mission in a week when the united states became the 1st country to suppose half a 1000000 coronavirus related deaths the highest total in the world but another epidemic is also raging there the continuing opioid crisis joining me now from bring in new jersey is an international leading voice on mental health and addiction patrick kennedy the nephew of the late u.s. president john f. kennedy thanks so much for coming on going underground 1st of all the figures $81.00 fountains and in 12 months to june what has happened in the united states about the opioid crisis because it's out of the headlines now well we we had an epidemic going into this pandemic and of course the pandemic has has moved off the front pages because of the urgency to address coronavirus but right underneath coronaviruses is all of the effects of isolation economic hardship because people are losing their jobs the stress of so many

aspects of this and that's just adding fuel to the fire that was already under way before we even had the 1st coronavirus case we were almost set a point where we were going to begin to focus our attention entirely on this mental health addiction crisis and then of course now we've taken our eyes off of it because there's something more pressing. but there's no doubt it's not going away it's just being masked by this this corona virus on top so emergency room visits up 30 percent i mean this insistence on mind boggling that alone the impact of lockdowns on mental health of course can buy tackle this crisis is a given that we know his absolute 0 position to universal health care. you know it's a matter of national security and every business in america now is is really panicking about what's going to happen in the aftermath of the kovac crisis

on their employees so it's front and center as an economic issue which really changes the tenor of the advocacy it's not something to be kind of taking care of kind of on the margins which is well underway it's now it's mainstream everybody has been affected by mental health especially during this crisis so i think everyone's going to be focused on this in a way that they haven't before and we need a public health model because of course code it's going to transform with all of these variations and we're going to see a need for us to have a much stronger public health infrastructure and if we build that infrastructure in all this so ought to be able to address this addiction epidemic at the same time and that's been the problem with mental health an addiction it's been separated from overall health care that this crisis on cove it might give us the chance to

integrate finally our response to the epidemic of addiction and mental health along with the response to this pandemic we have to put the 2 together and and hopefully the silver lining if there is one in all of this is that we will have a much stronger public health infrastructure coming out of this terrible pandemic and you have this confidence because president biden rang you up as soon as he was elected president because i have this confidence because 1st of all president biden has lived experiences that is what we say when where i'm a person long term recovery from opioid addiction myself his family has suffered the disease of addiction throughout his. amway and of course his son has been very public about his own struggles but i think that anybody who's experienced this in their family has got to have

a mission inside of them that says we have to do something about this you see not only is he not wrong you it seems but he immediately comes to power and biden stops the easing of prescription availability of blueprint for free and he made this order on january the 14th stopping people right now in the united states getting this medication against the advice of doctors against the advice for so many health professionals why is he rescinding the lorded. initiative of donald trump who said opioid death counts are too high we need to we need to make this provision. i think i got swept up an effort to try to clean up some of the last minute rules that donald trump tried to push through in the 11th hour and this ended up being one of the better ones but i think he got

swept up in a lot of bad ones and so i do believe the administration's going to widen the accessibility of buprenorphine which is the drug that is treating the opioid addiction it basically blocks the opioid receptors so if you take heroin or fenton all or oxy cotton or something you're not going to get the euphoria but you also won't get at the terrible craving that leads you to go back out there and use more so it's a very powerful medication if doctors are able to prescribe opioids they certainly should be able to prescribe the medication to treat opioid addiction so i am i am with an expansion of making this medication more available to more people in the border braman pharma dispenses of this drug do you not think you should be reading the president given that right now they may be people in the united states who require this drug or do you think biden is listening to other voices who say we

shouldn't medicalize a selves out of the crisis so the company i'm on has not even been able to get its product out into the marketplace which is a sign of the lack of urgency for us to constantly improve what is available this medication can be a week 2 weeks months and even longer and the beauty of that is if someone comes in for emergency room from an overdose they can immediately get inoculated much like one of these vaccines from death. cue to this illness because by getting this medication you prevent people from going back out and overdosing this this is a life saving medication and it should be out there it is not because we have not fast tracked these types of medications like we've fast track kovac vaccinations

