to be true to. the roads to be. blocked is. coming up on r t arizona faces a huge influx of undocumented children across the us mexico border over a thousand are being transported to facilities in the state south more on the outrage of how the u.s. is handling the situation just ahead. and two california counties are suing the world's biggest producers of painkillers it's in response to an epidemic of painkiller use that has been seen tragic consequences more on the case coming up. and in eastern ukraine government forces continue to battle and to keep separatists civilians flee from the towns that are seen the most conflicts more on that later in the show.

it's monday june ninth four pm in washington d.c. i live the french are watching our team erica. the u.s. government is rushing supplies to warehouses in arizona which are serving as makeshift holding centers for over a thousand children who crossed the us mexico border many of them looking for their parents and other family members last month the u.s. department of homeland security started flying immigrants to arizona from the rio grande valley in texas after the u.s. border patrol there was overwhelmed with immigrants including more than forty eight thousand children traveling on their own once in arizona the migrants were told to report to an immigration and customs enforcement office near where they were traveling within fifteen days the children are being kept in separate groups divided by age and gender with teenage mothers and their children also being housed separately arizona government governor rather jan brewer said she has demanded

answers after being caught off guard by the sudden shipment of people to her state which is scrambling to accommodate the thousands in need of mattresses portable toilets medicines food and appropriate shelter in the sweltering heat of arizona summers earlier i was joined by premeal of j a paul co-chair of we belong together i first asked her how why are we seeing such a influx of under-age migrants. well most of the research seems to show that they are coming to escape gang related violence and war related violence in those countries latin american countries so i think this is you know this is a product of what happens when you have unstable countries whether it's economically or politically and these these children are fleeing trying to be safe . so you know say what you want about governor jan brewer's immigration policies you know she got a lot of fans and a lot of people to do not approve but here's what she had to say about this crisis she said i'm disturbed an outrage that president obama's administration continues

to implement this dangerous and inhumane policy meanwhile neglecting to answer crucial questions our citizens demand and deserve what i learn from federal officials today only raises more questions about this operation not only does the federal government have no plan to stop this disgraceful policy it also has no plan to deal with the endless ways of illegal aliens once they're released here but what are your thoughts on her statement about this situation and being caught off guard well to be quite honest i don't think jim breuer has done anything to try to fix this issue either really what we need is comprehensive immigration reform that's what the senate recognized that is what we have been trying to push for at the house because that is the most important thing that we need to rectify the immigration system in this country but you know to tie this obviously we know that immigration into this country is also a product of what's happening in all countries and so any immigration policy that you have is not going to deal with the totality of foreign policy and so you are

still going to have people that are trying to escape unsafe places or economically bereft places trying to come to the united states and that has to do with america's foreign policy and how what we do to really help stabilize countries around the world and to reduce economic inequality around the world i think jan brewer you know i think the one thing i will say is that i do think that the. ration should have contacted the governor of the state where they were going to how's this facility you know if i were the administration i probably went to arizona i don't know what went into that decision but i think that the administration is trying to respond in a humanitarian way to what is clearly a humanitarian crisis you know over a thousand children that are coming to escape by on islands and coming to the place that they believe can provide them with the stability that they need so i think this is an attempt to address that i do think that in the planning and

implementation of it consulting the political leadership of the state where you're going to how's this would have been a good idea and frankly if it were me i would have picked a state other than arizona. so what do you think the foreign consulates in these border states when dealing with an influx of especially young children coming in you know fleeing this instability and violence in their in their home countries do you think that the foreign consulates in these border states have a responsibility. yeah i mean i think that the foreign consulates can play an incredibly important role on a couple of levels i mean one is obviously interacting and working with the u.s. government to figure out what kind of assistance the u.s. can provide and what countries are doing themselves to stabilize the situations in their own countries it's not always something that is easy for a foreign government to do i mean if you have economic famine if you think about you know ireland when people irish the first irish immigrants came over to the

