on the left

article. when the obama said to the bones on what mr miller never it's always like. president is politically correct that i'm correcting fox so-called news the phone news network spent a great deal of time today talking about the new congressional budget office report talking heads over a claim that the report found that obamacare oh well that i had two million jobs and naturally they were our age to take a look. we do begin with a fox news alert there is a bombshell new c.b.r. report that finds obamacare will be much worse for the economy and previously predicted welcome to. hammer nice to see you actually the effects of the next decade will be substantially larger than estimated nearly three times larger that adds a trillion dollars to the debt it shows two point three million jobs and the report which was released today projects actually not that the number of jobs is going to

go down but that the number of workers will decline by about two million by two thousand and seventeen thanks to obamacare for conservatives as proof that obamacare is a job destroyer but that's not the case in reality this report is great. news here's what's going to happen first of all what they're saying essentially is that two million or more people are working forty hour weeks at jobs that they absolutely hate just crap jobs just so they can get health insurance and those people and half of america's kids are coming home to an empty house latchkey kids so those people now can say well gee i can get obamacare i don't need this forty hour job i can work a thirty hour job or a twenty five hour job get enough money you know to live on and be home when my kids come home you'll have people who are less stressed out you'll have less you'll have kids who have parents again you'll have you'll less child abuse will have fewer divorces from all the stress you'll have happier people you'll have less use of any depressants so that's on one side and then secondly two million people stepping out of the job market that's

a great thing because that tightens up the job market tighten of the job market you increase wages as wages go up tax collections go up especially at the bottom end all those people are paying social security taxes this solves the problem so in their never ending quest so this is actually a great thing in their net but in their never ending quest of the ash obamacare and tarnish the obama presidency the talking heads over a fox so-called news have again misled the american public and bats why they've been politically correct. it's time for high speed internet access for paul this morning president obama spoke to a crowd of middle school in a delphi maryland about the importance of high speed internet access for america's students take a look. this is announcing

a down payment of two billion dollars to connect more than fifteen thousand schools and twenty million students to high speed broadband over the next two years only around. thirty percent of our students have true high speed internet in the classroom in countries like south korea that's one hundred percent. and we shouldn't get that kind of competitive advantage over to other countries we want to make sure our young people. have the same advantages that some child in south korea has right now but while high speed internet access may seem out of reach for many americans down in chattanooga tennessee it's been a reality for a while that's because chattanooga is home to the gig a taxpayer own high speed fiber optic network according to the new york times back in two thousand and nine. one hundred eleven million dollars stimulus grant from the federal government which allowed that city to get the gig up and running maintain and operate by chattanooga's publicly own city alone to utility companies

e.p.b. the gig allows chattanooga residents to surf the web at lightning fast speeds for less than seventy dollars per month residents browse the world wide web on a high speed fiber optic connection that shoots data back and forth at one gigabyte per second that's one thousand megabytes where i live here in washington d.c. at the pay a lot just to get a twenty megabyte per second connection chad no gets a. megabytes as the new york times points out one gigabyte percent in its fifth. and the average internet speed for homes in the rest of the united states and just as fast as the internet service in hong kong which has the fastest. someone in chattanooga using the gig can download a full length movie in high def in under thirty five seconds to our movie and the rest of the country downloading that same movie would take twenty five minutes but the gig isn't just good for downloading movies and shopping on line it's good for

business in chattanooga too. chattanooga officials say that the gig has helped to create at least a thousand jobs over the past three years and internet and internet based businesses are moving to chattanooga from high profile cities like new york and san francisco because of the lightning fast internet speeds in the years since the get go live other cities around the country and jumped on the publicly owned internet bandwagon lafayette louisiana bristol virginia also have rolled out publicly owned high speed networks so why are more and more cities copying the check the chattanooga model and are actually why aren't they putting control of the internet into the hands of their people because they realize that the internet or why are they because they realize that the internet has become a natural monopoly in our country just like water and electricity and therefore should be in the hands of we the people rather than in the hands of both for profit corporation that just wants this we got of its users today hundreds are

americans are paying hundreds of dollars to internet service providers like cast of arisan for so-called high speed internet access that's slower than most of the developed world in fact the united states isn't even in the top twenty five when it comes to internet speeds we come in at thirty one behind countries like bold garia as stony and rumania chattanooga has realized that natural monopolies like the internet function best when they're run by we the people for the benefit of we the people rather than by a big corporation for the benefit of profits and stockholders somebody needs to tell the rest of america lightning fast internet speeds shouldn't be just in chattanooga tennessee they should be everywhere in this country urban and rural the internet was developed by universities in the military and brought into being by an act of congress that al gore side it was never meant to be controlled by giant corporations it should be a public utility run by and for we the people and not just another profit line on

a giant corporations balance sheet free of the internet from corporate control. and that's the way it is tonight tuesday february fourth two thousand and fourteen and no forget democracy begins with you get out there get active tag your city. i'm the president and this site i'm a big corporation kind of can. do i'm the banker i think it's all been all about money and i was vastly sick for a politician writing the laws and regulations that. somehow. there is just too much rat today's society. that.

is a bit. of a. it was a. very hard to take a look once again here explain why have you ever had sex with governor rick perry feelings. about what. took. place. please. please. please put a bill.

i suspect. we're going to go digital the price is the only industry specifically mention in the constitution and the concept that's because a free and open process is critical to our democracy shred albus. rule. in fact the single biggest threat facing our nation today is the corporate takeover of our government and out across several we've been a hydrogen lying handful of transnational corporations that will profit by the screwing what our founding fathers once built up my job market and on this show we reveal the big picture of what's actually going on in the world we go beyond identifying the problem trying to fix rational debate and a real discussion critical issues facing america have on camera ready to join the movement then walk a little bit hard. to

. put in the new will strong arm an ally should be made to new knowledge face either side you know. it was. a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm researcher.

larry king now been as you've gone through a metamorphosis i know i got a butterfly tattoo to prove it but it was just one of those moments where i didn't have to act and feel emotion just kind of washed over me and i just bawled my eyes out the biggest misconception about being a disney kid that i think they force you to be a certain way they don't they don't you know plus is this guy your husband is desert island. i mean i think. that all next on larry king now. we're going to larry king now been is a huggins is with us you know her from.