Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - The opioid epidemic in your town: What you need to know

Episode Date: June 16, 2017

Drug overdoses killed 60,000 Americans last year. Opioid addiction is now considered an epidemic. More Americans died from opioid overdoses in 2016 than were killed in the Vietnam war over 2 decades. It took nearly twice as many lives as traffic accidents. Nancy Grace talks with 2 experts in this podcast. Dr. William Morrone, author of the book “American Narcan,” talks about what triggered the epidemic and how it can be stopped. Robin Gelburd, president of the non-profit research group FAIR Health, reveals how the crisis is being dealt with differently around the US. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You're listening to an iHeart Podcast. The state of Ohio figures it's home to 200,000 opioid addicts. Pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds. There are far too many people overdosing, far too many people dying. There's hardly a family anywhere that hasn't been somehow affected by the opioid epidemic. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. We've doubled the number of overdoses. And they continue to climb every year. It's the greatest public health crisis of our generation. People need help right now. Right now, immediately. It's a disease and it needs to be approached as a

disease in terms of early diagnosis. Believe it or not, drug overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of 50. Let me let that over half of America. What the hay is happening? I'm Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories. Thank you for being with us. With me, a very special guest today, Dr. William Maroney joining me, renowned medical examiner. Dr. Maroney, I don't get it. I know this much. In all the years that I prosecuted Dr. Maroney, I remember seeing stockbrokers losing their trading license, lawyers, doctors, young kids out of so-called good families, just across the board, people losing their licenses, their homes, their savings accounts, their marriages, their families, estranged from their children under orders not to have contact with their families because of drug

dependency. It ruins everything. And once you're in it, you can't get out of it. I mean, for Pete's sake, I've been on Weight Watchers for what, two months now? And sometimes I do it and sometimes I don't. Don't tell Oprah. But if I'm like that, what about people that have a real addiction to drugs? And now it's claiming so many lives the leading cause of death amongst all americans 50 and under dr maroney make some sense out of this for me please all right this whole thing started around 1999 2000 there was a non-governmental organization. What do you mean this whole thing? This whole thing started for 10 years before that. And I saw people losing everything because of drugs. So what things started? What what happened was a casual affair between doctors and patients about prescribing opioids that became out of control

well will you please stop talking like a doctor because most of us are just you know the common normal joe doing our job getting our children to school what's an opioid are you talking about your heroin? Yes. Well, doctors do not prescribe heroin. But doctors prescribe opioid pain pills like hydrocodone and oxycodone. Now mommy understands. Okay. So the oxycodone and percocet, oxycontin norco and as people were liberally prescribed in an unorganized fashion because medical schools don't really teach this well and hospitals are paralyzed they don't want to deal with this either so the physicians were left with very weak guidelines and just too many prescriptions for opioids went into the public.

Will you please stop saying opioids? Nobody knows what you're saying. Narco. Okay. Percocet. Are you talking about painkillers? Yes. Okay, that I know what you're talking about.

Listen to this, Dr. Maroney. Let's put this into perspective. The body bags piling up. Drug deaths, opioid, as you insist on saying, opioid deaths now surpass the peak in car crash deaths. That was in 1972. That's the year that most people in America died in car crashes. AIDS death, AIDS and AIDS-related deaths in 1995, gun deaths in 1993. And listen to this, doctor. After 20 years of dope overdoses opioid overdoses

car crashes aids gun deaths vietnam for pete's sake i mean it what nobody notices this am i the only one that's noticing yesterday alan duke the du with us. Alan, remember that article we read? Tell me about it. And it was in my hometown. Yes, I've been wanting to ask you, what's going on in Macon, Georgia? They've had this incredible outbreak. Well, it also included Warner Robins, the Demon City. Go ahead.

Yes, it did. The latest numbers out as of yesterday, 27 overdoses with people hospitalized. And there have been, I think, six deaths is the latest death. We're talking in the last few days. It was a bad batch of dope. And all these people took it and OD'd. I want to get back to Dr. William Maroney. Okay, doctor, this is way out of control. How is it happening? You know, I just had knee surgery and they gave me, oh, I don't remember what it was, but it was some kind of an oxy, oxycodone, oxycontin related bottle of drugs. I was so afraid of it. First, I put it on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet. Then I remember that commercial where the children are getting the dope and they look in the mirror in