united states obviously the government was trying to deal with the economic conditions of the same thing in political conditions but it's because government governments fail at doing that that you have migration in the first place the confluence here i think can play a very important role in particularly and making sure that the children are taken care of helping to provide financial assistance wherever possible and then very importantly i think really trying to make sure that the families of those kids are also notified and that that kids are getting that kind of psychological care as well as physical care that they need you know i'm disturbed by. some reports that i read and i haven't seen this confirmed but i would be very disturbed of kids are being separated from parents in terms of being able to house being able to be housed and i think that you know in a situation like this any kids that are traveling with parents need to be with their families and so the reunification of families i think is incredibly important

and working with the u.s. government to provide whatever assistance possible from the consulates and the and the and the countries the sending countries. you know to support the needs of the kids i think those are some of the most important roles that the foreign consulates need to play well we've seen reports that the children we were being separated by age and by gender and that the the mothers with children were had their own areas to to in these warehouses because as you said choosing arizona in the middle of summer their head they're putting them in warehouses with the beds and trying to get toilet facilities in there it's blazing hot in arizona in the summertime it just seems like a kind of a crazy choice why do we seem so unprepared for this type of an immigration crisis mean what's the u.s. game plan we're hearing reports of. officials handing out the address to the nearest ice offices to these people in tango report to the ice office i mean what's

going to happen now they bust them into arizona fly them into arizona and then they just disappear into the population i mean how can we be so unprepared well look i mean the whole immigration system as a whole has been broken for for a very long time and the response from congress and particularly from republican leadership in the recent months it wasn't always the case by the way but you know i think there were some democrats before there were also against immigration but we are in a situation now where our response has been enforcement and that is because we don't have we have not have the political courage republican leadership in the house in particular has not had the political courage to actually pass an immigration reform bill that. would modernize our system so that when you have refugees and asylum that come into the country when you have unaccompanied minors that there would be very strict and humane ways to respond to that that you would have people be able to get some kind of status that

allows us to both keep track of them and so move them through the process and so instead what we've done is create warehouses essentially i mean it's not that different the detention centers around the country that hold detainees right now congress mandates a certain number of bands that have to be filled so let's just be very clear that our enforcement system as it is is a patchwork of whatever local states want to do and that depends on the political conditions in those states and and it is you know really being fueled by a very profitable detention center. industry that isn't mainly run by private corporations so you know i think the whole enforcement response to this is not just about this particular incident it is an issue that has been. it's been an issue for a while and time this just highlights it because it's getting attention because jan

brewer brought attention to it because it's kids but you know we've been fighting to make the whole immigration system including the detention system and the enforcement system much more humane and that's what a conference of immigration bill would do and really that is the solution that political leaders like jen brewer should be looking to do and that's what we've been calling on speaker boehner to bring forward in the house as well all right pamela j. paul co-chair of we belong together thank you very much for weighing in on this today for us thank you every shade talking with you. prescription drug drug addiction in the united states has hit an all time high according to the center for disease control so who is at fault is it the drug company is it the doctors overprescribing the drugs or is it the patients fault for misuse charges making lopez takes a look at the dynamics involved in what's being called the worst drug addiction crisis in american history was a wrestler all through high school bus would mind go into lose and that's what

started percocet and oxycodone one bad injury one per script too many this is how jordan's slippery slope to addiction began i've been using heroin. in fourteen years it was more expensive to get oxycontin in here when i got to them and it was a better hiding to heroin and i started smoking heroin and then from then on it was game over over the past decade jordon story has become a common narrative in the prescription drug abuse epidemic the united states is in the midst of a severe epidemic of addiction to opioids which are drugs that come from the opium poppy and according to the united states centers for disease control this is the worst drug epidemic in united states history each year scores of people across the u.s. go to the emergency rooms for an overdose emergency now the c.d.c. reports that in two thousand and eleven one point four million americans went to

