Opioids addiction crisis oklahoma might change the course of history. For the 1st time in the United States a doctor will be sued by the state for 2nd degree murder for over prescribing opioids heres the accused dr regan equals. A Family Doctor for of the 22 years shes now suspected of being a prescription murderer. The judge has to ascertain if there is enough material to go to trial. The plaintiffs in the room have lost a child a brother a friend from an opioid overdose. Dr nichols was their doctor she was the one prescribing the drugs. My names are in box im an attorney in Oklahoma City i practice cripple defense ive got a Police Officer and ive been a prosecutor and ive been a judge ive been here all my life born and raised in oklahoma. The right the hard to the Oil Production were right on the edge of were cowboys are there and so weve got a lot of people in here that are hard working people and its a pretty peaceful city as far as that goes. Box knows these roads inside out and hes on 1st name terms with the local people all his career hes defended this community but today the clients have changed before i was having people from more the Poverty Level people all walks of life i have lawyers i have doctors children who have become addicted to the opiates now its every level in every area of life is for is for the low income high income. All of protected by the opiate use. He represents several families from this town everyone has lost a relative deceased of a cardiac arrest following a painkiller overdose drugs prescribed by dr nicholas. Tough enough it really is this and. This Oklahoma City lawyer has never seen a case like this and you victim wants to press charges. Come in you can see im going to see you. Have a seat and that marshall has been raising her 2 children alone since her husband died of a painkiller overdose my math shows thats 99 per day that she would prescribe him and he passed away like my 2nd. One in 20122012. He was a fire. She works in education counselor a regular family all it took was back surgery to turn everything over in a few months her husband became addicted to the painkillers prescribed by got to nichols the course once you have that surgery its never quite the same and then they did some other treatments and he had you know some other issues with just on the judge just injuries it from being to having such a physical job and i think it just snowballed you know he persisted with the pain but instead of trying to wean him off though she did those after dose after dose after dose and really became his drug dealer. More drugs than the regular drug dealers of the street would prescribe but shes doing it in the name of medicine. According to her doctor nicholas which swiftly see patients without any physical exam a few dollars for a prescription her husband would have been prescribed 100. 00 pills a day 3000. 00 a month the doctor should have been the response will course and theyre trying to nuts what their job is is to make sure theyre treating you in a healthy manner and theyre doing whats best for you and not whats going to bring harm to you. It happens to just your next door neighbor to your uncle missy firefighters here comma city Police Officer to your School Teacher to your you know its a its not a its not a disease that is specific it can hit anybody. How come opioids invaded america pain has become a market and the idea of not suffering even likely is a good thing in drug stores that look like fast food anyone can shop for pain killers physical or psychological a painkiller exists for almost any reason. Imagine facing the day with less chronic osteoarthritis. Ok. Imagine living your life with less chronic low back pain. Imagine with less pain. Amongst the pain killers on prescriptions. Usually prescribed for back aches or headaches 2000000 americans are addicted to these for a reason that most ignore their opium based. Im jason b. Minute and i am the chair of psychiatry at Oklahoma State universitys center for Health Sciences our oath is essentially 1st do no harm and i think that thats one of the biggest problems is that doctors dont realize that by purse cry being opioids that they could doing more harm than good and weve seen that in a lot of a lot of cases what would they originally prescribe for well historically the uses been for what we call cancer pain cancer does a lot of horrible things street your body and can cause a lot of pain nowadays its used for a lot of Different Things these pills hydrocodone. The content. Of the drugs that are legally sold on the market share the same component a powerful narcotic heroin and sometimes they are a 1000 times more concentrated. The opioid compound comes from a plant called the opium poppy and these plants are really grown mostly in asia and then there are imported by Drug Companies into the United States but what we do with the pills is we take the good parts of the flour that you would smoke and we concentrate them in a little pill. And so the pills are much more potent than smoking ever was but in the United States we outlawed the smoking of opium in the early. 900. 