Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Dr. Death gives pregnant mom thousands of pain pills as people drop dead

Episode Date: January 6, 2020

Drug companies are facing thousands of lawsuits over their alleged roles in the nation's opioid crisis. According to government data, opioid overdoses have claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people since 1999.Joining Nancy Grace to discuss: Dr. William Morrone: Medical Examiner in Bay County Michigan, Chief Medical Officer for Recovery Pathways; created NEW portable treatment center   Dr. Judith Joseph: Psychiatrist, Principal Investigator at Manhattan Behavioral Medicine   Mark Tate: Represents Chatham County, South Carolina; suing opioid manufacturers   Jeff Cortese: Former Special Agent FBI, former acting Chief of the FBI's Public Corruption Unit, Barry Meier: Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The New York Times, author of "Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the origin of America's Opioid Epidemic" Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Addiction to opioids. It is an epidemic claiming more and more lives across our country. Can you imagine babies, infants being born addicted to fentanyl, addicted to heroin, addicted to painkillers, straight out of the womb. Their lives are already broken because of this epidemic. And they are just one tiny, tiny example of what is happening now. But how do we stop it? Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

Juanita told us the children were born addicted to drugs. I've lived in Beckley since I was born. I like Beckley. It's a pretty town. Yeah, it has a lot worse than New York. Really? In other states. How do you know that? News. The Harveys live in Beckley, West Virginia, hard hit by the opioid epidemic. West Virginia has had more opioid-related deaths than any other state, followed by neighboring Ohio.

The Harveys are now part of a class- lawsuit against opioid distributors, manufacturers and retail pharmacies, accusing them of aggressively marketing, distributing and overprescribing the drugs. Stephen New is the Harvey family attorney. He's closely watching the federal case involving Summit and Cuyahoga counties in Ohio. In the courtroom, everyone's equal. A family like the Harvey family or a county like Cuyahoga County stands on equal footing with multinational billion-dollar corporations. Children born addicted to drugs. Juanita Harvey and her family are just one of so many people joining in a class action lawsuit over addiction to opioids. It is an epidemic claiming more and more lives across our country. The Harveys are just one example. I'm Nancy Grace.

This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. I had no idea when I signed on to be a prosecutor in inner city Atlanta, and every arraignment calendar, every week, 150, 200 new felony indictments in my courtroom alone, and about 60% of those were drug related, if not more. There will be one guilty plea after the next, after the next, after the next. Little did I understand then that this would result in an epidemic. With me, an all-star panel, Dr. William Maroney, Chief Medical Examiner, Bay County, Michigan. Also, the author of American Narcan on Amazon created a new portable treatment center to fight opioid addiction. Dr. Judith Joseph, psychiatrist, principal investigator at Manhattan Behavioral Medicine. Mark Tate, lawyer representing the Chatham County, South Carolina family suing opioid manufacturers and Barry Mayer, Pulitzer Prize winning former reporter for the New York Times, author of Painkiller, An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's

Opioid Epidemic. You can find that at BarryMayerBooks.com. That's spelled M-E-I-E-R. Welcome everybody. Dr. William Maroney, infants being born addicted to opioids first. Break it down, Maroney. Okay. Break it down. Okay. We're not doctors like you and Dr. Judith Joseph. All right. What is an opioid? Street names. What is it? What's happening is if it's heroin or if it's heroin with fentanyl or if it's pain pills, when the babies are born, the supply stops because the mother's blood is discontinued at birth and the baby begins withdrawal, which is a lot of fluid secreting, and they become stuffy, and they have difficulty breathing, and they're irritable, and there's pain, and then they have loose stool, loose diarrhea, and they have difficulty feeding. So you have a crisis immediately that the babies that ordinarily hug and cuddle and suckle at the mother's breast

have difficulty feeding because of being in withdrawal and immediately they're losing fluids and they're at risk of dehydrating dr maroney dr maroney i remember um when i volunteered for the nine years at the battered Women's Center at night, part of that, many of our volunteers would go rock, as we call them, crack babies at nurseries, at hospitals across the city of Atlanta. And the babies, after I had the twins, John, David, and Lucy, I really had something to compare it to. They were so agitated.