the emergency room for these types of incidents all of those over twenty thousand people passed away now since ninety nine we have seen these numbers go up significantly why did i know states have reported that those numbers have nearly doubled another ten states are part of that those numbers have tripled and four states report that those numbers have quadrupled right here in california the number of overdose deaths since ninety nine has gone up forty one percent prescription opioid overdoses now cause more deaths than heroin and cocaine combined two counties in california are confronting the problem head on this month district attorneys in santa clara and orange county filed a lawsuit against the major manufacturers of these drugs naming johnson and johnson purdue pharma industries and zero health activists in their lawsuit orange county district attorney anthony recopy a spoke with over the phone about why he's pursuing these companies in particular.

ok. last week chicago joined the fight filing a one hundred twenty six page lawsuit against those same manufacturers and accusing them of a twenty year long conspiracy to increase sales chicago's lawsuit alleges the companies downplayed the addictive qualities of the drugs using so-called front groups to publish biased reports about the benefits and extensive uses of opioids they're also accused of training doctors to turn to these harsh medications more frequently and targeting returning troops as a key demographic back in orange county recommit says one resident dies every other day from a prescription drug overdose and. require. them

to tell the truth about. the pharmaceutical companies declined comment on the lawsuits but some say the blame shouldn't only rest on the shoulders of the manufacturers about fifteen years ago the medical community began prescribing painkillers more aggressively than we ever had before and as the prescriptions began to increase its lead to parallel increases in rates of addiction and overdose deaths so in many ways this epidemic was caused by the medical community but for now district attorneys in california and chicago hope their scathing lawsuits will force big pharma companies to change their ways even if that is tough to swallow reporting in los angeles meghan lopez r.t. . to talk more about this i'm joined by our t's meghan lopez here in the studio thank you very much for joining me something that's curious in these cases you know

why do people seem to go seamlessly from the painkiller straight over to heroin specifically well what we're seeing is this increase as you're seeing in the story and kind of mention to yourself we're really seeing this increase when it comes to the per script and this and so the sales of these drugs have gone up three hundred percent since one thousand nine hundred ninety so they're prescribing them quite abundantly and not only that but repetitively so the sort of developing this kind of long term dependence on using these kind of things in order to get away with different pains that are feeling so these it drugs are very harsh and they're made of the same opium poppy which heroin is made of so people that start using these drugs to do with pain eventually develop a tolerance to them and the tolerance is so high that they need more and more and eventually they start trying to move to cheaper because as you can imagine these pills are not cheap and they're known as a sara lee easy to get your hands on versus heroin which is coming becoming even

more of london and more available in the u.s. coming from countries south of the border and also from afghanistan what also with you know heroin you're going completely off the market but with painkillers you can get quite a serious jail sentence for forging prescriptions and things like that around you when i know that you can also get the pain killers off of the black market in fact three out of four people that abuse. medications such as these get from a prescription that was not their own one of the claims you mention in the chicago lawsuit is that pharmaceuticals were targeting returning troops to tell us more about that right so that is a chicago lawsuit so essentially what they're saying is that these pharmaceutical companies in particular are not just appealing they're not appealing for the veterans themselves but they are appealing to the people that treat those veterans and obviously when we see a lot of people come back from the afghan. theater from war not only are they suffering physically they're suffering mentally p.t.s.d. there's just there's so many unknown tolls of these wars so chicago says that these

people in particular have been pointed as as a target for them in order to boost sales now a person that i spoke to that you saw in my story his name is andrew callignee actually supported that claim he said that we've seen this just skyrocket and by skyrocket i mean that the number of people that are abusing these kind of prescriptions that are from the services or have served doubled between two thousand and two and two thousand and five and then tripled between two thousand and five and two thousand and eight so we're just seeing this major rise and something else to keep in mind we've got this huge v.a. scandal that's going on at the moment where people you know we're finding out now that people have been waiting for years and years and people are even dying you know to get their hands to be able to see a doctor well in the meantime they're being pursued these opioids so people actually coming out veterans are coming out and saying that they are addicted to painkillers because they were put on this painkillers for such an extended time