the bathroom mirror and it's the parents fault because they find these drugs that are left I immediately flushed the whole thing down the commode and threw away the bottle how many days did you get from your doctor how many days of pills I took it one night and then i i said what was that and um i looked at it when i saw what it was i got so freaked out by it i thought that's when i flushed it down the commode threw it away um what do i think it was it was an oxy something well here's what happened for the last 10 years for a good decade like robots the prescriptions that were written were automatically you get 30 days. Everybody thinks in 30 days. Oh, yeah, I think it was 30 days. I think it was 30 days. You do not need 30 days. I don't know who taught 30 days. Maybe you need four. Maybe you

need five. But when you stick the human body on painkillers derived from opium for 30 days it's dependent at the end of the month and that's happened a minute okay don't i know i'm just a lawyer okay i'm just a trial lawyer but when you just said opium and i'm, what is an opioid? It's a derivative of opium. Yes. And when I think of opium, I think of, you know, the Far East and drug houses. I think of the poppies in Wizard of Oz. I think of all the people that I tried to get into rehab and dealers dealing it. All those visions crashed together in my head.

Opium derivatives are opioids. And what are their clinical names? Oxycontin, Oxycodone, what else? Percocet, Norco, Tylenol-3, Vicodin, Dilaudid, all of those chemicals come from the mother morphine. And morphine is a natural substance from the poppy. Now, when you are saying these medical names or professional names, the street names would be what oxy roxy what else right and uh you know uh vitamin h for the high power norco and uh the big d's for dilaudid t3s for tylenol threes but what people got from their doctors kind of locked their bodies into seeing it every day, feeling it every day, needing it every day.

And then the doctors were afraid to say no. Because what, the people would say they're in pain? Oh, yeah. But wait a minute. The prescriptions, I know, are one aspect of the overdosing of America. But all these people, like the 27 people that were hospitalized, that's not from a doctor's prescription. What is that? Nancy, I can tell you in Macon, Georgia, one of the concerns is fake Percocet.

They've identified a fake version of the drug Percocet, which is being home manufactured, not by a big pharmaceutical company, but by some criminal someplace and sold on the streets. And it's killing people. What were you going to say, doctor? And here's what's happened. Insurance companies and restrictive laws have made it very difficult for doctors to continue to prescribe. And everybody always has a friend or there's somebody always near that says, well, I can get you some of these. And you skip the doctor, you skip the pharmacy,

and you start buying this stuff off the street. Like Alan was just saying, it's called Cottonons, kickers, Oxycontin, Oxy, OCs, Orange County, O's, Oxy's, killers, beans. There are hillbilly heroin. There are a million street names for this. Those are names for Oxycontin on the street. So tell me, Dr. Maroney, doctors over-prescribe, the patients come in and claim they're still in pain, and they may be, they may be imagining it, or they may just want the drugs. I mean, look at Jim Carrey. Right now, he is embroiled in a wrongful death suit filed by his mistress's his girlfriend's family

he was getting drugs under a different name and she got them either he gave them to her or she got them on her own and she died okay so there's also the fake name using to get prescriptions. In his case, so the whole world wouldn't know Jim Carrey was using a painkiller. Then, like Michael Jackson. Anna Nicole. Yeah, Anna Nicole. I could tell you all about that one. They would doctor shop and pharmacy shop. And they would get tons and tons of these pills from all different pharmacies.

And the pharmacies and the pharmacies didn't know about each other what about that dr maroney well the the pharmacies are supposed to be running reports the federal government has a system that they've encouraged all the states to have software that a pharmacy or a physician can look up a patient by name and birth date and see two years worth of the last of narcotics that they filled. These are called prescription drug monitoring systems. And every pharmacist in America can run a report and every physician can run a report. But doctors became lazy. Pharmacists are pushed to see a lot more people and people don't take the time to get those reports. Well, why isn't it mandated, Dr. Maroney?

Those laws are coming. But up until now, they've been voluntary as they put it in place. Mandating it is the answer. Mandating means if you're going to write a narcotic, if you're going to write a painkiller, you have to run a report on that patient. If you're going to fill a narcotic, if you're going to fill a painkiller drug as a pharmacist, you have to run that to see that that patient's not running a scam and running a couple different doctors. Let's talk about Percocet 2, which is, as you say, a derivative of, it's an opiate. Percs, Paula's, Roxycontin, Roxy's Blue Dynamite, 512s, that refers to the generic brand that prints a 512 on a round white Percocet pill. There's a million names for this, for these dangers. So it's from two sources, people getting overprescribed one way or another by hook or by crook.