00 if you get a 3 day per scription theres a 13 percent chance that youll be taking those opioids a year later so whether its a few prescriptions or a few pills its a very small amount that it takes to get addicted. To the left a lethal dosage of heroin to the right its a quick glimpse onto opium softballs. To date you know you did something for your pain talk to your doctor. To be able to not feel pain has become a tacit agreement between doctor and patient that it was price these drugs a ticking bombs whos aware of that fact did dr nichols know. A wrongful death lawsuit was filed today against a midwest city dr Ragan Nichols is already accused are prescribing a massive amount of opioids to 5 patients who later died when i heard that there was 4 other deaths thats a. Good thing a midwest city documentary im homeless tonight 3000000 jobs davis im just really not a clinician. Committed crimes and stuff. Is very much out of rest in our washington studios very happy that. We dont know where it was said was this is from your money did she harm i didnt know any internet i met a man my mantra. Met and manage to. A met. These are navy have spent their entire life in this house this is where their daughter chelsea was born. 21 years ago hear also that she passed away at the painkiller overdose in 2013 their story is one of an analgesic burdened family hiding in the secret and shame of addiction. Shes headed for a back surgeries dr nichols was lizas doctor for 7 years she was the 1st to fall into the opioids trap when i 1st started seeing her i thought she was going to be ok and she was giving me Pain Medicine to help my back but as the years go by course your body gets used to that medicine so that it doesnt work you know you used to could take one pain pill and now youre having to take 2 or 3 pain pills because the pain is so bad so it just increased and its just a vicious cycle because you know youve got to have the medicine but you know you dont want to have to take that much medicine but you cant i could work and do my job if i didnt have those. Lisa had her own addiction but she didnt know is that her daughter was doing the same thing for 3 years chelsea had diabetes which causes muscular pains it was her turn to consult with dr nichols. And i asked her about the quantity of medicine she was given her and her response to me was chelsea was an adult that she could talk to me about chelseas medical but she could talk to me about chelseas diabetes but she wouldnt talk to me about. The medication that she was i did trust her maybe money feeder to do it maybe just the the love the money maybe give it to her because i know that when she chose to be a doctor and i did we did all of that and she chose to want to help people. You cant be both with the yeah you like. Syria has been engulfed in civil war for almost 10 years its cost hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced millions more no 1. 00 foresaw the peaceful protests of 20 of them is collating into a complex conflict between various armies geopolitical interests rebel groups and jihadists. How they are needed on the book on this. But if you tell us if you say you hate because i. Was asian its. Best that the show look cool and. Let you know deep down you look. Closely at it on a day out of. An ordinary has sat on ice you know it never stops times the other day and then the shame but i dont im going to hate get a shot then you. Get it. We met dr nichols almost a year ago i think she has a very good heart she wants to help people maybe a little awkward but shes got a really sweet heart my names tommy adler im in a criminal defense attorney here in Oklahoma City we represent dr Ragan Nichols or really like her very much. Doctors lose patients all the time. To accuse a doctor of. Acting in reckless disregard for her patients when we believe that she was genuinely attempting to care for them. Is a big step for the government thats a. That exposes doctors to a lot of risk and these were troubled people these patients were abusing the things that they had access to. It wasnt the amounts that dr nichols prescribed these people that killed them it was the amounts that they decided to take. Her line of defense is set to shift away the shadow of responsibilities dr nichols was an irreproachable professional who was duped by drug addicts and she never had any awareness that her patients were facing any danger whatsoever nowadays in Oklahoma City addiction can be seen at every corner. I think america got here because we are the most medicated country in the world and you climb we are a country of if that is fast food quick fixes now now now feel bad heres a pill her heres a pill tell disfunction heres a pill all of those things are right there at the doctors head but pain is good pain or mines is that were all. He went to the center as a patient since then hes become the head of the facility in order to save others like himself everyone here has to learn to live without pain killers this private ranches 30 places a year it receives 40 requests a day at 21 years old kyle is in rehab for the 1st time to. Sub rather to dora. Im good will cool man i feel and. I gotcha. Us stay clean. Are you ready alright ran. Your mom in here and well good well get everything started. Right after you guys. Are all. Has been to college and hes the father of a little boy. But 4 years ago he became addicted to opioids and then heroin. Writes opiates heroin and oxycontin anything else and now ok and this is the 1st treatment on right arent are you feel very emotional. The motion of everybody shes waiting for her boy to come back. Its going to take cal bout 30 days for you to really begin to see a change. So is life and death man theres only 3 ways out of this which is get sober which is what i pray for you on the 2nd one is is prison if youre lucky 3rd one is. De berry. I dont know how else to say it but im right and i cant do that said member of. Our own so much that i would rather not see. Them who are or at this moment i dont know. If you will be on the view who are who. Are also to be here. Kyle has 90 days to learn to live without opioids. And how it feels toward my body is a lot of. My thought process its slow. For just about all of it and there in the down a lot of sad a motion is in the assist i cant keep my emotions in one place and you know on top of. Her i just dont feel good. For our friends. For all of us for us and. After that. We in my friends kind of stuck together in. Were doing these pills and it was just blocking out so much pain or so stressed out and. Fighting back tears every day i think thats how i wanted something it was just blocking out that pain. And the feel good it and forget it and i actually helped me out with a lot of things. I