Douglas Murray Investigates: America's Drug Crisis

how often do you do this every day every day then make sure those cops don't come over here you're burning up Sentinel how do you feel all the pain goes away America stands at a Crossroads this is a tourist attraction people travel here for the drugs it's solutions to the ongoing drug crisis aren't working the Train's intentional it's there to drown out our screams North America now has the highest rate of opioid use of any region in the world you go to a spot like this they give you a shot fenel in the morning and

you come in the night and they give you a shot in the fenel at night fenel fenel takes the life of an American every 5 minutes knew immediately that she had been poisoned with fenol fentel is now found in recreational drugs like cocaine and even weed with hundreds of thousands of Americans dying every year the question remains how did we get here and how do we get out I'm Douglas Murray and this is America's drug crisis hey guys um um can I show you a picture this is my my granddaughter's uh mom her name is

talitha she's 6 foot tall esta Anne is a 59-year-old middle school lunch lady from Monroeville New Jersey today she's searching the streets of one of America's largest open a drug markets hoping to find the mother of her granddaughter hang out up that's what that guy just said Esther is a member in many of the Facebook groups where tens of thousands of friends and family search for their missing loved ones who are lost in Kensington but that's just the beginning of the crisis Across America fentanyl has infiltrated every drug Supply concerning how much of a hold

this drug has on New Mexico vental lace heroin cocaine and marijuana on the south side of Chicago fent in a laced pills that killed North Texas teenage girls in 22 the number of drug overdose fatalities hit an all-time high exceeding 100,000 lives lost in an ongoing epidemic largely driven by the powerful synthetic opioid fento what in your view is actually driving the epidemic of drugs in the US today the drug supply has become much more potent and as a result much deadlier Charles feain Layman is a fellow at the Manhattan an Institute a conservative think

tank focused on domestic policy and urban Affairs give us an idea of what that potency change looks like fentanyl can be many hundreds of times more potent than morphine it's certainly in order mag more potent than heroin drug traffickers have gotten much better at making much more potent much purer substances and so it is much easier for people to give themselves more than they are used to particularly when they're dosing on the street and as a result is much easier for them to overdose while fenel overdoses can be reversed a new flesh rotting tranquilizer with

a no reversal agent has begun to infiltrate drug supplies including kensington's have you had lots of these wounds before Paul no not until the last like 2 years like I used to go without any sort of abess or assist or anything for 2 years yeah well I've been shooting up since 21 I'm 29 so for like seven or eight years I never had health issues like this but it was when the Tran came in that that was when you you got wounds for the first time right it was a combination of like the Tran causing

people to get more open wounds siline known as Tran is a large animal sedative it depresses the human central nervous system like opioids when misused causing flesh eating wounds severe respiratory issues and potentially death the supply it's like 9 90% Tran at this point the Tran is what is doing this I mean fentanyl wasn't popping these wounds up in 2021 over a third of Philadelphia's 1,276 overdose deaths involved Tran today we're at Savage sisters a nonprofit run by recovering addicts like executive director Sarah Laurel who's been on the front lines of the war with Tran

and fenel we have zero human studies on xylazine and the effect on the human body so unfortunately because the adulteration with xylazine began in Philadelphia Philly has been dealing with this crisis firsthand on the ground with no scientific data no medical backup nothing what do you do here at Savage sisters Savage sisters offers housing Street based Outreach and the Drop in Center as well as wide trainings and education we have a shower and wound care for our friends who are experiencing homelessness as well as substance use as much as Savage sisters tries to help many

who use their services can't kick their addiction like Paul who we found using just hours after having his wounds cleaned what's her name her name is t how long has she been out here she's been out here for I believe 3 to 4 years you think she's hit yeah now I want her to be here so if I could see her out there I was trying not to break my neck while I'm driving in these streets I mean I'm just I'm a grandmother my son doesn't even know I'm here that's your daughter my my granddaughter's