And then as Alan correctly pointed out, other people producing it, not through pharmaceutical measures and getting it on the street. So, okay, would you agree so far, Dr. Maroney? 100% of the problem off the street is a market that was created because now patients don't want to go to the doctor, so they got kicked out of a doctor's office, or they know they can't get enough from a single doctor, so they turn to the street. And in the old days, one of the only other options you had on the street was, well, you just got heroin from a dealer, but now these fake pills are on the street. And somebody will offer you heroin or the fake pills. And everybody knows that heroin's

being laced with other chemicals and drugs like fentanyl and people are dying. So people are afraid to ask for heroin. And they're going back to things that look like pharmaceuticals, but they're fake. And it's an entire market driven by the drug cartels and the dealers to give people more options so they don't have to go to the doctors. But they're already dependent. They're already addicted. Right now, people dying of drug overdoses in record numbers. This is not just a slight increase. It is a very scary, a horrific surge in drug ODs in our country. Now, many claim we should be more permissive and more tolerant, more understanding about drug abuse, and I agree with that. You know, Dr. Maroney, you and I have talked about this off camera so many times.

Like I have told you in the past, I would come out of one arraignment calendar with 150 new felonies on it. I'd be in there in the courtroom all day cutting deals, putting cases on the trial calendar, trying to get as many people in rehab as I possibly could. I'd come back to my office six, seven o'clock at night, and there'd be a whole new stack of 150 more felonies to take to be disposed of in their jargon not mine there were not enough spots for people to go to rehab dr maroney i would try to to get in a rehab a state rehab where you don't have to pay for it most people cannot pay for it you'd have to wait and either have to let them out of jail which then immediately go and get back on drugs the minute they walk out of the courthouse. Or they'd have to wait in jail for a spot in rehab.

And sometimes the wait in jail would be seven, eight months before you could get in rehab. And by that time, you know, they're doing a year of jail time. It just was just there was no money, no resources. And very often the only thing I could do is send somebody to jail, an addict. And I knew that wasn't the right answer, but it was the only answer I had. Here's what the new move is. We know there's not enough addiction doctors. We know the primary care can't do this. We know there's not enough rehab clinics. The federal government started in the last administration and is going to continue drug court services

for rehabilitation directly out of the drug courts supervised by the drug courts. Drug courts are one of the answers to the future. The drug court associations will create guidelines that'll say if you had a nonviolent crime and your crime was based in drug use and you are admitting that you're an addict and you need help it's cheaper to get you a job apartment and drug court services and treat you outside of the jail than it is to pay all that money and keep you locked up where you're not getting any help now listen to this. According to Justice Department, 52,000 people died of drug ODs in America 2015. Over half of those deaths, Dr. Maroney, over half, involved the use the deaths attributed to that opioids fentanyl oxycontin etc have now skyrocketed to above 60 000 60 000 people dead now tell me about fentanyl. Fentanyl is a drug that works in the brain that is not directly related by chemical structure to opium and morphine.

It's synthetic, but it's very powerful. And we've always used it in surgery and in hospice patients. But the new way that fentanyl is being used by the drug cartels is that it's being sprinkled into the heroin. This fentanyl comes from Mexico and it comes from China. And it is supposed to be super branding and making the heroin stronger. But the people who sell it really aren't managing the quality control. And if there's too much fentanyl in your heroin, your heart stops and you die. Tell me, what are fentanyl patches? Explain to me how those work. Fentanyl being manufactured by an ethical pharmaceutical company is available in a patch that you wear

on your skin like a band-aid and a best way to say it is they kind of mix the medicine in the glue and it sits on the skin for 72 hours or three days and the plastic on the outside prevents the drug from touching other people. So it's absorbed into the skin. And for three days or 72 hours, you don't have to take any pills. Well, the patch was designed for people who were really sick and had cancer, were going to die and were nauseated because they couldn't swallow or because they were sick. So the fentanyl patch was not designed for an average person on the street. Let me ask you about this. What do you make of the claim there's going to be an anti-heroin vaccine heroin vaccine that the shot could prevent recovering addicts from relapsing by blocking the high you get from heroin. What do you make of that? Well, currently we have a drug that we