it's just another example of the double standard in which we treat addiction as a less urgent public health need than the rest of physical health care but when i started in recovery i started on buprenorphine started on suboxone in order to to address the critical need of my addiction to opioids and so what we need to do is take the newest versions of this medication which are allowing for weeks and months of duration which really allow people to get if you will locked in to recovery and stabilized if their brain is not on fire because they have medication that will help douse that flame which is what buprenorphine is able to do. well as you say swept under the accompanied his biden attacked anything that was associated with germs seemingly i'll tell you what was a fuss tracked joke to janet would cook who she approved zoom hi drew neutrino

about that against scientific opinion against the opioid and that biden people are talking about her being acting. have f.d.a. months i think maybe being permanently head of the f.d.a. what do you mean you don't degenerate would cook because lettuce to buy them from the physicians 1st ones would be prescribing public citizen fed up the telling by begging but not to appoint him. so the problem with these opioid medications is that they have been over prescribed and that's been driven by the profit motive obviously of the medical establishment that comes from over prescribing it's an addictive drug and it can help drive business if your business is writing prescriptions and we saw that with the per to pharma the oxy cotton you know we swear seeing settlements now in america where we're finally holding

pharmaceutical companies responsible because many of them knew they were prescribing way in excess of the population that actually needed this pain relief i am all for people with severe pain getting the treatment they need but we know what rep they represent in terms of the total population and we should have a situation where these powerful medications are being written well beyond the prescribed population that they're intended to. meet their needs her how does it relate to jan would cook well janet woodcock was there when it came to approving additional really super addictive opioid medications and my problem with it is that you know an industry that's based on addiction for profit is a dangerous industry and you put money behind getting more people addicted that's

not a prescription for anything good and so when the f.d.a. continued to approve these very powerful opioids they're really opening the door and they're saying there's going to be a lot more pain and devastation from people who are going to end up getting hawked on these medications then perhaps the benefits that these medications were designed to address again. i'm sure as you know a lot of these settlements are made and the ones that do with no admission of wrongdoing and certainly biden's a choice rifty a boss said that she defied the 11 to do vote against the opioid not because she'd been taken to any fancy dinners with lobbyist i'm sure sure where that. well i just believe that there ought to be a way of say if we're going to approve this medication that we prove it very narrow

way and have some type of accountability measure where if it's being perscribe beyond those with severe cancer for example that it be taken off the market there has to be some because what we're doing is were saying we don't value the loss of life due to addiction because it's not the life that we're looking to save we only care about saving people with these types of problems and that's why we're so where allowing a medication to go forward to save lives here disregarding all the lives that it's going to cost over here and that's that the disconnect when people discount how real addiction is and how fatal an illness it is and the fact that they can say one area of medicine is more urchin than this area of medicine addiction has

always taken a back seat to other physical health conditions it's almost as if we care about those addiction be damned and we ought to be setting up a new paradigm given the public health threat of addiction to say no we need to take that much more seriously in the total approval process of all of these medications people you mention money then why do you think biden got so much more big pharma money then trumpet the u.s. election to enough 1000000 to biden was 864-7000 dollars to chum biden got money from pfizer from up from j.f.k. bank. what do they want from but well maybe they just like the guy well honestly i think our country has led the world and i owe medical research and data has been a positive impact for the world. i believe in this time of code we appreciate

having a pharmaceutical industry more than ever before they were able to field trials to the research and give us a vaccination in record time no one begrudges pharmacy ability to turn out lifesaving products so there's nothing wrong with him receiving dollars from what i am i believe and furthermore let me just say thank god joe biden got elected ok you can make every criticism you want of joe biden he lead he leads our country and this world at a very important time where we need to put the past of donald trump firmly in our rear rear view mirror for all that he brought our country and our world in terms of defenses and i say i know here is kind of a democrat family but but i mean i want to put in china textile you know a lot of these stories you know you kind of want to you know think you got to take

on the new guy i don't think joe biden is the kind of guy that gets corrupted by that stuff patrick kennedy and something that more from the late john f. kennedy's nephew and former congressman up to the spring. it's

been decades since the fall of spain's fascist regime but old wounds still haven't tailed you into from going into the pentagon this morning and that's. because only from a. nickel feeder market about a mishap i will succumb to me in the present just as me no doubt what i noticed in the scene caused me to you know. thousands of newborn babies were torn from their mothers and given away and forced adoption i don't know a lot of money it was the other fantasy stuff that i don't grow but as a fellow men tend to this day mothers still search for grown children while looking in hope for the best parents. welcome back i'm still here with patrick kennedy former congressman and if you

