Leader in tehran the war in syria and the twenty fifteen u. K. Deal dominated the talks with putin labeling threats by the u. S. President to withdraw from a deal as unacceptable to say the stream is next. To that i phone or. I answer me ok. Today one nation overdosed we look into the Opioid Epidemic in the United States how do you tackle the problem with seemingly a lack of resources. As soon as you do it its like a big blanket just. Everything just fills perfect like your body you just feel like a new person you dont think about the negative you dont think about nothing its just nothing matters and i dont actually believe you are. My mom and im not actually that you know. That the powerful new fault lines documentary heroines children the film explores the Opioid Epidemic in the United States and what its like for those at the center of the crisis the attics and their loved ones last year sixty four thousand people died of drug overdoses majority of them from heroin benton all and other opioids this week a White House Commission is delivering recommendations to President Trump the news comes one week after the president declared the crisis a Public Health emergency stopping short of calling it a National Emergency had that declaration been made better all funding would have been allocated. So how do you tackle a problem joining us to discuss this we have in new york Maria McfarlandSanchez Moreno shes the executive director at the Drug Policy Alliance in new jersey dr indra sadam baby shes the medical director at the center for Network Therapy and right here in our studio we have just rushing hes host of our desires for lines and he and his producer layla just finished making the film heroine childrens good to have you here everybody just let me show you this statistic at our audience as well six hundred fifty thousand opioid prescriptions on an average day in the u. S. According to the department of health and Human Services you cant even get your head around that number so what you did with the four lines film was you actually said how we make this personal and how we make this people connect with whats really happening when we decided to do it. Theres a ton of coverage on this right there in the states at least a lot of coverage from this may be the most covered issue. That it has been for a while so we thought theres a lot of context out there rather than retread that do something really intimate and so what we wanted to do was to give you a film that when you watched it you really felt like you were there and you were connected to these people and you got the very human side of the story so we made a conscious choice to approach it in that very kind of intimate way and stayed away from a lot of the other context thats out there although all that stuff should be reported were just offering this kind of one very specific look at it yeah i did show some people some pictures that you take. And you take pictures as well this is from your instagram feed tell us what were seeing as i came. Here. So we got called to a double overdose in chillicothe ohio small town Middle America and we go into this little house there are two guys on the floor. To feet completely out of it and its this interesting scenario where youre talking about a dozen cops and e. M. T. Cram into the room theyre moving with a kind of like a fish and see that you can only have if youve done something a million times think about the way you make off in the morning without thinking about it theyre moving like that but at the same time theyre kind of a nerd to it because theyve seen it so much but for me it was just heart stopping these guys when you looked at the guys who had a deed there giving them an ark him they gave i want to say five hits in our kim and these guys were responding to it. Their pulse is weakening theyre losing them theyre trying to save and they got to carry him out of there and the entire thing is just shocking but when you really stop and look at the guys who owed deed and i have one photo that shows this theyre somewhere between bliss and. Theyre there theyre like in the sound sleep but not disturbed at all even though the theres all this action around im trying to save their lives for most of that we didnt show their faces in the book my photos i only released photos where you can identify them but since. I publish this since we came out with the story one of those individuals found out he was in this dock and he got back in touch with me and so i now know his story and you know your documentary is haunting us just one word to describe it when you see it and the scenes and seeing these faces and the kids and the effect on them but i think one thing that our International Audience your film has an International Audience the show does as well theyre asking this question this is on twitter and he says why is the Opioid Crisis a uniquely American Experience and why isnt it happening in other g. Twenty countries maria im going to direct this to you actually pulled up some stats here this is boxes came out earlier this year americans consume more opioids than any other countries since standard daily opioid dose for every one Million People and you can see the United States rates right there maria is this a uniquely american problem and why is that. Well the opiate overdose crisis has definitely hit the u. S. Much harder than any other country and some of that may have to do with with prescription practices and broader broader issues but i also think that a factor we have to bear in mind is that the war on drugs in the u. S. Has been so aggressive. And the lack of Public Education about drug use about the risks of drugs has been so serious and widespread that right now you have a problem where a lot of people