inject once every 28 days. It's not technically a vaccine. It's still a depo shot, like a birth control shot, but it's available for men and women. And it's a shot in the buttocks every 28 days. And it does stay in the system and block the brain. That shot is a drug called naltrexone, which is similar to methadone or suboxone, but instead of being an active drug that activates the pathway, it's a blocker. And it's in the same family, but it has the opposite action of morphine. And that naltrexone shot was available as a pill for a decade, and the federal government saw it was extremely successful, but then people would forget to fill the prescription. So they encouraged the development of that shot that you show up your

doctor once a month, you get the shot and then you don't have to take the pills. Let me ask you this. Have you seen the wave of videos and photos of parents passed out in the car on opioid addiction. It's like every other morning I look at the Daily Mail and there's a new set of parents. They're like asleep on the sidewalk or in their car with the children in the back seat, OD'd on heroin or an opioid. I mean, a daughter just recently live-streamed her parents on Heroin Binge when she got home to find them passed out in front of the TV. And that was shot, of course, in America, showing the parents slumped over and unresponsive. The daughter even starts kicking her father to try

to wake him up. It's awful. And that really brought it to the forefront. A recent shot of a mom and a dad passed out in the car with their little children in the backseat and they were high on, I guess, heroin or a derivative of opioid. So what do we do with these children that are suffering because of their parents' drug addiction? Just tell me what you think we need to do now, Dr. Maroney. Oh, P.S., what is your book, your new book coming out? My new book will be out in about two weeks. It'll be available on Amazon.com and off a webpage that we're finishing. The name of the book is American Narcan.

Narcan is the blocker. It's the drug that reverses overdose. American Narcan is the first book in America on the essentials of naloxone and heroin fentanyl associated mortality. Narcan. Okay. I want to have you back with us if you can on the day that it comes out. I know you'll be busy. Now, just give me something I can understand. Dummy down for me. What can we do now? Give me your top three suggestions.

In America, the drug Narcan and the generic Naloxone is available. There's like 43 governors that have assigned laws that say you can get this and keep it in your house. And that is to fight your addiction? It's not to fight the addiction. It's to reverse the overdose. Ah, yes. That's what they tried to. Is that what they tried to give to Prince?

They did give to Prince. And it worked that one night when he was on the private plane. It is, but what happened is you don't have to go to the hospital and get that now. Narcan can be prescribed. Yes. It's exactly the same drug, though, Nancy. It's the same drug, but the governor realized the problem. Okay, you're overthinking it.

Narcan, you can have in your home. You can have have it in your home for an overdose to save your life okay number two number two all americans need to understand there are hundreds of thousands of people who've had their brains hijacked by these drugs and we need to get them help and have sympathy we we cannot we cannot beat them up with stigma and prejudice and jail and jail okay got it so understanding got it and number three break it down doctor break it down we're not all mds like you not everybody had the money or the seven years for med school okay okay so talk down to me and and the third and final thing is we need to pressure our lawmakers to get the funds to the people that are doing the treatment i will never forget when I first entered the district attorney's office,

my elected DA in his wisdom sent me along with the lobbyist on anti-crime issues to the Georgia legislature. I've never been hit on so many times in my life by married people. That cured me from any desire of thinking I could make change in the world through politics. So good luck with that funding, Dr. Maroney. But you know what? I'm also an optimist. I hear you and I agree. With me, renowned medical examiner and author, Dr. William Maroney, his new book coming out, American Narcan. Did I get that right? Got it right. I can't believe you of all people didn't have some long subtitle like,

Facts and Statistics Regarding the Opioid Deaths in America from 1959 to 2000. Anyway, American Narcan. Let me stop right now, just a moment, and thank someone very special for making today's podcast possible. Our partner, our sponsor, Blue Apron, the number one fresh ingredient and recipe delivery service in our country. Blue Apron's mission is to make incredible home cooking accessible to everyone. Blue Apron achieves this by supporting a more sustainable food system, setting the very highest standards for ingredients. Now, Blue Apron has established partnerships with over 150 local farms, fisheries, and ranchers across the U.S. And because of that, seafood is sourced sustainably under standards developed in partnership with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch.

Upcoming meals, listen to this. Warm smoked trout and asparagus salad with fingerling potatoes and garlic croutons. Mmm. Peach honey glazed chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, collard greens, and Thai basil. Whoa. Blue Apron, thank you for making this podcast and so many others possible. Okay, back to the story. We are being joined by one of my favorite people. She's beautiful. She's talented, but most important, she is brilliant and committed. With me is Robin Gelbund, and she is the president of, I call it a think tank. It's Fair Health. They are non-profit. They don't owe anybody. Nobody affects their opinion. And they

are sought after from entities all over the world. They are a think tank about health issues. That's all they do. They have just released one of the leading studies regarding opioids. Robin, I just can't thank you enough for making time to join us on Crime Stories. Fair Health has issued a series of, as you say, white papers on the opioid crisis. It is a crisis. You started last July with the opioid crisis among the privately insured, the opioid abuse epidemic as documented in private claims data. That's a mouthful.