mother he recognized her on second and Fifth Street in Center City she gets off here on alany Avenue she doesn't like to stay here because it's so dangerous and she wears big earrings puts her hair up in a bun messy bun very tall I would check a prevention point at night with the sun soon setting Esther's search yields to the dangers of Kensington after dark we didn't find to in Kensington today how did you feel about that part of me felt relieved but I wanted to find her I didn't know what kind of condition she

would be in I hope to see her again and I hope my granddaughter gets to see her again as family members like Esther continue to search through Kensington for their loved ones David O the Republican meral candidate in Philadelphia's 2023 race who wound up conceding to the city's current mayor Cheryl Parker is still searching for Solutions walk me through what happened in this city in particular with drugs in recent years there's a group of well-minded people who have creative ideas about enabling drug addicted people that these safe injection sites do not work not true so

in their minds because they have lost the war on drugs or because they have lost someone very dear to them they believe that the best thing you can do is keep people alive by by letting them do their drugs what would you do to change this we're going to enforce the law so the number one person I'm concerned about is a resident they live there when did it become legal to do drugs in the open air they have rights and they've not had rights for many many years their children don't have rights they're in danger

all the time there's needles everywhere they deserve to live in a country of laws and they should not be a singled out as a community where there's lawlessness so some people argue that there's a police answer to all of this what would you say to those people I don't think that further criminalization of this community is what's needed if you come in and you arrest them how long is the American taxpayer going to pay for them to be incarcerated our jails are already overfilled as it is they've done it and somebody pops up the next

day people are going to use drugs people are going to sell drugs you can try and shut it down as much as you want but this Market is never going to stop safe Supply would help that investing wealth into the community would help that what is is safe Supply have you ever been to a bar oh yeah that's safe Supply a specific amount sold to you in a specific location that would be a safe consumption site where you can drink legally and the alcohol isn't going to make you go blind or mad right not moonshine

correct over the last two decades there have been four key waves that have defined America's drug crisis this first wave gained momentum after Purdue farmer aggressive marketed Oxycotin an opioid approved by the FDA misleadingly downplaying its addictive potential and fueling a surge in prescription related fatalities this cash only operation allowed doctors to clear as much as $100,000 a week the second wave saw heroin rise sharply as a deadly contributor to the overdose epidemic peaking around 2015 the ongoing third wave is dominated by fenel far more potent and deadly dramatically escalating overdose deaths currently in the

fourth wave the deadly combination of fentanyl with stimulants like cocaine and meth has significantly increased overdose fatalities when we talk about overdose there's an implication that somebody knew what they were taking when somebody takes cocaine laced with fentanyl they don't know what's been put into their drugs is it apt to say that they were poisoned by the drug dealer quite possibly the bigger point for me is that kind of poisoning risk exists for everybody now there's no such thing as recreational drug use without risk the risk is substantially higher than it used to be every

morning when I wake up I come downstairs and I light a candle in honor of Julia take a picture of it and send it on a WhatsApp chat when people look at their phones they send their hearts this isn't a story about overdoses it's a story about poisoning people with drugs laced with a hidden substance the conviction was you were selling cocaine that was laced with feny in a story that captured national attention 26-year-old Julia gamani was one of three New Yorkers who all ordered cocaine from the same delivery service and tragically lost their lives

to fenel contamination take us back to the moment you first heard the news we have a family chat a WhatsApp chat and we talk we talk to each other all day long and I noticed the day before that Julia kind of went silent so that night I kept calling her and calling her and she didn't pick up we got and jumped in the car and as we were driving the I don't remember if it was a detective or the EMS said you know we're sorry for your loss so we pulled over and hugged each other

went back down into New York we had no idea what it could possibly have been since um 2010 overdoses involving stimulants like Coke and Fentanyl um have increased I think it's something like 50 fold what does it make you feel hearing statistics like that we don't call this an overdose because she did not overdose somebody poisoned her so that that language we you know this is not accurate it's poisoning you know I think this is an important point for us and when you bring up those statistics I I brought this is CDC numbers right this

