60 Minutes - 1/11/2015: Colorado Pot, Obamacare, Up

Episode Date: February 26, 2015

A year after Colorado became the first state to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, Bill Whitaker takes a look at the results and interviews the governor, who calls the move the most ambitious social experiment of the 21st century. A new book reports that the controversial Affordable Care Act will eventually become unaffordable because it doesn’t fix the biggest problem of all, the high cost of healthcare. Lesley Stahl reports. Some of America’s most severely wounded veterans are using their hearts and minds to summit some of the world’s tallest mountains and overcome the disabilities war has dealt them. Lara Logan reports. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Welcome to the Mile High City, where marijuana, long a symbol of the counterculture, now is just a part of everyday culture. It's a Thursday night in downtown Denver, and we were invited to a marijuana food and wine pairing catering to young professionals. You might expect to see the band toking up, but here, everybody is. Denver is the epicenter of a marijuana industry that's now in full bloom.

This is not somebody's backyard. This is industrial agriculture. Absolutely. Good news? More people are going to get health care. Bad news? We have no way in the world that we're going to be able to pay for it. He's talking about Obamacare, a subject Stephen Brill knows well. And his comprehensive book comes just as the new Congress is getting started with many Republicans gunning for the Affordable Care Act. So what works and what doesn't?

That's our story tonight. There are few people in the world who have the skill or the will to attempt to climb one of the world's seven summits, the tallest mountain on each continent. If you don't make it to that path today, we go down. Expedition's done, finished. All right. All right. So you've got to move quick. Tonight, you'll meet young men who've done it with no legs. No! I'm Steve Croft. I'm Leslie Stahl.

I'm Morley Safer. I'm Lara Logan. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. Visit Colorado these days and you can smell change in the air. It's the scent of legal marijuana for recreational use. If you're a resident 21 or older, you can walk into a state-licensed store and buy up to an ounce of pot. Tourists are limited to a quarter ounce. Colorado has allowed medical marijuana

since 2001, but in 2012, voters amended the state constitution to allow recreational pot and gave the government one year to make it work. Colorado's governor calls it the most ambitious social experiment of the 21st century. Three other states also have approved recreational pot, but none has gone further or faster into the legal retail weed business than Colorado. The experiment just hit the one-year mark, and we wanted to know how it's going. So we headed to Denver, the epicenter of a marijuana industry that's now in full bloom. Welcome to the Mile High City, where marijuana, long a symbol of the counterculture, now is just a part of everyday culture. It's a Thursday night in downtown Denver, and we were invited to a marijuana food and wine pairing

catering to young professionals. You might expect to see the band toking up, but here, everybody is. The food is sprinkled with marijuana, the wine infused with a strain called Killer Queen. Budtender Leo Deneuve selected it for the evening. Because of the mellowness of the strain, there isn't any kind of anxiety attached to it. So that's why we have such a crowd of happy and fantastic people. And what we're doing there with that machine is it creates smoke that is cooled to minus 10 degrees, and that smoke is

then blown into this glass, and that allows the wine to open up and really bring in the fruit-forward qualities of it. Those who might remember pot from the 70s, the marijuana grown and sold in Colorado today is up to 10 times stronger. There's a healthy appetite for the Rocky Mountain High and no shortage of stores to supply the demand. There's the Corner Store in Denver. 173 even. A high-end boutique in Aspen, right around the corner from Prada and Gucci. Colorado has licensed more than 300 recreational dispensaries so far, bringing up an estimated $288 million in sales, $37 million in tax revenue. This is a lot of pot. This is industrial scale.

How many rooms like this do you have? When we're fully finished with our construction, we'll have 12 like this. Meg Sanders is a new breed of cannabis CEO, driven to push marijuana into the mainstream. A suburban mother of two, she left a private equity firm to run Mindful, a chain of four retail stores that sells recreational and medicinal pot. All of this is legal. That's just mind-blowing. It is. Meg, did you ever think you would be here doing this? No, never in a million years. I was working in a small financial office and it just wasn't a lot of upward growth and what better opportunity than to jump into a fledgling industry, something that we'll never see again in our lifetime. Her 44,000-square-foot marijuana factory is cutting edge.