Then September, you published the impact of the opioid crisis on the health care system, a study of privately billed services. Now you're third in the series, peeling back the curtain on regional variation in the opioid crisis spotlight on five key urban centers and their respective states. Wow. Okay. That was a lot to take in. So I want to focus on the paper that is coming out. What makes this white paper different from the other two? Well, thank you for your interest in this topic, which is a critical one. As you probably know, Fair Health houses the largest private claims collection in the country, over 23 billion

records for 150 million people, of course-identified and while we off okay hold on let me break that down to regular people talk okay because you're like warp speed ahead of me and Alan okay I think what she just said Alan was that they procure and gather millions billions yeah of health claims and from that they don't care who you are or what your name is they're trying to deduce or figure out what's happening health-wise in our country you know robin like in great britain everything is socialized the government has their fingers in everything so they can very easily track what's happening health-wise in fact the other day alan i read how ivf raises your likelihood of getting cancer by

like 30 ovarian cancer because of a brit study because it's socialized fair health is doing that for the u.s sorry i just had to break it down to regular people talk. Okay, go Robin, sorry. Oh, of course. So we have this enormous ocean of claims. So what we try to do is in effect take a glass bottom boat out on that ocean and really try to reveal trends that we're seeing. And you're right, we issued two earlier papers on the opioid crisis, but those were at the national level. And so what we really want to do now, instead of really being out on that glass bottom boat, scuba dive more deeply and really look at regional variation in the issue involving opioid abuse and dependence.

And what we saw were dramatic differences in what's really happening under the hood in these different states. You know, I could listen to you talk all day. I really could. The way you compared to gliding across the statistics in our country in a glass-bottom boat to deep diving in five states. opioid epidemic, and we're talking about OxyContin, Oxycodone, Percocet, heroin, of course, any poppy, opium derivative, California, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Texas. How did you pick those five? We chose those five states because they host the five most populous cities. And by choosing the largest cities in the country and their accompanying states,

we thought that that would be the best way to really provide a rich, detailed understanding of what was happening in connection with this growing crisis. Guys, stay with me. Stay with us on this. The lives of your children, your neighbors, your family, your relatives may depend on what you are about to hear. Robin, I know the findings took you by surprise. I was surprised by a number of largest number of procedures in both rural and urban settings were associated with those age 51 and older. What? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What

did you just say? In regular people talk. Some people have associated the opioid crisis with really younger people under age 35 or millennials, if you will. But what we're seeing is healthcare claims being submitted in connection with those 51 and older. And what that might suggest is that this is really, again, getting to the heart of some prescription patterns in the medical community, because it's that age group that often is obtaining various procedures, orthopedic surgery, so on and so forth. So really, that's an alarm bell to look at that group of individuals and really try to understand why they are outdistancing all of the other. Now, you looked at the five most common opioid-related procedures for each state and the five opioid-related

procedures that represented the highest expenditures, what did you learn? Well, we learned that every state is very different, and that raises really interesting questions. So, for example, if you look at the top five procedures in all the states, only one code was on all of each of those five states list, which is related to a drug screening test. But in California, for example, the most common procedures were associated with intensive outpatient services. whereas Illinois, they seem to rely heavily on a medication called naltrexone, which is part of their treatment protocol. New York, for example, is known for methadone maintenance program. That was its most common. And then you see in Illinois, I mean, in Pennsylvania and Texas, they have primarily laboratory tests and screening as opposed to group therapy, intensive outpatient, or any of those other services that might have surfaced in the other states. states and the way they want to treat? Is it due to the reimbursement practices of the insurance industry? Is it due to access or the lack of access to some of those services? And why it's

so critical to look at this snapshot in time is now to think about what happens after this photograph was taken. Now that we know that there are such differences in these various states, what are the outcomes of these different protocols? Who's relapsing? Who's having overdoses after going through these treatment regimens? These are laboratories in real time that we can now start people are being screened or tested or administered medications. So it's important to both try to create impactful treatments and interventions, but also try to understand what's not working. What Robin is saying is so critical because we're not talking about selling crack cocaine or a doper showing up at your door at 3 a.m. to give you a bag of marijuana. We're talking about opioid-related deaths, people ODing young and old off heroin, opium-related products like what your pharmacist and doctors are giving you. Oxycodone, Oxycontin, Percocet.

