Trump is no longer president, but Biden still has two health crises on his hands: COVID and opioids. One is sort of getting under control, but the other is still raging on. Still, we shudder for what the opioid crisis could have turned into if Trump were still in office, especially given his alleged first-choice for drug czar, Tom Marino.
Alex Gibney—a documentarian whose latest film, Crime of the Century, explores the opioid crisis and how it (and who) is still killing Americans—attests to this.
“His go-to guy [for drug czar] happened to be the guy who did more than anybody to eviscerate the DEA and his ability to go after these companies that were flooding America, the opioids, of course,” he tells Jesse Cannon and Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal.
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He wasn’t picked, we know now, but human beings are still being used as opioid guinea pigs, says Gibney. Who is to blame? Lots of people, actually.
Big Pharma, of course: “Purdue gets its hand slapped, but doesn't have to endure any real punishment in 2006 because of a deal cut mysteriously. And nobody knows exactly who cut that deal at the Jepartment of justice. But Rudy Giuliani was, was a part of it. And then it happens again in 2020 with this deal cut again at the Department of Justice where fines are paid, key facts are buried,” explains Gibney.
Doctors are also complicit, as his documentary shockingly conveys. However, the biggest villain of all, he says, is our health care system and government leaders not doing a damn thing to change it.
“It's so full of bad incentives that are so much more based on supply and demand than they are the Hippocratic Oath,” he says. “I think in the wake of both COVID and the opioid crisis where so many people are dead, you'd think, people would be able to say, ‘You either give us a good health care system or you're out.’ And that's our bedrock issue.”
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