Automated water and nutrient systems feed the plant. Lighting mimics the seasons so plants can be harvested year-round. All this in a warehouse right across the street from a Denver police station. 60 mindful employees cultivate, trim, and package up to 500 pounds of marijuana every month. This is not somebody's backyard. This is not some stoner's basement. This is a big business. This is industrial agriculture. Absolutely. Commercial grow right here. Which is why she recruited Philip Haig, known in the trade as a master grower. He used to cultivate flowers on an industrial scale in Texas, but his true passion is pot. What do you bring to the table here?

Efficiencies on the grow side. I treat this building more like a large-scale tomato greenhouse than your average cannabis grow. But these ain't tomatoes. These are definitely not tomatoes. It's a very specialized plant. And you are personally familiar with your wares? Most definitely. Yes, sir. All of this still is illegal at the federal level. The Justice Department is watching closely. The feds say they won't intervene as long as Colorado's recreational pot doesn't fall into the hands of kids or criminals or cross state lines. With marijuana's growing acceptance in Colorado, Sanders says she's comfortable as a cannabis capitalist. I have

a massive engineering fee for you. Her 23-year-old son Elijah works with her at Mindful. She says parents at her daughter's middle school seem more curious than critical of her business. Do you have any concerns that your job is sending the wrong signal to your 13-year-old daughter. I'm not concerned about that. At all? I'm not. This isn't carte blanche. Oh, because I work here, everybody should have access to it, and that includes her.

We have very good conversations about it. She knows. She knows. I mean, you say you're a business person. I think some parents would look at this and say she's just peddling drugs. I can tell you that the drug dealer, illegal drug dealer on the corner in any state in this nation isn't carding, isn't checking your ID, isn't making sure you have a medical marijuana card or you're over 21. Listen to she does it every day. The stats show it.

We've done a phenomenal job. Mindful expects to rake in 18 million dollars this year, but it's not easy money. Colorado requires every plant grown by a licensed operator to be tracked from seed to sale. Each one has a barcoded radio frequency ID tag and is logged into a statewide database. Cameras watch it all. The goal is to keep every bud and bit off the black market. Greenwood Village Police Chief John Jackson isn't sold. Law enforcement is really trying to do the right thing here. It's different and it's requiring a mind change or shift on our part. Jackson is president of the Colorado Association of Chiefs of Police. He says there's still illegal pot on the streets

from underground dealers who don't have to levy 28% in state taxes. There's a common belief that by legalizing it, you will get rid of the black market. I can resoundingly say that the black market is alive and doing well. It's still cheaper to buy it from the dealer on the street than to buy it in the store. Certainly. We've created an entire industry here. And I'm going to be honest with you, there are some very responsible people that are involved. And it's like anything else in society. You've got a few people that are really making it hard for the others

and maybe use Colorado as a platform to simply provide their marijuana to the rest of the country. This is what he's talking about. In October, Denver police and the DEA raided several warehouse operations that were allegedly growing marijuana destined for out-of-state. Neighbors Nebraska and Oklahoma are suing to have the U.S. Supreme Court declare Colorado's recreational pot market unconstitutional, claiming marijuana is crossing their borders. It's too early to say if other problems are taking root. Colorado is just now starting to collect and analyze data on pot's impact on the state. I do worry about if we are irreparably harming Colorado,

and it's something that will take years to suss out. This baby-faced 31-year-old, Andrew Friedman, is Colorado's marijuana czar. He's a Harvard law grad, handpicked by Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper to oversee the rollout of legalized recreational pot. There is no roadmap. I mean, you guys are racing ahead at, you know, a thousand miles an hour, and you're trying to work this out on the fly. How do you do that? It's an unbelievable challenge. Within one year, we wanted to get our culture up to speed. What is the right amount to imbibe or to smoke and drive? What's appropriate around kids? What's appropriate in public? Society never weighed

in on these things before. Okay. Anything else on caregivers? Black market, gray market, where we're going on it. He regularly calls together the department heads of revenue, health, education, all the state agencies involved with marijuana, trying to balance the demands of the people with public safety and the law. It's legal here, but outside of Colorado, it's still illegal. It's a federally illegal drug. How do you square those two? Well, it is a round peg in a square hole.