Little tiny babies, they were all underweight and they were agitated. Nothing could calm them down. Sometimes we could get them calmed down rocking them. But those were crack babies. Is that what this is like when you're on, when a baby is born addicted to opioids? In general, the withdrawal symptom is similar for all withdrawal from all drugs. It's a very similar condition, syndrome. No matter what it is, withdrawal is withdrawal. It's inconsolability, irritability, difficulty feeding. For a tiny baby, and Dr. Maroney, you have children, as do I. It's hard enough to calm down a fussy baby in the middle of the night, a normal baby, much less a baby addicted to opioids.

Barry Meyer, Pulitzer Prize-winning former reporter for The New York Times, author of Painkiller, An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic. Barry, what led you, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, to get so enmeshed in the opioid epidemic? Well, Nancy, back in 2000, just 2000, 2001 timeframe, I was a reporter at the Times, and an editor came to me and said, you know, I've gotten a tip. There's this hot new drug on the street. It's called OxyContin, and there are reps going around claiming to druggists that the drug can't be abused. It's unlike any other opioid painkiller that's been ever produced. It's safe.

People can use it. People can use it as high as, you know, sky-high dosages without any health problems. But we're seeing it all out on the street. You know, it's being sold like hotcakes. So I began to investigate this. And what I started to uncover and documented subsequently in Painkiller was a criminal marketing campaign by the drugs manufacturer OxyContin to lie to doctors, to lie to pharmacists, to lie to regulators, patients, everyone about the addictive potential of what became the most widely abused drug in American history, OxyContin. You know, I remember a woman, gorgeous, came into court. I was a new prosecutor.

I was just doing my best. She had been a really successful stockbroker, and she came in in chains. I'm like, oh, dear Lord, she must have shot her husband. That was my first thought. She came up and I pulled her file for the plea. It was a plea deal. And I looked at it. It was a plea deal reached by the prosecutor who was running that court. I was just a novice. And I was standing up to practice reading somebody their rights and then giving a fact recitation to the judge to accept the plea. I had to stop in the middle of reading the police report out loud. This gorgeous woman, stockbroker, highly successful, family of three children

married, lost her license, lost her children, lost her home, lost her marriage, lost her job, everything because of an opioid addiction. Now that was when I was still prosecuting in the mid-90s and I had no idea what was to come. As a matter of fact, take a listen to this from Fox 8 Cleveland reporter Matt Wright. I sought out what I knew would make me not sick anymore, which was heroin, which ultimately led into fentanyl, which brought me to my knees faster than ever before. Nathan Berchak says he has struggled with opioid addiction for years. Stole my youth, blew lots of opportunities, ruined lots of relationships. After several relapses, he's now living in a dorm here at the Cleveland Treatment Center, Stella Maris. Stella Maris saved my life. But the non-profit's director of nursing,

Carol Negus, says need far exceeds space and resources. If they don't get into detox, there's a good chance that they're gonna die waiting to get into detox. Intake currently located in this trailer. Right now there are more than 120 people on the daily detox waitlist. It can take weeks to get a bed. I think the reason that the waitlist has gone up so much definitely has to do with this opiate epidemic. There is no question about it. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. In 2009, more than 2,900 people died in Florida of drug overdoses, mostly from prescribed opioid pills. In one 16-month period, DEA records show Barry Schultz dispensed 800,000 opioid pills from his office pharmacy.

People have become addicted to these drugs. People have died because of these drugs. People in your practice died from overdoses of opioids. A person. One is enough. That monster ends in my son's life. Carol Tain's son, David, went to Dr. Schultz for pain management after a car accident. Schultz prescribed an assortment of pain pills, even after David became addicted. In 2010, David died of an overdose of opioids prescribed by Dr. Schultz.

So should Dr. Schultz have prescribed these pain pills to him? No. He didn't even examine him. He hadn't seen him in four and a half years. He just wrote out these scripts. As far as I'm concerned, he's a murderer and not a doctor. He murdered my son. He didn't need a gun. He used his pen to murder my son. Oh, my stars. You know, this morning when I was getting the twins ready to go to school,