waiting for a doctor to treat their problems understandable that the d.a.'s office gave you any indication of why they decided decided to go after the manufacturers rather than prescribing physicians you know i was one of my first questions it's hard to understand i mean obviously these companies they're in the business of making money and the business is in the business of making money so you know i asked them why not go after the doctors and this return is that i talked to both from santa clara and also from orange county said that it is important to change the culture they're not going to sit back and go after one doctor after another witchhunt plan of don't know they're right you know these people who are addicted to these these people who want to get their hands on it will somehow get their hands on it they will find a way to get a doctor they're trying to change the culture overall ok with that makes sense that this lawsuit probably though is going to take quite a while so what's the state of california going to do in the meantime to help. the user end of things the people that are really suffering well california has instituted a number of different little programs that they have here in their own or to try to

stop it obviously awareness campaigns are very important something that they started in two thousand and nine it's called a safe drug drop a box essentially was this is you can anonymously go up to a police station there are dozens across the state you go to a police station there's an essential you go mailbox outside you put your prescription drugs if they're on use earth or expired they have one for illicit drugs they have one for syringes and hypodermic kind of things like that and you turn it in anonymously no repercussions nothing like that but it gives people a way to get rid of their medications and particularly parents a way to get rid of their medications and to keep it out of the hands of possibly their children when they don't need that these programs have had significant impacts department the sheriff's department last year said that it got eight thousand four hundred pounds of prescription medications alone and twenty twelve they got twenty thousand pounds so it is helping but it's not doing enough these people are still getting our hands on it it's not want to be nailed it will be able

to so these people are trying to change the culture and to tell these pharmaceutical companies that underplaying the seriousness under playing the addiction is not going to cut it and buying your summer home on the proceeds of people's painkiller addiction is is a dangerous thing all all right thank you very much art make a lopez for us thank you very much. still ahead here on our tasty millions flee from the heaviest fighting in eastern ukraine as the nation's forces continue to battle and to keep separatists more on that right after the break. i marinate join me. in part and. commentary interviews and much like. only on the bus and i only want to.

thank her for. the. well the latest reports from ukraine's eastern city of slovyansk indicate it's once again been targeted by government troops the army reportedly has stepped up its offensive against militia groups in the region with civilians caught in the crossfire are just pause slayer brings us more as women and children flee the violence. was something else even though he says though it's not safe for them to stay here after everything that is happening. we want them to stay alive

a bittersweet for world families leaving for an uncertain future betray a scary went to sleep at night because the bomb will forward everything and. so it's really scary we're making our way to the russian border no one's quite sure how safe this journey is but people here desperate to leave they've been on a waiting list for days the phone call came in the morning giving these women less than four hours to pack up all their belongings and leave again the big one we don't know what will happen there and for how long the situation will continue we want to return home as quickly as possible but they say they have no choice they simply have to go see one of the airplanes in the bombing said the scariest because you don't know where they're going to fall and when we can't always stay in a basement because of the small children victoria is traveling with her two daughters and like all the women here she's left behind

a husband and family and my grandfather grandmother and my father stayed behind. i told my father and grandmother i want to come home to them it's a three hour drive to the russian border and in every organizer has asked us not to interview him on camera because he says he's getting indeed threats from putting this trip together and many feel torn about taking the decision to leave velour worries about a father he left behind. it's really hard to the girls are you probably won't see him for a long time here too it's going to be mom can be. even here so thousands of women and children have already made this journey and thousands more on waiting lists trying to leave the crossing through the ukrainian border we're having to fullness a little bit discreetly as there are border guards everywhere the people in the past are preparing their documents and russia the final destination. it's just