It takes everybody being creative in ways they haven't been creative before and knowing that at any time the federal government could come and shut us down and tell us that what we're doing is illegal in their eyes. You still think that's possible? Sure. It's completely possible that in a few years, somebody comes around and says, a new president says, we are not okay with you doing this. They know they're under a microscope. That's why Colorado was quick to act when it bit into trouble with edibles, marijuana candies, cookies, and other infused foods. Just three months into legalization, a 19-year-old college student visiting Denver

leapt to his death from a hotel balcony after eating a pot-laced cookie. The coroner's report noted marijuana intoxication as a significant contributing factor. I think one of the things we didn't see coming was that people were going to overdose on edibles. And we're not going to try to hide that problem. New rules and regulations came out faster than I think you ever see state government do something. New rules placed immediate limits on the amount of THC, marijuana's major psychoactive ingredient,

allowed in edibles, and required new labeling detailing the potency of each serving. But the biggest cloud over the industry is banking. As long as the federal government continues to count pot proceeds as illegal drug money, most banks won't touch it. So Colorado's billion-dollar marijuana industry is conducted almost entirely in cash. That's why Meg Sanders keeps a two-ton safe. So your payroll was in cash? Payroll, taxes, licensing fees, Home Depot, vendors,

you name it, our electrician. All in cash. Absolutely. From a public safety standpoint, it's definitely the number one issue that this industry faces. If you want to guarantee that a fledgling industry becomes corrupt and becomes populated with gang activity, fake it all cash, right? That's as old as Al Capone, right? Cash creates corruption. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper says a partial solution might be a new state-chartered cannabis credit union. He's urging the federal government to approve it. Still, despite the problems, Governor Hickenlooper says he's encouraged by the rollout of this green experiment Colorado voters wanted. In the beginning, you didn't think it was a good idea.

No, I posed it. You know, and I posed it, I think even after the election, if I'd had a magic wand and I could wave the beginning, you didn't think it was a good idea. No, I posed it. You know, and I posed it, and I think even after the election, if I'd had a magic wand and I could wave the wand, I probably would have reversed it and had the initiative fail. But now I look at it, and I'm not so sure I'd do that, even if I had such a wand. I mean, I think we've made a lot of progress, and, you know, there's still a lot of work to be done,

but I think we might actually create a system that can work. All right, I will have an eighth of that. Meg Sanders says marijuana is good for business. It's pretty groovy, dude. And good for Colorado. Are you seeing a marijuana effect on the economy here? Absolutely. You can't find an empty warehouse in the city of Denver, really. I mean, you just can't. And then think of the ripple effect. I mean, we affect a ton of businesses, security, marketing, you know, web hosting. We're a business just like anybody else. We have the same needs. Today, you can walk into a mindful dispensary and buy a joint for $14.53. Business is good. Sanders is planning to expand. We're creating. We're saying, please trust us. We know we can do this right.

I do remember when this was rolled out, everyone thought the sky was going to fall. Still there. It didn't fall. And business is thriving, and the customers are still coming through the door. So clearly, if I'm looking at my business and I'm looking at those around me, the consumer is saying, yeah, this works. 60 Minutes, coming up after this short break. Sometimes historic events suck. But what shouldn't suck is learning about history.

I do that through storytelling. History That Doesn't Suck is a chart-topping, history-telling podcast chronicling the epic story of America, decade by decade. Right now, I'm digging into the history of incredible infrastructure projects of the 1930s, including the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and more. The promise is in the title, History That Doesn't Suck. Available on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts. This month marks one year since health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act began. And from the president's point of view, so far, so good. More than 10 million

Americans who didn't have health insurance before have signed up. But congressional Republicans are gunning for Obamacare. Even if they can outright repeal it, they want an overhaul. And with the debate just getting underway, author Stephen Brill, who has spent the past two years immersing himself in the subject, has come out with a new book, America's Bitter Pill, that takes a comprehensive look at what the new law does and doesn't do. Brill argues that Obamacare is the product of what he calls an orgy of lobbying and backroom deals, in which just about everyone with a stake in the $3 trillion a year health industry came out ahead except the taxpayers. Good news, more people are going to get health care.