Lucy goes and barricades herself in the bathroom to put on beauty treatments. I can't get her out, but John David unwittingly walked out early, and I forced him to practice the waltz to Rainbow Connection by Kermit the Frog. You're probably thinking, what does that have to do with what we just heard? This mom's son is dead? It's all over for her? I mean, that's one of the reasons I get up in the morning to see John David and Lucy and to think that this son is gone from her life now

and she says the doctor is a murderer by a pen, not a gun or a knife, but a pen. You are hearing our friend Bill Whitaker at 60 Minutes, the opioid epidemic taking over our country like a tsunami. I had no idea when I would take a plea after a plea, after a trial, after a trial. It was just the tip of the iceberg. Joining me, Mark Tate, attorney representing chatham county south carolina suing the opioid manufacturers mark renowned attorney thank you for being with us mark many people would argue well dopers take opioids of their own volition it's not the manufacturer's fault i remember mark the first time i saw actually saw somebody in real life

shooting up, I was running in city of Atlanta. I had just gotten out of court. I was running and I ran past a big football stadium and there was a car parked out and I glanced to the side and there was a guy in there with a syringe shooting up. And it was, it just felt, it's like, you know, when you see a snake, there's just something that you recoil, something inside, unless you're a snake lover, Mark. I just recoiled, and then I took off running. Tell me, what are you trying to do, Mark?

What's happening? Well, first of all, you know, you tell these kinds of stories, and really, these drugs, the opiates, that doesn't care about race. It doesn't care about wealth. It doesn't care about poverty. It treats all comers exactly the same, and the reason that I got involved in wanting to do something through the power of our civil justice system, because I have been around and involved in seeing so many people die his dorm room, and I was the one who had to go, you know, clean it up and take care of the final affairs. And so I started noticing this horrible problem, and I have a lot of friends who are in the medical profession as well, who were describing to me that they would get visits from drug reps. Pharmaceutical salespeople would come to their offices and say, listen,

OxyContin is not addictive. OxyContin is the gold standard. If you are not treating pain, which is the fifth vital sign, as they were saying, then you're committing malpractice. The pharmaceutical lobbyists and reps went to the organization that certifies hospitals and convinced them that if they're notifies hospitals, pardon me, and convinced them that if they're not using opiates there, that they're committing malpractice. And all you have to do is- Well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Mark Tate, Mark Tate, you're telling me a sales rep, okay? Yes. You're telling me that a sales rep can convince a medical doctor what to do, Mark? Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely, they do. Medical doctors have a few moments to listen to these riffs, and they listen to them. And they show up with gifts for the staff, and they show up with gifts for the doctor, and they romance the doctors. Oh, it works. And they come with studies that are published studies that the manufacturers and distributors created.

However, they were false. And all of those doctors and other professionals who took part in those studies have now recanted and said, no, we were not telling the truth. We were bought and paid for. And we never believed that opiates were not addictive. We never believed that only 1% got addicted. We never believed that there was such a thing. Wait, now who is saying they didn't believe it? The sales reps or the doctors? No, the authors of the studies that the sales reps reported to be distributing have all recanted all of that.

And, you know, they also created this horrible fiction that if you see someone as a medical professional who's exhibiting signs of addiction, that's not addiction. That's pseudo addiction. And pseudo addiction has a cure. Well, I'm sorry. You know, I'm just an old prosecutor. What do you mean by pseudo addiction? Because if it looks like addiction and it talks like addiction and it walks like addiction, it's addiction. Well, this is part of the gigantic fraud that was perpetrated and forced

us into this position. Pseudo addiction, then it wasn't addiction, fake addiction. The cure for pseudo addiction is increasing the dose of the opiates. So this is what happened. This is what happened in the medical community. This is what happened in the pharmaceutical community. They're now being held accountable. Dang. And I filed the first lawsuit in the state of Georgia on behalf of Fulton County. I now represent close to 70 different municipalities and counties. They are all filed in federal court. We have a magnificently interested federal judge, Dan Polster, who's got the cases consolidated in Cleveland. We have now switched gears, having started to gain progress on behalf of municipalities.

Okay, now wait, wait, wait. Now you're talking like a lawyer, okay? And I used to love nothing more than having a lawyer on the elevator with a jury pool. And the lawyers, of course, start showing off and throwing around Latin phrases that nobody understands. This is what I know. Congress called five reps, sales reps to testify. Of the five, only one said that the pharmaceutical companies contribute to the crisis. But this is what I know. I know what Ms. Juanita was just saying about her son. Right now, defendants in a landmark case against opioid manufacturers and distributors

negotiating a last-minute settlement. People all over the country devastated by opioids. You've got a child. You've got a son. You've got a daughter. You better listen crime stories with nancy grace with Nancy Grace.

Tonight, the weeks of speculation are now over. The Midwest Medical Examiner's Office concludes Prince died of an accidental drug overdose, self-administered fentanyl. Fentanyl, an opioid painkiller prescribed millions of times each year, is also available on the black market. And tonight, a new mystery. Where did Prince get that drug? He needed for a medical at P.J. Park, 7801 Audubon Road. Prison down, not breathing. A week before he died, ambulances meeting Prince's plane after that emergency landing.