who use drugs do so underground and do so in a way where they dont know necessarily that if you combine opioids with alcohol or with benzo die as a family that thats going to increase your risk of overdose dramatically. And where they have no ability to get their drugs checked to see if they are contaminated with fentanyl which again makes overdose much more likely and so these are situations where people are going underground they dont have access to information they dont have access to experts and health and they dont have access to treatment because. Evidence based treatment is actually very very hard to get in the United States medically assisted treatment in particular is very hard to get in the u. S. So people are adrift and dying. Though to enjoy i just want to share this with you this came from jen beijing she is a former member of the stream but also now a Substance Abuse profession specialist and jensen jess we need to educate the public with p. S. A. Is to help in an old situation over the situation because thats a reality now were way beyond preventing overdoses do you think the general public has enough information of what it means to be an overall crisis right now in the states do they know do they understand what drugs can do unfortunately i dont know its not surprising to me. And a. Patient of mine dorothy have not to a bar what this all. Means and want to overdose really me so i dont think people are valid you get a bargain price even though you know mr is right. What well im going to talk about i think a lot of people think that in arkansas the answer there is that theyre making that more readily available but the problem isnt my experience is that its not working anymore and its not working because so much here one of the streets is laced with an older car fentanyl and the market doesnt really those people respond to it the same way so i watch these guys get five doses of narc and it didnt bring them back and i just want to act now and lets just explain just very quickly is a drug that can be administered in different ways that sometimes in a syringe it gets put up your nose it blocks the effect of the opioid so helps people who overdose and come out of the overdose maria were going to say please go ahead i was just going to say that putting a lock son in the hands of First Responders is a positive step and its one of the things that that trump mentioned but precisely for that reason. Is so often in the supply now its really important to get the locks on in the hands of people who use drugs their friends their family members because fentanyl works so quickly that you really need to be overdose reversal medication much more quickly as well if you have any hope of making it work and go to indra just told us how ignorant the American Public is about drugs so sentinel in a sentence is. I found a little is one hundred times more potent than heroin so it is synthetic and i also tell you to be back on that no not for not abiding patients because im also poly Substance Use mostly that bender that is a penis being used by these people who are using heroin so reviving those kind of other substances is not possible just the la times neither made sure you know giving the acceptable family members and the person who has been given all the prescription is not the solution because all little. And not planned wanted and an accidental event so when they will because even if they have a lot going to cannot be using that and most times these people who are overdosing are a lot in the how home environment so they are not doing it in front of their family members so it being a First Responder is having the locks on them and are reaching people is quite meaningful so. Weve just scratched the surface of this a p. R. Crisis issue in the United States but last week president United States declared the situation and national Health Emergency let me just remind you what he said have a listen to this this epidemic is a national Health Emergency unlike many of us weve seen and what weve seen in our lifetimes nobody has seen anything like whats going on now as americans we cannot allow this to continue this time to liberate our communities from the scores of drug addiction never been this way we can be the generation that ends the Opioid Epidemic we can do it. We can do it all heres what people online felt about that this is ken on twitter he says seriously trying to clearing an Opioid Crisis an emergency makes just fifty seven thousand dollars of vailable he goes on to say have to seven thousand would cover tuition for one counselor is that enough to fix it all it wont buy much air time for really really good advertisement on it especially picking up on the fact that someone earlier said we need more p s as on this what anthony here feels a little bit differently he says its good that this is being treated as a health issue and not a war what do you make of the announcement. I actually think the funding is a huge problem and we dont have enough funds and even the fund that are available right now are. Russian are we going to spend it in the right direction so everything that the president brought to the table is in the right direction but what are we going to do for the funds that are one of the just look how are we going to support this behavior to me is going to be more beds available in patients who are embracing the new woman ality a slight alteration detoxification which is quite successful and have the cost of inpatient treatment so that we can make a be able to fund made available to treat more people who are suffering from this disease maria theres a tweet that you shared a couple of days ago here is what donald trump should have said about opioids instead you kind of retooled what he should