Bad news, we have no way in the world that we're going to be able to pay for it. Stephen Brill says that the outrage is what the Affordable Care Act doesn't do. It doesn't do anything on medical malpractice reform. It doesn't do anything to control drug prices. It doesn't do anything to control hospital profits. So all the cost-controlling side of this just went by the wayside. 99% of it. Brill learned that when it came to controlling costs,

the White House was told up front. After costs, you're never going to get anything passed because the lobbyists won't, you know, will just not allow it to be passed. So let's go through what each entity won. The drug companies, you know, they were going to get 200 plus billion dollars worth of new customers able to pay for drugs. They were going to avoid the calamity of the real reforms that they were worried about. Price controls generally. Canada. You and I being able to buy drugs from Canada, that would have cost them hundreds of billions.

The hospital lobby did agree to cuts and how much the federal government compensates them for Medicare patients. But Brill says overall the tradeoff in new paying patients would more than make up for that. And the hospitals managed to keep other cost controls completely off the table, allowing them to charge whatever they can get for hospital stays and greatly mark up drug and test prices. In writing his book, Brill wanted to find out how hospitals jack up those prices. He found the answer in the Retchie family of Lancaster, Ohio. Their experience, both before and after Obamacare kicked in, shows all the things Brill says the law should have dealt with,

like highly inflated hospital charges, but didn't. I just want to get healthy, and that's what I told them. Their story begins in 2012 when Sean Retchie, then 42, father of two, was diagnosed with cancer, stage 4 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I have two young children. I want to see them get married. I want to see my grandchildren. Too early.

Stephanie was determined to get him to MD Anderson in Houston, one of the premier non-profit cancer centers in the country. But because their health insurance policy was so limited, they had to pay up front. First, $48,900 for the evaluation, then more for the actual treatment. They told me that we would have to give them another $35,000 to get them to get chemo. Did you have the money? I didn't. My mother did. Your mother had to give you the money?

Yes. I just kept thinking in the back of my mind, there's a mistake, and we'll work it out. I just have to get him there, and I have to get him better. That was my main concern. When Sean was sick, they felt vulnerable and scared. Like most people in that kind of crisis, they never once asked what any specific item or test cost. When they got the bill, they gave it to Stephen Brill,

who found charges he couldn't believe. The first thing I saw in their bill was a generic Tylenol for $1.50. Now that's not... One pill? One pill. You can buy 100 generic Tylenols for the same $1.50. So that's a 1,000% markup. But who cares?

It's just $1.50. As you start going down the bill, they had something like $15,000 worth of blood tests that Medicare would have paid a few hundred dollars for. The charges add up over the single-spaced 18 pages of the bill. Independent hospital economists say these are all greatly inflated over their actual costs, like a PET scan for $5,453, a 400% markup, three CT scans for $9,685, an 1100% markup. The charge for his room was $10,746 for six days. That comes to $1,791 a day. You and I need to get into this business. It's a really good, they call it non-profit, but it's a good business. The single largest charge was for his cancer drug, Rituxan. For one dose, the hospital billed him $13,702. The hospital paid $3,500 for that drug.

Okay? How many times? That's a 400% markup. This is a non-profit hospital. What does non-profit mean? It means they don't pay taxes. That's the first thing. They don't pay any taxes. They've created in health care an alternate universe economy where everybody except the doctors and the nurses makes a ton of money.

And nobody is holding them accountable. And Obamacare does zero to change any of that. MD Anderson declined to appear on camera, but sent us a letter defending the prices it charges patients, saying the costs reflect in part using and maintaining expensive, state-of-the-art medical equipment and research to develop new and better treatments. But Brill says hospitals get some federal aid for new technology and says in general, large non-profit hospitals are thriving businesses. He suggested we go to Pittsburgh. Once a steel city, today Pittsburgh's biggest business is a hospital complex, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. Its CEO, Jeffrey Romoff, showed us the view from his office. Here we are in the U.S. Steel Building.

Steel defined Pittsburgh, and now the hospitals define Pittsburgh in the sense that you employ more people. We employ 62,000. We are not only the largest employer in western Pennsylvania, we're the largest employer in all of Pennsylvania. It's a $12 billion a year global health conglomerate. By one estimate, the nation's top-grossing non-profit hospital. So what's your salary?

My salary is $6 million. One of the arguments against these nonprofits that are so big and make all this money is that so much of it's going to executive pay. It makes $6 million, and you have seven executives here who make more than $2 million, and you have another 23 who make more than a million. So let's add it all up. What do you have, $ hundred million dollars on 12 billion. I can't off the top of my head calculate what percentage that is but it is likely less than 1%. But it's a non-profit hospital paying exorbitant executive pay. Well that's your judgment of it. I think my board determines what the appropriate compensation is for me and for all the other executives.