CFR will be waiting. They want you to go to the West Center North Ramp the night before his death, Prince's reps called an expert in pain medication addiction. His death highlighting the problem of prescription opioid abuse across the country, which has claimed 2000 plus more lives since that day.

The DEA telling ABC News it's related to the overall opioid epidemic in America. There is not a region in this country today that is not under siege from heroin or fentanyl or prescription drugs. David, while the medical examiner has released the cause of death, the sheriff's office is still investigating. That was our friend Eva Pilgrim at ABC and with the DEA, Jack Riley with me, Dr. William Maroney, Dr. Judith Joseph and Mark Tate. Dr. Maroney, do you recall when Prince died and you and I were on the phone talking immediately? Remember? Yeah, I'll never forget that because everybody

didn't understand how much opioids were prevalent and he died of diversion of illegal opioids. He wasn't prescribed, but he was seeing a doctor and getting other opioids, but it wasn't enough. And that's what happens to everybody. It's never enough. Your brain is hijacked. Just like that guy injecting in the football stadium. If you don't use, you get sick. You vomit, your body aches, you have panic attacks, and you can't breathe. What happened to Prince was a crime, and it affected everybody. We still really don't know where his fentanyl came from, but we knew he was seeing somebody and being treated for pain and it got out of control and he couldn't get enough. And that's where we are in America. Nobody can get enough. It's going

to get worse before it gets better. Dr. Maroney, let me plug your book, American Narcan on Amazon. Explain Narcan. What do you mean by that? Narcan is the brand name for naloxone. And naloxone is an opioid molecule that does not activate or get you high. It blocks the brain where the opioids go. So when you overdose, you get this medicine injected into you, blown up your nose as a mist, injected into your muscles, it into your bloodstream, and it goes to the brain. And because it's shaped like opioids, it fits in the same place.

It kicks out the Oxycontin. It kicks out the fentanyl. It kicks out the heroin. And then you begin breathing again. That's the first step to recovery. It's the first medicine. It's the beginning of rehabilitation. It's the beginning of detox. Without it, you're dead. It should be in every home in America. Not just my book, but the Narcan should be in every home in America,

just like an EpiPen for people with peanut allergies. Our children are at the greatest risk they've been in a hundred years. You know what? Let me get on what you're saying right there, Dr. Judith Joseph, my friend and colleague, psychiatrist, principal investigator at Manhattan Behavioral Medicine. Dr. Judith Joseph, Maroney has just told us that children are at risk. Now, we've already talked about infants, newborns already addicted to opioids who have a very high risk of death, a high mortality rate. Dr. Judith Joseph, when do your children first endanger getting addicted to or trying drugs?

That's a great question, Nancy, because one of my first positions after training in child and adolescent psychiatry at NYU was out in Staten Island. And Staten Island is known as one of the boroughs that has a lot of hardworking, working class cops, firemen,

and people who moved out there because they wanted a better life for their kids. They wanted to stay out of the city. And this is one of the areas of New York that is being hit the hardest. And treating kids out there, from what they were telling me, they were getting these medications from their parents, not directly, but they were taking them from the prescription cabinet, because people did not realize that a medicine that is given to you by your doctor properly could be addictive. And I think that this is why the epidemic is just so hard to catch up with because these drugs weren't considered to be street drugs. You typically think

of marijuana, you think of cocaine, but with pills, you don't see them as being harmful or evil or as if you're doing anything wrong. And that's why I think that this epidemic has become so out of control. And I've had stories of teens telling me that, you know, they would feel anxious in school because, you know what, school's hard. And they remember just taking like one of these pills at their desk, passing it to a friend. And before you know it, you had a whole community that used these pills to self-medicate. And they were hooked.

