And so, you could see the whole cycle in one character. Then he realized, oh, my gosh, you know, what about fentanyl? It’s so much cheaper? And not only that, I can import it from China, and then I can deal it and cover my costs now that I’m addicted to opioids but also make money. At some point, you know, his tolerance went up. In addition to Scott and Sari and Lenny, who were all in the film, you know, there were some people who were on this story early on, a New York Times reporter named Barry Meier, Patrick Radden Keefe from The New Yorker, but also, you know, there was a character that actually The Washington Post discovered, a kind of Walter White-like character named Caleb Lanier, a guy who had a terrible back issue, you know, was in an awful accident, stated taking Ox圜ontin. We found a number of what I will call detectives. And Joe launched this thing called the Distributor Initiative, and he felt like if he could choke off the supply there, that maybe they could-he could start to save some of these communities.Īnd so, we went out on the road to try to find people who could-who could carry the burden of this story. More and more people were getting addicted. First, they were flowing to internet pharmacies, then they were flowing to pill mills in South Florida, and they were just spreading like a blob, like-it was like a monster movie, these drugs just moving across the country. And the DEA fines some of these companies, and yet pills kept flowing. And so, he put them on notice in 20 and said that they were required in the law to report these things and to hold some of these shipments back if they deemed them to be suspicious. And he saw that these drug distributors were sending millions and millions of pills downstream into these communities and to these pharmacies.
And so, The Washington Post decided to sue to get that lawsuit, because it was-the parties involved in the lawsuit had it, but it was not made public, and they did not want to make it public.Īnd then in the middle of the drug manufacturers and the pharmacies are the drug distributors. And we thought it would be a blueprint for us in our reporting that that database would show kind of unprecedented insight into what the companies knew about which pills, how many pills were going into which community. And we tried to get it, but had been, unfortunately, unable to get it. So, it showed where all these pills were going. And as part of this lawsuit, they were given access, the parties involved in this lawsuit were given access to a confidential DEA government database that is called ARCOS, and it tracked every prescription pain killer from the manufacturer to the distributor to the pharmacy. Thousands of cities, towns, counties, Native American tribes were suing the major players in the opioid drug industry for the collateral damage, for what had happened to their communities. And this really-this speaks to Alex’s point about the collateral damage. HOROWITZ: So as Scott and I started to do our investigation, at the same time there was a massive lawsuit being filed in Cleveland, in Ohio.
So it was that kind of false advertising which set in motion the crisis. And the most important thing is to redefine pain. I mean, the remarkable thing is that the Purdue Pharma company convinced people after hundreds of years of experience of understanding just how addictive is opium or opiates, you know, going back to the Opium War with China, going way back further than that, that suddenly they convinced people that, oh, no, opiates really aren’t addictive, and you can take as much as you want. And so, we spent a good time dealing with that. That’s kind of the match that lights the forest fire that engulfs the country.
But, you know, strictly speaking, the opioid crisis starts with the story of Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. A lot of what The Post did was to focus on the second and third waves but also the role of these big pharmaceutical distributors. And we started just the two of us-and we’re going to talk about this more later-but this expanded into a massive investigation involving like 60 people on the newsroom led by Jeff Leen and David Fallis, and it became "The Opioid Files." And so, Scott and I started to do some stories about fentanyl. And then the Chinese, Chinese drug dealers, exploited that market by selling, importing-exporting fentanyl, which was cheaper and more potent. People addicted to them turned to heroin. And in fact, the fentanyl epidemic was the third wave of what started with prescription pills. And we compared notes and quickly realized that these two epidemics, fentanyl and prescription pills, were connected. And I asked him about this, because he was covering the prescription opioid epidemic.
And so, I went and talked to my old friend Scott Higham.