was that was my girl you know that as well and then. Just this last year like too many tell me about things ive lost my family and that wasnt enough that wasnt enough to write or change. Mentally in my head ive gotten close to suicide. In all these pills are created monsters or i dont think that they should be legal. Just like tobacco addiction the dangers of opioids have been hidden it is taken 20 years for the government to take action for financial reasons. In my office while the lawsuit against the producer for my. Knowledge and so on and janssen pharmaceuticals. In putting this lawsuit together. We believe these companies are culpable for the tragic heartbreaking number of oklahomans who have become addicted or who have died as a result of the opioid up in. Amec in our state. Hes the Oklahoma Attorney general and the 1st one in his country to go to battle. My counter is publicly accusing pharmaceutical companies of having caused this epidemic. He wanted to prove that he and his team have been investigating for more than a year. Yes my name is regina whitten im an attorney here in Oklahoma City and my time is model burrage i am my lawyer in oklahoma. General hunter hired my law firm when verge to represent the state of oklahoma and try to recoup all of the costs that the state has incurred because of the Opioid Epidemic we need this person as a. I think were going to be able to prove that 80 percent of all the crime in the state of oklahoma is directly caused by this Opioid Epidemic in our prisons are over feel because of that loss of productivity of taxpaying citizens costs the state money but im anxious to get this 1st this 1st battle started. What they did to this country. Is from. Their estimates bring the cost of the epidemic to 7000000000. 00 in oklahoma. This is story corps hearing will take place in a few days. Today Reggie Whitney will explain his motivations to a group of students that this struggle is a personal one. Partner has been involved in the opioid addiction the opioid crossus ever since the death of his son brian and i had a nice that also related to drugs and so when the attorney general talked about representing the state. In this case. I think he knew that we both had family members that because of the epidemic. Were going to talk to Incoming Freshman athletes at the university of oklahoma im going to tell a. Story about my son brandon and thats the power of addiction and how dangerous it is and maybe. Save somebodys life. I think i got a chance to shake almost everybodys hand when you came in i was trying to figure out what sport you are its hard to guess every sport from your you know your size but thank you guys for coming. So let me introduce you to my co speakers and this is brandon. And rand is not here today and ill tell you why later this is me when i was at o. U. And i had this young son and also when i had more hair. Brown was a cute little kid brand his plan was to go to college and play football which he did. And he ended up playing on a National Championship Football Team never got in any kind of trouble and the drug that brought him down was an opioid and it did not come from the streets it came from a pharmacy i just told him stop using those pills and i found out its not that easy i found out its like telling a diabetic to use more willpower and stop needing insulin you cant do that thats crazy. I never told him about addiction i never warned him. And so now i i have survivor guilt now but im living with it so i started a foundation called fighting addiction to education because i think education is the key to this problem and when i tell this story at schools it gets so quiet you could hear a pin drop and theyre not really interested in me theyre interested in brandon i show pictures of him he was one of them hes just ordinary kid and if an ordinary kid like brandon can end up getting hooked they could and that is the truth these pills that big pharma sells. Theyre essentially heroin pills most people dont know the these opioids are essentially the same this here one thats the key telling patients that theyre not addictive thats the killer literally thank you guys for being a good audience and im hoping some of the information ive shared with you today might help you in a good way. Reggie son never managed to quit. There is someone responsible for his misery. Pharmaceutical. We go to work so you straight home. I 1st heard about you know. From the helicopter folks in iraq. I think that there are people i mean with military who have never forgiven. This guy a freighter and treat it as a book and make it look. He was really starting to happen. In the pen and done on these that youve. Seen a lot. Primes. Not on. The idea of developing an economist to try and applying it to media since he thinks that was a friend. Who told him to write that he would be. One of the worlds most. Useful for your resume theres an innocent rich founder of the song it was sunny. And there was a great deal of jealousy. For the song why wont it be more like they had q. Seen all. The sweet. Smile. We have giuliani signs in solitary to. Listen for terrorist oh wait you dont have a live person. I dont see him dying thats. What hes thinking. The us is seize the biggest black lives massive protests in weeks in major American Cities this is the scene right now large pitches for you from portland in oregon the biggest protest thats been seen over the weekend was in seattle and we heard from rebels recovering at that rally who ended up on the receiving end of the police response. They get closer and closer to me and im saying hey im being peaceful im packing up and you can see a Police Officer from seattle show me back to work i start filming him and he pepper spray directly. Because Opposition Labor Party pushes for atis broadcast license to be revoked but insists that it results in moscow a security progress
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