Oh, my star, Dr. Judith Joseph, you are scaring me so much because, you know, Mark Tate with me, representing Chatham County Suing Opioid Manufacturers. I watch what they do. I look at their phones. I know what veggies they have. I know what underwear they're wearing right now because I set it out for them last night, but I can't control what's happening at school. Mark Tate, you're on the forefront along with Dr. William Maroney fighting the opioid crisis, and right now you're taking on the actual manufacturer. How's that going to help me and my twins in their classroom? Well, it's

going to help consumers quit having false information shoved down their throats by these manufacturers. And I'd like to add, Nancy, that there is in two states in our country a beautiful legislative tool called the Drug Dealer Liability Act. And in Georgia and in Michigan, unlike every other state, you do not have to have a prior conviction of the drug dealer, and the drug dealer does not have to be selling street drugs or illegal drugs. And so in Georgia, we have undertaken representing the spouses and the children of people who have become addicted to prescription drugs by pill mill doctors supplied by distributors who know they're distributing more drugs that are therapeutically necessary, and against the manufacturers who created this entire demand for these drugs. Hey, Mark Tate, Mark Tate, more drugs than is therapeutically necessary. What I think you are saying in a very eloquent fashion that would be wonderful in front of an appellate court, what you're saying is doctors are prescribing people painkillers to death. It's not just that. It's not just that. Yes, they are. But in addition

to that, the suppliers of those drugs know that they're giving out more drugs than are necessary or could even be conceivably used properly. And the manufacturers created the fraudulent environment telling people that these drugs are safe. That's what's going on. It's still going on today. And there are tools that we have that represent the families and loved ones of the individual abuser and hold those people accountable. And we're doing it. Listen to this.

Our friend Christina Thompson, ABC. The judge called Smithers' patients victims in court. DEA Special Agent Christopher Dezik and U.S. Attorney Randy Rams tell us there were about 300 people from at least four states, some as far as Ohio, who regularly saw Dr. Smithers. Some patients were prescribed opioids without even being seen. These were drug seekers, addicts, and certainly, as the judge labeled them, victims, which they are. He was prescribing very potent opioids. Dr. Smithers prescribed more than 500,000 pills. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace.

I came to represent my daughter. She was a patient of Dr. Smithers. Ramona Hartshorn's daughter, Heather, is the only confirmed overdose death caused by Dr. Smithers' overprescription of opioids. I hate that she's gone. But I feel like her death was instrumental into bringing him to justice, closing down a pill mill, and sending out a message to others. Welcome back, I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. You're hearing ABC 13 News reporter Christina Thompson and the mother of a young girl that overdosed on opioids.

Dr. William Maroney, I started off asking you, guys, Dr. Maroney, Chief Medical Examiner, Bay County, Michigan, at Recovery Pathways and has now created a new portable treatment center. It's like a giant state-of-the-art RV to treat the opioid crisis. Now that is dedication. Dr. Judith Joseph with me, psychiatrist, principal investigator,

Manhattan Behavioral Medicine, and Mark Tate, renowned attorney, actually taking on opioid manufacturers. Dr. Maroney, once you try an opioid, let's just say OxyContin, how does it get a hold of you? That's what I try to tell the twins without nagging at them or harping on it. Because if you argue too much, then they'll run out and do it. But explain how once you try it, just once or twice, you're hooked and you can't stop. It's like the devil's gotten into you.

The most important thing is it takes over your brain. You're hijacked. Physically, you get nauseous. You have panic attacks. You can't breathe. Your body aches, and you know that if you take an opioid, whether it's heroin or OxyContin, it goes away. And that's how you're hijacked. It's withdrawal. It's dependence. And we need more people to treat and less people to throw pain meds out on the street like the ice cream truck.

People get greedy. They make too much money. This gets easy. The states are out of control and everything comes down to there's not enough people to treat. We've created this problem with 20 years of bad prescribing. Now we need treatment. Okay, wait a minute, wait a minute. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Mark Tate, Dr. Maroney, Judah Joseph, I can't even call out all these names. All of these are opioids. Vicodin, Tylenol number three and four,

Tazistra, Tussionex, Tussicaps, Targenic, Roxaset, Rosera, Percodan, Percocet, Palliodone, Oxaset, Oxycontin, Opana, Norco, I mean, Lorset, Lortab, Liquaset, Hydrocan, Hydromet, Hyset. There's so many. I can't even go. Vicodin, did I say that? Zodial. There's so many. I can't even tell you all of them.

And there's street names. Captain Cody, Cody, Schoolboy, Doors and Fours, Pancakes and Sorrel, Loads, Emma's and Mother, Miss Emma, Monkey, white stuff, Demi's, painkiller, Apache, China girl, dance fever. I don't even have time to say all the names on the street. So Mark Tate, your lawsuit, which is very brave. How many do you believe, how many people are affected by your lawsuit? A total population of addicts and their loved ones, you know, probably 8 million, 10 million people. And again, understand that what we're doing with the lawsuits we have on behalf of the governments, we are filing and representing them to get back the money, the taxpayer money that they had to spend to treat the addict. Law enforcement, drug courts, jails, coroner's offices, Narcan equipment and training.

