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whose daughter died two years ago at the age of 22 of an accidental fentanyl poisoning. sarah, what s your question? doctor, thank you so much for all that you do. i would like to know, what are we as a nation doing to address the problem with mental health care and rehabilitation not being accessible to all people who need it? yeah, again, thank you for being here. i am an addiction psychiatrist, right, so that someone who not only deals with people who are misusing substances, but also have mental health struggles. one of the things that i think is most important is removing unnecessary barriers to mental health care. and one of the ways to do that is to scale up mental health parity. meaning that no matter what you have in terms of your diagnosis, that is covered under the insurance. unfortunately, that s not the case. there is so much stigma and insurance companies decide what is covered and what is not covered. that is a problem. so, really looking for
other products. because there s such harsh penalties on fentanyl that the chemists are saying, okay, let s make something else so we can circumvent the fentanyl. you understand? so, you re saying just focusing on the supply, that s nothing to solve the problem. it s not gonna solve this problem. lou, what do you think? in west virginia, we see supply driving demand. there s so much supply, so much first, prescription pain pills and heroin and methamphetamine, now fentanyl, so much slung on the streets, it drove demand. so, we have a high rate of addiction in our state. and so, we have to address recovery. we have to offer alternative solutions for folks to live their lives. you know about recovery firsthand. tell folks a little bit about yourself. as a physician, i had access to prescription pain medication and my sample covered. and when life got stressed, i had a headache, i would take. one and sampling that drove me heavily into addiction. i was my own dealer. i had acce