He does run a top-ranked medical research center with a reputation for excellence. And he says he's been trying to rein in hospital costs. And he thinks he's come up with a solution. We have our own insurance company. You have your own insurance company? Yes. As part of the company? Yes. As part of the company? Yes. He says the beauty of it is there's no incentive for his hospital to overcharge his insurance company.

In other words, there's nothing to gain in inflating a patient's bill. We are the same family. It's the same kitty. And our premiums now are among the lowest in the country. His insurance company's policies can be used at his hospitals as well as selected rival hospitals in the state. He thinks this idea of hospitals with their own insurance companies could be a model for the nation and the best way to reduce inflated costs. Okay, but you admit that you were part of the problem. Not only were we part of the problem, we were one of the most successful parts of the problem. So you admit that you were part of the problem. Not only were we part of the problem, we were one of the most successful parts of the problem. So you admit that you participated in a system that willy-nilly jacked prices way up.

Did I say anything about willy-nilly? I'm saying willy-nilly. I'm saying willy-nilly. No, I'm not saying willy-nilly. What do you have to say about the hospitals who are still doing that? It is untenable and unsustainable. To be fair, hospitals do save lives. As Brill says, they do God's work. In Sean Retchie's case, MD Anderson's treatment plan, the chemo, worked. I'm 100% cancer clean and feel great. Even though he's $84,000 in the hole.

Today, despite Sean's pre-existing condition, the Retchies have good health insurance because in 2013 they signed up for Obamacare. So now they have total coverage 100% subsidized by taxpayers. So Obamacare has passed. MD Anderson goes to give someone Rituxan. Are they still charging $13,700? Well, they probably are if you don't have insurance. If you do have insurance through Obamacare or otherwise, prices would in most cases be negotiated down. What about the Retchies' $84,000 bill at MD Anderson in Houston? It would most likely not be negotiated down because they signed up for Medicaid under Obamacare in Ohio, which is not recognized in Texas. In their letter, MD Anderson wrote,

Thanks to the Affordable Care Act, experiences like the Retchies should become less common. However, the problem still exists. So even while some prices are being negotiated down, not all prices are. And Brill says that overall costs are still going up because there are now millions more people getting covered and treated. You know, President Obama says over and over that costs are coming down, or he implies they're coming down because of the Affordable Care Act. Who knows? Someday, maybe it'll be true. Health care costs have slowed down, though Brill says not because of Obamacare.

And besides, they're still rising at a rate double the pace of inflation. The much touted, you know, savings the president keeps talking about, it still increases. So instead of going like that, it's going like that. You know, if there's a stat, if there's a piece of data that comes out that says that the galloping increase in the cost of some aspect of health care has started galloping a little less. It's touted as the cost is going down. I mean, it's just ridiculous. Brill says he has come to appreciate the good that the Affordable Care Act has done in that it's a safety net for so many people like the Retchies. But he wants the public to know that what was to be at its heart driving down down the cost of health care, was neglected. And it's the taxpayers who are left holding the bag.

Obamacare is a government takeover of health care. That's what the Republicans say. Obamacare is the opposite of a government takeover of health care. Obamacare is the taxpayers intervening to pay the private sector for their already inflated prices that they charge for health care. Obamacare is the taxpayers intervening to pay the private sector for their already inflated prices that they charge for health care. Is there any way now to go back and add cost containment? It was impossible then. It's more impossible now. When this becomes a fiscal crisis, that may be... You have to wait for it to be a crisis? Yeah, that's the way we do a lot of governing in this country. We wait for something to be a crisis. When something becomes a crisis

that enough of us care about, then the lobbyists matter a lot less because we care a lot more. 60 Minutes, coming up after this short break. 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling. There are few people in the world who have the skill or the will to attempt to climb one of the world's seven summits, the tallest mountain on each continent. Tonight, you'll meet young men who've done it with no legs. Their bodies and their lives were shattered in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but on the big mountains, they find a way

to reclaim what they lost on the battlefield, going beyond the limits of their injuries to achieve what seems impossible. At their side is a former Hells Angels biker named Tim Medveds. He never served in the military but on his journey to the top of Mount Everest he says he found a way to help catastrophically wounded war veterans. We joined him and a young Marine as they climbed up the tallest peak in Australia and saw for ourselves how a mountain can change someone's life. It was below freezing at 6,500 feet above sea level.