a few minutes away. gradually every passenger was crossing the border to russia in . tears of relief but for many here this is just the first difficult step towards an uncertain future. on the ukrainian russian border. the justice department apartment of defense and central intelligence agencies are putting a little extra work into preventing the public from seeing the document outlining its legal justification for using drones to kill americans suspected of terrorism overseas lawyers for the government told a federal apparel peals court in manhattan that it seeks additional redactions in the memo to protect national security to prevent damage to the government's ability to engage in confidential deliberations and to seek confidential legal advice in april a three judge panel of the court ordered the memo released due to a freedom of information request by the new york times and the american civil

liberties union lawyers for the times and the a.c.l.u. said friday that the government's continued delays regarding the document are cheating the public of a fully informed and fair debate over the highly classified targeted killing program the foia request was made after two drone strikes killed three u.s. citizens one in september two thousand and eleven in yemen killed and more locky an al qaeda leader born in the united states and some air con the other one just a month later killed a lock his teenage son abdulrahman run home on a lucky legal scholars and human rights activists have complained that it was illegal for the u.s. to kill american citizens away from the battlefield without a trial. it's monday so admitted if you might have had one too many glasses of wine over the weekend well in new york politician he's might have to one up you on this one vincent tebow is attorney claims he was drunk when he took a twenty thousand dollars cash for a ride. to help

a democratic state senator obtain approval to run for mayor in queens as a republican his attorney says the bone had six or seven vodka tonics for dinner and that's why he agreed to the bribe he says he believes he was being hired as a political consultant to bone was given the cash last year in an s.u.v. outside a manhattan steakhouse turns out the money and the guy who was giving him the cash were an undercover with the f.b.i. the bone is just one of three politicians on trial for charges in a bribery scheme but so far he appears to have come up with the most creative defense. the spider's web isn't just a home it's also an instrument is a science lesson for you today scientists at oxford university recently tested how a spider's silk vibrates by shining a laser on the strands and shooting a bullet at it. they've discovered the silk transmits vibrations across a wide range of frequencies when it struck spiders use the frequencies to determine

if mation about prey mates even the structural integrity of the web most fighters have poor eyesight and rely almost exclusively on the vibration of the soak in their web for sensory information researchers call the news stunning. it's pretty anyway the bus is coming up here right on our t.v. aaron eight joins us more for twenty us for a quick preview hey erin thank you coming up on groom bus kick off to the world cup the twenty fourteen world cup it's only days away brazilians aren't necessarily welcoming the game with open arms now we're bringing you part two of my interview with sports economist victor matheson he's telling us about the very wide range of issues facing the world cup both economic and otherwise and in today's big deal edward harrison and i are discussing debt forgiveness and rebalancing risks in our economy it's all coming up so stay tuned great hey they better fix those stadiums up before the kick off. thanks that does it for now for more on the stories we

covered go to youtube dot com forward slash america and check out our website dot com forward slash usa you can also follow me on twitter at and see friends stay tuned boom bust coming up next. well. science technology innovation all the list of melanin still around russia we've got this huge area covered. the shelves are forced. to play. mux margins are the finish line of the marathon. that's. what we're hearing. but. i'm betting that

a society that i'm big corporation kind of can. do and the bad product all that all about money and i was fascinated that for politicians write the laws and regulations that bankers coming up. there's just too much pressure is it a tie. up the bat. well if you're like. i dislike you.

pleasure to have you with us here on our t.v. today i roll researcher. over there i marinate it this is boom bust and these are some of the stories that we're tracking for you today. first up a kick off to the twenty fourteen a world cup is just days away for brazil hands aren't necessarily welcoming the games with open arms now we're bringing you part two of my interview with forth the economist victor matheson he's telling us about the very wide range of issues facing the world cup both economic and otherwise and the european central bank is moving into an chartered waters without a map to get a better understanding of what's going on in euro and dr ben steele is on the program senior fellow and director of international.