I mean, I just had knee surgery. They gave me 30 days of something, Robin, Oxycodone or Oxycontin. I took one one night my husband gave me. It was like the size of a tiny tiny tiny little pill and the next night I'm like what was that you gave me and I looked at it I saw it was an oxy something I'm like uh-uh I was afraid to even put it in the medicine cabinet because I thought the twins might find it we went and dumped it I like, I don't care if my knee hurts. If they ate one of these, dear Lord in heaven, and it is prescribed medicine. People think, oh, the doctor prescribed it.

It's fine. It's not fine because you get hooked on it. So what are the major points, Robin, you expect readers to take away from your latest study? From this latest study is to show that this is an issue that is evolving daily. And also for people to be very mindful exactly what you just said. If you are coming out of a procedure to really question your medical professional, if you are being given prescriptions for things that Tylenol, other types of pain management regimens could be just as effective. It's also important to recognize that to address issues with your insurance company, to see to what extent if you are in the midst of some type of opioid abuse disorder,

to check to see what kind of reimbursement and benefits are available to you through your insurer, and to also really address the fact that each state is really moving and evolving in real time, and that it's important to understand that illicit drug distribution channels may be impacting the type of approaches that, again, state biases may be doing that as well, and that it's important for these mini laboratories to help the country design effective responses and create off-ramps to this epidemic. Wow. You know, I am so knocked out by you and by Fair Health. I never realized Fair Health existed until my former EP, Dean Sicoli, told me about it. And I started following you and following Fair Health and

your studies, and they are incredible. Just think about it. Millions and millions of health claims across our country, billions, and they take all of that information and they pick a topic like opioid addiction and what it's doing to our country, to our children, to our teens, our high school students, college students, older than that, that are getting these prescriptions after surgeries or for pain, and then everything goes sideways and people are dropping like flies. I mean, Alan, what about those last studies that's showing 60,000 people dead in 2016? I'm looking right now at Fair Health's chart. This thing looks like it started around 2013. And then it just the graph just goes skyrocketing up to 2015. And it's sort of leveled off in the last year, according to as far as insurance claims. This is a question I've got. San Antonio, Texas, what's going on there, Robin? You're reporting a 141,000 percent increase in these addiction treatment claims in the last 10 years. 141,000 percent? Where does that happen? Why?

So opioid use as revealed in the claims also includes fentanyl. And it's been understood that within the San Antonio region, there are some distribution networks there that should probably and are already catching the attention of both enforcement officials and public health officials. Yeah, I found that fascinating that, for example, in New York City, which constitutes 43% of the state population, only 13% of the opioid-related claims were present there, whereas San Antonio, which has only, and its surrounding area, has only 6% of the population, accounts for 66% of the claims within that state. So yes, that's why the data are so important. They can really shed a light and allow sort of the canaries in the coal mine to surface and to allow attention and resources to be directed to the geographic regions that are really in some ways screaming out for some intervention. Robin, listen to this. People are partying naloxone is the the anti-opioid it's

it's i think what they tried to give prince on that private plane when he was od'ing on prescribed drugs allegedly just very shortly before his death they gave him the antidote to OD. Now instead of saying, hey, you be the designated driver, don't drink tonight, they're like, hey, are you carrying naloxone? I mean, that's crazy. Absolutely. In some ways, in effect, everyone is being enlisted to be a foot soldier in this army, whereas naloxone used to be, you could be found to be violative of a law for administering naloxone. People were afraid to

administer it because they felt if they're giving it to someone taking an illegal drug, they will be found in trouble as well. States like Illinois and a number of other states are passing laws that in effect immunize people or make it perfectly legal to administer that drug to stop someone from having an opioid overdose. It's almost a recognition that this is becoming at such an epidemic proportion. All of us have to be deputized in trying to aid people from really dying from an overdose or having some acute incident. So it's a fascinating social experiment that's going on in real time right now. With us, the president

of Fair Health, doing everything in her power to save lives in our country. Robin, you're awesome. Thank you for being with us. I'm Nancy Grace, Crime Story signing off. Goodbye, friend. You're listening to an iHeart Podcast.