Private First Class Isaac Blunt had hit the deep snow on Mount Kosciuszko. The most brutal part of his climb was just beginning. And without knees, every stiff, awkward step he took was a battle. All right, man, get it on. His trainer, mentor, and self-appointed drill sergeant, Tim Medvedz, was pushing him every step of the way. You gotta fall, just fall straight back on behind you. By that afternoon, a severe

storm had enveloped them in blinding snow and wind. Isaac was only halfway to the summit, and he could barely move. I need everything you got, otherwise we're done. Their journey to this mountain started two months earlier, in the hills outside San Diego. We met Isaac as he was starting to train with Tim, who was preparing him for long days in his new climbing prosthetic legs. What appeals to you about the thought of trying to climb a mountain? I knew that it was going to be a challenge and I wouldn't have to, like I'd have to get out of my chair, have to

start doing everything that I've been wanting to do. How would you describe the last two years for you? Hell. Isaac was 20 years old when he was sent into the center of the fight against the Taliban in Afghanistan. A small-town boy from Wisconsin, he grew up in a military family, and all he ever wanted was to be a Marine. On patrol in Helmand Province in 2011, just three months into his deployment, Isaac stepped on an IED, which blew away most of his lower body. They told me that I had lost both my legs. They told me that unless I was able to move my fingers, they were going to take my arm

because I really messed up my bicep and my forearm. Two weeks later, the doctors had to remove his eye. After you'd already lost your legs and nearly your arm, was that hard? I think the hardest part was finding out that my testicles were gone. Luckily, I have a daughter, though, and she's a miracle. Isaac battled depression for the next two years and had all but given up on his recovery when he learned about Tim Medved's and his work with other veterans who'd survived catastrophic injuries.

Why did you choose Isaac? A lot of these guys, you get used to the wheelchair because it's easy. You know, putting legs on, it's not easy. It's painful. It's work. And that's where Isaac is now? And that's where Isaac is now, and that's where I come in. Let's go.

Bam! Tim chose the lowest of the seven summits for Isaac because of the severity of his injuries. But he also chose winter, the toughest time of year. Rehabilitation comes from the challenge, he says, not from making it easy. I have to give him a mountain that's like a Mount Everest to him. And with all those injuries he has, and I'm going to take him up the hardest route. You factor all those things in there, I mean, there's a good possibility he might not make it. The first thing Isaac encountered at the base of the mountain was this dense underbrush covered in snow

that tangled and twisted around his artificial legs. There was no trail, and with his prosthetics digging into his stumps, he painfully fought his way up the mountain. With each step, Isaac moved only a few inches, and after seven hours of climbing on that first day, he had barely made it a mile. I'm not very good at blazing a trail. As darkness fell, Tim stayed at his side. It's all about right now getting to camp. What do I want you to focus on?

Like there was a few points that I swear to God I thought my bone broke through my skin. What did you say? I just wanted to tell Tim like, dude, I can't do this. Like I'm in way too much pain. I can't do this. Like, I'm in way too much pain. I can't do this. At some point, it becomes more mental than physical. And that's the part where it comes down to this and this. Tim Medveds would never tell you he knows what it's like to be wounded on the battlefield. But what helps him relate to injured veterans like Isaac is his own experience of struggling to overcome life-threatening injuries from a motorcycle crash 13 years ago. Half of my back is a net cage around it. It's been bolted with six bolts, and it's been fused.

I have two metal plates in my head and ten screws. I have two metal plates and ten screws in my right hand. You're a hell's angel. You're a biker. You're a tough guy. What's it like to suddenly find yourself in this state, completely vulnerable and broken? I would just, you know, cover the pain with, you know, 15, 20 Vicodins and whiskey. At the bottom of a downward, destructive spiral,

Tim picked up John Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air, about a hiking tragedy on Mount Everest in which eight people died. He says climbing Everest struck him as the ultimate way to prove to his doctors and himself that he was still capable of doing something that difficult. So with no mountain climbing experience and a body patched together with metal, he set his sights on conquering the world's highest peak. This was going to be my rehabilitation. You got to understand something like for a guy like me to walk into these rehab places, these people doing these little, you know, squeezing the ball

thing. And I turned around, walked out and never even did any physical therapy. And for me, that was just, that wasn't enough. That was like dying. Yeah, it was like dying. Yeah, it was. And I felt like I was dying inside. So I needed a, I needed a punch in the mouth, you know, and Mount Everest was that punch in the mouth. Mount Everest was that punch in the mouth. Six years later, on his second attempt, Tim summited the mountain as part of the Discovery Channel series Everest Beyond the Limit. He says the experience got him off his pain pills and back on his feet. He became convinced it could do the same for injured war veterans.