have said to the nation give us a little snippet of what the most important thing that should come in terms of leadership in ita states right now with god and this is shit. I think you have to recognize that a big part of the problem has here has been the war on drugs the us has been the the main us response to drug use and the drug trade over the last fifty years has been to criminalize and trauma in his speech even though he mentioned Public Health and he did talk about creasing access in the locks on and a couple of other measures that might be helpful overwhelmingly he repeated the same lines of the past he talked about Prevention Strategies and ad campaigns that were all about just saying no which is the same campaign that nancy reagan pushed in the one nine hundred eighty s. And which failed he talked about using drug courts which are again a criminal justice tool criminalizing a medical issue he talked about enforcing criminal laws and he talked about building a wall on the border even though the fact is most immigrants are more law abiding than u. S. Citizens and even though organized crime across the world has always found ways around every wall every border that the u. S. Has has put up to stop the drug supply so my bottom line message is we need to have a new approach you cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again expect a different result the war on drugs has led us to this place where the u. S. Does have the strong magic increase and opioid overdose lets think about some new alternatives lets think about ways to acknowledge that you know what some people are going to use drugs lets teach them how to avoid the harms that sometimes go with drug misuse lets teach them to avoid mixing opioids with alcohol or bends or die as a power which makes them more likely to die. Lets treat kids with respect and give them meaningful education about drugs lets offer good treatment. Evidence based treatment medication assisted treatment to those who need it lets reduce harms by offering supervised consumption sites for people who do use drugs so that at least theyre using drugs with clean needles and arent exposed to infection so that at least somebody is watching them while theyre consuming to prevent the risk of overdose so there are a lot of measures that one could adopt that other countries have adopted that some cities even in the u. S. Have have been exploring. And increasingly states want to take explore but that wasnt part of trumps speech. So that view is a huge problem and you know maria even as we look at new alternatives though there are people online who want to remember one thing this is allison she says generally addiction was viewed as a moral failing or a choice not a medical condition warranting science based treatment that slowly changing but why its only changing people have some theories josh ill show you this week we got a lot of other ones just like this from dorian who says look at the incarceration rates for blacks on drugs versus whites white people need help and blacks get thrown on infill and he references another tweets the crack epidemic from the eightys here in the u. S. Do you see a disparity there do you see a difference yeah i think you spot on i think the criminalization of it and i think the media narrative the way they treated the crap epidemic in the eightys and the way we treat this now and i do believe that race is a big part of it of who the victims are. I dont think that the answer now is to cover the story the way we wrongly covered that one i mean i wish wed go back and cover that one in a different way but i certainly believe that race has played a part in this kind of narrative changing and we share with you whats going on on the web site whitehouse dot gov as were doing this show its a meeting of the president s commission on combating drug addiction and. Just listen in for a cup. It sounds. And i think it gives us a blueprint if we stay the course and per year and recognize that we are dealing with a brutal who will stop at nothing on its own to be successful and we need to follow through with the growth. Addiction is and that i think in many respects. We need if you dont enjoy it this is a a White House Commission its fully informing the president and the Current Administration in better ways to tackle the Opioid Crisis is even just seeing meetings like that is not a step in the right direction to choose beginning to change the start. I think as a president. I dress the same from the top view but i think as a treat or being an addiction psychiatrist i look at this very differently decriminalizing which i really did talk about the economy single the truck charges as a form and then the realizing the drugs exist in the south while the anybody then a person actively uses drugs they incur charges and they. Meaningfully engage in treatment in the treatment. Of these charges that they incurred while they were using come back to bite them and so theyre not able to go back into the workforce and that becomes a trigger for them to relapse so i would think its important to really address decriminalizing. The drug charges that helps us in two different ways one it pushes people who are using to go back into work for so that a white future relapses and secondly the two hundred billion dollars have been spent on criminal Justice System and if even a release like twenty five percent of that money that can be directed to the treatment and that will be meaningful at this point i think all these factors are the only or the funding funding and funding this is the main point in going ahead with all these beautiful a view that we have on the table so i hear what youre saying there i want to bring in this comment you tube live yawners watching the show and