violate us president john f. kennedy you don't think it was trumpeted the opioid crisis more seriously than his predecessors and asked you to loot lee not i was on trump's commission ok how much to donald trump put behind his margin see of opioids 0 do you hear me 0 dollars donald trump put towards this we were losing back then $80000.00 with debt to about $76000.00 and now it's back up he got too much running at present donald trump talked a big game and did nothing about this and i wrote about this while i served on the trump commission on the opioid crisis deserved on that commission what was it like this commission it was let me just tell you you know put your money where your mouth this. donald trump we had an increase of about

$3.00 to $4000000000.00 all of that was led by congress donald trump didn't ask for one more cent for this crisis as a result of that commission and that's why he cannot be held out as anyone who did anything but just create more. essential a denial around this he himself lost a brother to alcoholism he knows the power of addiction i thought and i had great hopes for him when he spoke about his brother to take that experience and use it to transform our country's perspective on this but this is a disease which he invested nothing in treating in fact he even cut the office of national drug control policy proposed to cut by 95 percent i me

any body who is in this space believe me cannot say one good thing about what donald trump did to actually address this crisis when it was before him well i'm sure trump in saying at least he did get it national emergency and and he chose you unlike joe biden who they say has it hasn't given you a coolie and yet he he has said in the bus that he would have become a priest or a corporate lawyer if it hadn't been for the election of you or a uncle. would be what do you see as the kennedy legacy through joe biden apart from him obviously being of irish ancestry. well i believe joe biden's a very devout catholic i know he is i live not too far from church that he would attend on a regular basis as vice president and he didn't do it for attention he would slip

in and out and let me just tell you he's someone who believes in the social gospel where matthew 25 those that are there for the least one of us my brothers and sisters is there for may and i believe that that's the kind of answer to all of our world's problems that we need we need to identify with those who are struggling because there but for the grace of god goes each and every one of us and if we practice the golden rule of treating others like we ourselves want to be treated this world would be a different place and joe biden gets what that meaning is all about well i wonder what your other agreement kennedy would think it was the views on a mass incarceration he was an architect event was we all make mistakes and that was a big mistake that everybody at the time thought was an answer and an historical

hindsight it was a terrible disaster and i believe that he will lead the cleaning up of that i think that he will lead go the whole reform in our criminal justice system and of course in our country our criminal justice system hasn't only just been racially motivated it as really ended up being the default for a lack of a mental health system and a lack of an addiction treatment system given the fact that over half of those that are are incarcerated are there as a direct result of their untreated mental illness and there are untreated addiction . it's an it's another biden legacy we don't normally get a kennedy on going underground in a general of a student comes on quite a bit quite a bit do you think that biden will release the papers on the assassination of john f. kennedy that are judy releasing optimism obama stop them being released trump stopped him being released i don't see any reason why. he would stop them i think it's good

for. transparency which we need a lot more of in our world today people are consumed and obsessed with conspiracy theories and all the let like if you withhold information all it does is fuel this kind of conspiratorial thinking i don't think that's healthy for anyone i think it's better to have transparency and i believe joe biden will release them and obviously conspiracy very much in the news about corona virus here in britain the uptake in vaccines concerning authorities here can i ask you whether you've had the vaccine would you tell people that they should have the vaccine if they were the health professionals tell them it's advisable. well i have terrible asthma and have been hospitalized many times for it so i couldn't wait to get my

vaccination and as soon as i had the opportunity i went ahead and did it and i for one cannot imagine adding one risking losing their life to this disease and by denying the themselves the opportunity to get an ocular at it from that i just can't understand that i think that conspiracy theories around vaccinations there are risks to everything if where to wrap conspiracy theories around everything that might be dangerous for us because nothing is perfect then we'll never be able to. move forward so bill gates may be powerful medically unqualified but he's not putting silicon chips in your your vaccine then julie. i've got to ask you clearly given the implications for mental health of coronavirus why you haven't made it clear that your running to go back into frontline politics