These types of things have cost taxpayers money. So the real ridiculous tragedy, in addition to the number of people who are dying and addicted and all the cost of treating those people and all the loss that their loved ones have experienced, is the fact that we, taxpayers funding our governments are subsidizing these industries we are fixing it so the families and the stockholders of these companies and these companies and their executives are getting fat and rich and happy and so they are rolling in money mark tay rolling in money while people are dying. That's exactly right.

And we have subsidized that. You know, it's kind of like when Walmart teaches its minimum wage employees how to go get Medicaid. We're subsidizing their wealth. We are subsidizing these companies as taxpayers. And what we're doing is saying, listen, you are now going to bear the full cost of your product. No longer are you going to get to skip happy taking our money while you're killing us. We're going to make you pay all of the economic costs you put on us and pay for future treatment of these people. And hopefully we can change the mindset. And you mentioned this earlier where, you know, people are blaming the addict and it's just not proper because what happens is, as the doctor was saying, this drug changes your brain chemistry.

And so it is no longer a voluntary act. You are you are taking this drug to keep yourself from dying, because if you go cold turkey off of opiates after you become addicted, you can die. People have seizures. You've heard described the nausea and vomiting, but it makes it so you can't just stop. You got to taper off and switch to other things like the old methadone clinics. And so that's the way you survive. But it's not the volition of the addict. And so we got to hopefully, although it's going to be difficult, destigmatize addiction so that people do get treatment and do get better. And like I said, with the Drug Dealer Liability Act, we now have a tool in Georgia and Michigan to go after these

companies on behalf of the loved ones of the individual abuser. And we're doing it, and that's going to make a difference. I want you to listen to Dr. Barry Schultz and what he does when he's asked why he prescribed 1,000 opioid pills to a pregnant mom. DEA records show in 2010, one patient of Dr. Schultz was prescribed nearly 17,000 of the highest potency oxycodone pills in a seven-month period. Another got more than 23,000 over eight months. That's more than 100 pills a day. Business was so good, Schultz was making more than $6,000 a day prescribing and selling opioids to his patients. The numbers of pills that you were prescribing are astronomical. Who takes that many pills and puts them into their body?

What were you thinking? I was thinking that the patient was a genuine patient who had real chronic pain, whose complaints were legitimate, and that I was prescribing medication that they needed. Doctor, you prescribed 1,000 opioid pills to a pregnant woman. I don't think most doctors would prescribe a thousand aspirin to a pregnant woman. I would like to stop. Yep, when Whitaker turned up the heat, the doctor, if I could even call him that, left the interview.

Dr. William Maroney, take a listen to this. We got the report from the Midwest Medical Examiner's Office, which did the autopsy on Prince's body. They also did the toxicology of his bloodstream. And what they are saying is he died from an overdose of an opioid. We told you on TMZ.com for weeks that we were told Prince had an addiction to Percocet, which is also an opioid. The shocking thing about this report is that they are saying he died from a fentanyl overdose. Fentanyl, so that everyone knows, is a very, very strong opioid. It is very similar to Percocet, but much stronger.

You're hearing our friends over at TMZ. Dr. Maroney, if Prince's life couldn't be saved, what does that say for the rest of us, Maroney? It's going to get worse before it gets better. When you have all the money in the world and you end up taking fraudulent pharmaceuticals, he didn't know he was getting fentanyl and he was still addicted and he couldn't afford treatment and he didn't get it sooner. It's going to get worse before it gets better. Hug your children. Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, wait. Hug your children. That's all you've got for me? I mean, you got to give me more than hug

your children. I already do that. Narcan. Narcan in the house. Narcan. Buy the book. See that you need Narcan in your house. It's more important than soap and water right now. We love our kids in sports. We love our kids in sports. We love our kids in choir. We love our kids in class, but Narcan, because you never know where the fentanyl is going to come up. Right now, the fentanyl is in methamphetamine, the fentanyl is in marijuana, the fentanyl is in cocaine. So if the kids say, well, I'm going to try a drug, but I'm not going to get an opioid, they can still die. That's how bad it is out there. Let me give you this number 1-800-662-4357. 1-800-662-HELP. I hope that parents are listening. Nancy Grace, Crime Story, signing off. Goodbye, friend.

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