says the only way to stop the Opioid Crisis to heavily reform the pharmaceutical industry is in the corporatization of health care and no one knows that better josh than someone who sent us a video comment this is maureen she is the head of an Advocacy Group and her son is a recovering addict and this is what she told the street have a listen. I became a bobbin my something connected to legally prescribed controlled controlled narcotic painkillers. That happened in florida and that happened during a time when the Florida Medical board apparently felt that for scribing three hundred not because two hundred and you know as than x. Then there was an acceptable acceptable medical standard of care this went on for over three years of grossly negligent prescribing. We have those that have become addicted all of these close the border you know because of the oxycontin express. This is a man made. Epidemic and it is controlled by the physician community. So josh says this is a manmade epidemic does that ring true from the reporting you did yeah i absolutely think so and in fact its one thing talk about the criminalization of and how its created this that problem the problem but it that also dovetails with a movement in the medical industry to treat pain this is came out in the ninetys that patient had a right to say they were in pain and that a doctor should treat it that came around the same time as all is coming up in these type of programs where you would review doctors so if doctors didnt treat pain they might start to lose business to start those customers this also converges that same time that the companies who create these pills are in sin of vising the doctors on the back end and also advertising for these pills which is unusual in america that you can advertise for a prescription pill is good compared to other countries so this is really driven from the corporate side the corporatization of the american medical industry like that person said i think theyre spot on i talk to so many people i talk to one dad his son played Division One College football really top tier athlete. Twelve kids on his Football Team which was Akron University ended up in rehab from opioids two of them including his son ended up dead and his sons addiction started with sixty vike in pills that were prescribed by the doctor theres another thing that happens in the us is the way we accept authority and we think that doctors are thorough these and that they have our best interest in mind so if they give your son sixty five couldnt say he needs us after the surgery we just we do it meanwhile the companies that made those pills were telling the doctors theyre not addictive dont worry about it and all of this kind of convergence together into a perfect storm of what were seeing now still change i studied this conversation with a look at how many thousands of opioid prescriptions were dispensed every day to people around the United States so im wondering is the pressure now coming back on the doctors in the medical professionals who are writing these prescriptions to say hold on a minute maybe we helped start this. Can we help to end it. Beautiful question and this is a side of the kerry. Crisis started in the beginning of the turn of the century the transect ministration and the equivocation by really pushed doctors to. Make pain as a fifth vital signs and therefore are eighty percent of the patients identified themselves with some sort of pain and that led to this you know im partial process of writing of pain pills and here we are in the midst of all the a crisis and lets look at the prescription for being built in the past couple of years i would say sixty five percent of these bills were prescribed not by the specialist and are by the plain spoken being doctors but by the Nurse Practitioners and Family Physicians and its really going to educate these people not to write you know not pain medication for every person walks and not the little lives i think that in itself is controlled is you know there are good solution that regular cable is that let these prescription people being pills to the specialist or treating the underlying pain say for example if someone brought their apple then the person who was treating that will be an arguably this and that person should be the one who should also be controlling the pain perception that goes to that bridge that may be a doorway to start winter and how long you dont want the bin medication every day read to be any concern about the person getting addicted to where it should be referred to an addiction psychiatrist to work in or a hand had and the are the business and so on in us are being introduced to this as a back pain then we are working with that being management person and with the addictions i bought i think that will be a better direction to take thank you dr indra thank you maria as well and thank you for being part of this program medical. So what this from dr thomas on twitter who says we need all encompassing continuum of care the entire system needs to be reformed and how we approach this epidemic needs reform as well and some more on the. Children you need to get to aljazeera to call slash for thank you guys for being with us thank you for watching c. R. Y. If youre not. Going to concrete. What it is a full fledged raging by what donald trump open the door to this is just hate how it was that he opened the door to turn it into a physical reality that threatens a lot of my. Life six eight trucks america at this time. Zero. We understand the differences and the similarities of cultures across the world. So no matter where you call home aljazeera bringing the news and current of things that matter to. Aljazeera. 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