or in the room is jus that it's your wife who who maybe well i look forward to serving my country if ever given the chance and i'm blessed to have 10 years of continued sobriety thanks to 12 step recovery and i believe there are ways for me and my immediate life to help just the people who are in my circle of recovery just as they help may and we're all in it together and i hope that that spirit of us being connected is what's going to take us out of this crisis tz and help us heal the disconnectedness that has too often taken place in this crisis and isolated people isolation is the worst thing you can do for someone with addiction or with someone with a mental illness. it only allows your mental illness and your addiction to pathology eyes to get worse you need human connection in order to be stronger i mean sure you're doing more than that tell me about the kennedy forum which i have

to say is backed by suitable companies going as i'm going to says i'm for that what is the kennedy forum going to be doing about the implications of current of ours for mental health so the kennedy forum is about holding insurance companies accountable to paying for mental health and addiction care so i'll take money from wherever i can get it if it allows me to stop anding to allow us to stop ending the discrimination against people with these illnesses which because they have these illnesses they are dismissed by the medical system the insurance system often do. a nice them care out right whereas if they had another type of illness the insurance system has been designed to treat them and to cover those treatments but not in mental health and not addiction because we had a perception that these illnesses are controlled by the people who suffer from them as if someone gets up every day and says oh i want to alienate all my family i want

to jeopardize losing my job i want to risk getting arrested by the police i want to try to die through the chance of over overdose saying nobody chooses addiction and mental illness as a way of life i can just assure you that and yet all of our public policy is predicated on that belief that people choose these illness to be you mean doing this for years until i do 40000000 people could eat without the help of food stamps how on earth is america the united states going to tackle mental health in any kind of time scale that's going to help someone watching right now. is any appointment the joe biden has made is there any element of joe biden's initial move since being inaugurated that is given huge sources over to listen right now joe biden's trying to get

a 1.9 trillion dollar relief package is so that we can get people resources to survive letter early survive people are homeless they're hungry they need resources and we also need to give them mental health resources and that we need to keep fighting for but listen joe biden is trying to force this through because right now too many republicans are holding it up because they say it's too much money where in the midst of such a crisis this is for government this is. when you need government this is when you need the extra spending to get people out of this crisis if you can't spend more money now when can you spend money so i just think thank god joe biden's pushing this through and tell me about the one mind initiative you're a co-founder of so one mind is like my uncle space race when he said he was going

to put a man on the moon in this case one minus about it inner space race a research of our brain our brains collectively are responsible for so much disability around the world from all simers to addiction and we as a world community need to be focused on unlocking the galaxy of neurons in our brains and understand what works to better treat the brain this is truly a global issue that will involve the whole world and one mind is trying to build relationships with countries around the world so that our noro science can sync up with their narrow science that will get us to answers to all simers addiction depression anxiety all of brain illnesses in a much more expedited way which will be good for everybody watching this program and just finally i'm going to us because that cuba is pioneering vaccine research

and of course trump tried to close up all relations between the u.s. and cuba and your father was the pioneer in changing the relation between cuba or in the united states you do you see by improving relations to back and back when senator ted kennedy did make things warm up between the 2 countries. i think having friends in our hemisphere is a very important thing for our total security and i also think that we still have mob rule you know if organized crime running cuba so they still routine way deny people's human rights and so we need to put some some accountability in place so if we have any kind of relationship with them that we want to press forward on human rights and i think joe biden will pursue human rights obviously donald trump did not he loved dictators he love putin he loves to war to say he loved

kim he loved any dictator he could shake hands with and joe biden's the opposite joe biden is going to be pressing for more democracy and human rights everywhere in the world and i'm so grateful that joe biden is our president those countries often see old deny their dictatorships and including cuba patrick kennedy thank you and that's it for the show will be back on monday with respect to system of a down from man surge tankian about speaking truth to power until then join the underground of the low social media and there them is an interview by subscribing to us with neutral. benckiser by a survival guide books they say yes like all the stars simply read all the surface . pieces are there you don't stand a bad. actor. oh heck no but this is

a repatriation team or get arrested 7 years. billick a separate organizer for. hundreds of millions of euros to a controversial foreign consultants present micron's government comes under heavy fire for its vaccine distribution campaign. also this hour microstates san marino turns to russia's covert shock after an e.u. approved vaccines failed to arrive. on the b.b.c. reveals plans to reverse the dominance of american cartoons extremely ambitions targets to get children watching a more british based culture. you're watching our 2 international coming to you live from the russian capital this and.