reporter: while the coronavirus faem pandemic did d much of our attention record death toll. reporter: for the first time on record, more than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in a 12-month period. in may 2020 and april 2021, much of it from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. joe biden s new drug czar told me we need to employ harm reduction, making drug use safer, and testing drugs for the presence of fentanyl. people will say, you re enabling drug use. that s the provocation. as an evidence based physician that has spent his career dealing with science and moving data around, we just do not have that evidence.
while the coronavirus pandemic did demand most of our attention, another epidemic continued to surge. america s drug epidemic now deadlier than it has ever been. record death toll. for the first time on record, more than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in a 12-month period between may 2020 and april 2021, much of it from elicit fentanyl, a synthetic opioid. president biden s new drug czar, dr. gupta, no relation to me told me we need to more strongly employ harm reduction, making drus use safer with things like mel locks own, clean syringes and testing drugs for the presence of fentanyl. people will say, look, you re enabling drug use. that s the provocation. as a physician who has spent his career dealing with science and moving data around, we just
fentanyl. a synthetic opioid. president biden s new drug czar, no relation to me, told me we need to strongly employ harm use reduction, making drug use safer. they ll say look, you re enabling drug use. that s the provocation. as an evidence-based physician that has spent his career dealing with science and moving data around, we just do not have that evidence. tonight for the first time in almost 20 years, there s a new drug just approved to treat people in the early phases of al siemz ers. the first new drug approved to treat the disease since 2003. now, according to the fda, the drug can reduce the signature tangles and plaques that block the neural pathways in people
what the public doesn t know is that we re not actually in the same opioid epidemic that we were in ten years ago. there s actually been three different phases. the first one people heard about in the news a lot, the prescription bills and the overprescribing. then it switched over to heroin, and now we re into the third wave of the opioid epidemic, which is with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is really powerful, and that combined with the pandemic has really exacerbated the number of overdose deaths and it s a real public health concern. explain fentanyl to us. are young people knowingly taking it, or is it that it s being mixed with other drugs and it s lethal. you know, i m a physician and i m a child psychiatrist and a medical diction doctor. my trade for over a decade was working with young people for over a country. many of them were quite entrepreneurial, so i knew exactly how this unfolded when it hit the news years before it did. how? so what you hear in the news is