The ABC News Radio special series is called America’s Fentanyl Crisis. Senior Justice Correspondent Pierre Thomas (pictured here wearing a hazmat suit to get a sense of the challenges police face) reports on the crisis from New England, which ABC says is ground zero of the Fentanyl epidemic.
Fentanyl is a powerful synthetic pain killer that has become a popular street drug. According to the CDC, in the last year the number of deaths caused by Fentanyl has nearly doubled. During this five-part investigation, Thomas goes inside a Drug Enforcement Administration drug lab, participates in law enforcement ride-alongs, and meets with survivors struggling to stay clean.
Here are the details about the new ABC Radio series:
Part 1: Inside a DEA Drug Raid
Thomas witnesses a drug raid in Texas, where he interviews officers as they enter an alleged drug apartment and speaks with neighbors, who had no idea what was going on next door. LISTEN TO PART ONE HERE
Part 2: Law Enforcement on the Frontlines
Thomas tries on the hazmat suit that law enforcement officers wear when they are dealing with the highly toxic nature of Fentanyl, the suit can only be worn for 15 minutes at a time.
Part 3: A Weapon of War
Thomas travels to New England, which has been hit extremely hard by the opioid epidemic. He interviews Jack Riley, who retired last month as DEA’s deputy administrator. Riley likens the drug to a weapon of war for the way it is killing citizens.
Part 4: The Search for a Stronger High
Thomas speaks with 21-year-old Morgan Gilman who overdosed at the wheel and nearly died before getting clean. She tells him she knew the risks of Fentanyl but was searching for that stronger high. Thomas visits a DEA lab in New Hampshire and talks to scientists who say they have never seen a drug kill at the rate Fentanyl is killing.
Part 5: From Victim to Survivor
Thomas meets another Fentanyl victim, 26-year-old Natasha Symonds, who is now in the process of getting clean. He also visits firehouses that use non-punitive measures to help users get clean. Both Natasha and Morgan Gilman begin drug programs on the path to recovery.
With this article, Pierre Thomas highlights the true catalyst of the “Opioid Crisis” are opportunistic drug cartels literally flooding American cities with untold amounts of Heroin and Fentanyl. All of this “truth” is history repeating itself to Prohibition or the Volstead Act when the drug “Alcohol” was made illegal in the United States. By doing so, it laid the groundwork for individuals like Al Capone to usurp law enforcement and city government to unthinkable corruption.
The greatest unintended consequence of Prohibition however, was the plainest to see. For over a decade, the law that was meant to foster temperance instead fostered intemperance and excess. The solution the United States had devised to address the problem of alcohol abuse had instead made the problem even worse. The statistics of the period are notoriously unreliable, but it is very clear that in many parts of the United States more people were drinking, and people were drinking more.
There is little doubt that Prohibition failed to achieve what it set out to do, and that its unintended consequences were far more far reaching than its few benefits.
Our current day Opioid prohibition is having the exact same conscience to America. The single unique difference between the two is the scapegoat or “boogie man” of today’s prohibition; those Americans who suffer from Chronic or Persistent Pain. As the silent attack against the weakest of us goes almost completely unreported, it has become convenient to blame the deluge of illegal Heroin and Fentanyl on millions of innocent suffering citizens. Whether it’s an American Soldier returning from the war suffering from extreme bodily damage or an elderly individual suffering from degenerative disc disease, the convenient target is and has been medically prescribed pain medication. We as a society are causing untold suffering to those who have no relation to illegal drug use for recreation, but use pain analgesics to survive from debilitating pain.
Shame on the news media for ignoring this.
“…the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped. ”
~Last Speech of Hubert H. Humphrey