So he created what he calls the Heroes Project, a one-man organization that takes amputees where most able-bodied people wouldn't dare venture. From the frozen tundra of Antarctica to the top of Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America. Big mountains like that, they, you know, forget that they even lost their legs. Because if they can do that, they can do anything.

If they can do that, they can do anything. These three young men were all wounded fighting the same enemy in Afghanistan as Isaac, and also recovered here at the Naval Medical Center, San Diego, where Isaac was preparing for his climb. Each one of them followed Tim Medveds to climb one of the seven summits. He took Marine Corporal Keontae Story to the coldest place on earth, Antarctica, where he struggled for two weeks to get to the top of Mount Vinson. You deserve it. Going through my injury, I lost myself. I didn't have a clue who I was.

I got to that point where I was actually starting to hit that breaking point of, you know, you hit that suicidal plateau. Getting to the top of that mountain, I felt like I found who I actually was, who I am, and what I can do. And Staff Sergeant Mark Zambon traveled with Tim to Africa, where he conquered the continent's highest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. At that moment, it was like, you know, that answered it for me, you know, that this injury, like, does not define my life. I define it. And life is still able to be powerfully lived even in this condition.

You've got to dig deep, man. And Corporal Brad Ivanchan went with Tim to South America, where he climbed 23,000 feet to the summit of Mount Aconcagua, less than a year after losing both his legs. It's something that you can carry with you the rest of your life, and it also helps you put a closure on a period in your life, too. I don't know where I would be today if I had not done it. It's definitely improved my life significantly

and my outlook on life significantly. They all said it was the most physically demanding thing they'd ever done in their lives. It's miserable. I mean, high altitude mountaineering, it's just pure suffering. Period. You're freezing, you're starving, your body's withering away, you're aching. It's just horrible.

Sounds like hell. So why do people do it? For that moment, that five minutes on the summit. That accomplishment. What if something happens to one of them? What if they do die on one of your climbs with you? Is that a conversation you have with them? Of course. Yeah, from day one. I mean, I'm taking it to a mountain that people die on. It might happen. It might happen. And that's part of the recovery. And that's part of the rehabilitation.

In what way? It's like deploying to Iraq, deploying to Afghanistan. It's like going on a patrol every day. They don't know if they're coming back. You know, and that's a powerful, powerful life changing experience. Back on Mount Kosciuszko, where the storm had grown stronger and more threatening, Isaac's mission had now become extremely dangerous. After three days, he was far from the summit. If you don't make it to that south today, we go down. Expedition's done, finished. All right. All right. So you've got to move quick.

The storm turned into a whiteout with 60-mile-an-hour winds and zero visibility. Once that storm hit, the only way I could actually follow the trail is if I had somebody literally two feet in front of me so I could see their snowshoes. A few times, like, I'd sink in or something, and the guy in front of me would get a little bit, like, further ahead. I'd look up. I couldn't even see him. Unable to move, the team hunkered down to wait it out. They were stranded for two long days. Just as they were reaching their limit, the skies cleared,

leaving behind a hard, icy surface on the mountain. I was able to move so much faster because all the snow was compact. I wasn't sinking. I wasn't having troubles with my side sticks. I could stay on top of the snow. Isaac covered four miles in this one day, more ground than he had the entire expedition. And the summit was now finally within his reach. But he still faced the most challenging part, the final 400 feet of vertical elevation to the top.

No pain? No pain. The five days Isaac Blunt had endured on Mount Kosciuszko were the first he'd spent without his wheelchair since losing his legs two years before. Now he was standing on top of one of the seven summits of the world. I'm Scott Pelley. The AFC Championship game is on right here next Sunday night, so we'll be back in two weeks with another edition of 60 Minutes.