is what we usually tend to refer to as overdoses and everybody still quotes the 2021 numbers because nobody wants to publicize that one 10 7,521 deaths in 2021 made all the newspapers November 17th 2021 opioid epidemic they call it you know they talk about prevention and drug abuse and not one of them mentioned murder homicide poisoning it was all about you know oh look how much people are using more drugs and so we need to look at Health remediation sassan believes Julia was poisoned and murdered by Billy OTA the dealer who sold to the batch

he told her was cocaine on the night of March 17th he called up presumably another drug dealer and said hey man I have a batch of stuff here that people say is too strong Maybe you want it but you take it and you know give it to some girls and LOL give it to some girls LOL give it to some girls and see what happens yeah LOL LOL earlier this week he was sentenced to 30 years in prison what do you make of that sentence we're stunned this was a chance for the judge to deliver

a strong message he was remorseless afterwards he never apologized so you can't possibly find somebody more heinous and culpable than this man who himself cut up the drugs put it in and than what he did afterwards she wrote that in her Middle School yearbook my goal is to make the world a better place and so you know in life I'm I'm in the financial Community we think of money all the time and you know all that and it's just you need to take a step back and think about you know what the consequences of different

things are you know people come to their house and they're oh this is a nice house and all this and it means nothing it means nothing for me you get everything to have her back to better understand how fentel is reaching America and dealers like Billy Orga we went to the dark web if I'm going to give you my name it's Torin 27-year-old Torin is a former drug dealer who used to sell fenel and Other Drugs on the Streets of San Francisco Toren showed us that with just a few clicks you can find fentel as

well as literally any other it drug for sale online how is it sent is are the drugs hidden in any way you know like those like Get Well balloons you know like the crinkly ones that are shiny that's my law yeah you can't smell through it you would literally just pack it up you would go into another room wash it off so you make sure there's no particles on there for the dog to smell and you pack it up in another then you double wrap it in another room I would generally just go get like

a normal card I would open up the card and you put the thing in there and close it up and boom like that where's the fenel on the streets in San Francisco coming from do you know oh yes I know coming from Mexico coming um Mexico a lot of it was coming from China at first but now now they're getting a lot of it themselves everything that we're getting is being smuggled across the southern border new images out of Mexico tonight of a massive drug bus more than 530,000 fentanyl pills the problem has gotten so

bad in the US that many American cities have employed Innovative yet relatively unsuccessful strategies to fight the problem overdose prevention sites are up and running in Manhattan today organ is now the first state to decriminalize small amounts of hard drugs inside this harm reduction kit there's no mention of getting people off drugs in your experience what interventions in this area have actually worked none is the pessimistic answer many things work a little bit nothing works perfect l or is decisive here in New York lies on point America's first officially authorized supervised consumption site so tell

me exactly what happens when you go in there either get coffee breakfast the depending what time you get there or you get lunch or dinner they got clothing for people that don't have clothing and they help you out to get off of drugs to they get you into a metalon program but if you want to take drugs there what do they do they just they give you your kit they give you a kit but you have to buy the drugs in the street right they don't s drugs up there they don't give you drugs up

there people can go to this facility they can take illegal drugs they can't buy them there and the idea is that they can use them safely they can test their drugs including fenel use them in the facility and there are volunteers who watch over them if anyone overdoses can step in and save their lives the idea is safe Supply and harm reduction it actually has quite a lot of bipartisan support but it's still very controversial what are you doing now fent this is Fen why are you not going to one point to use it now

because there a whole bunch of people in there there a whole bunch of people there done how do you feel now I go rob a jewelry store in a bank right now I'm just joking supervised consumption sites don't work we have evidence from New South Wales we have evidence from cohorts of drug users both in Spain and also Norway we have evidence now from the staged rollout of supervised consumption sites across Canada and what you see is that supervised consumption sites uh reduce use of Emergency Services certainly if you reverse somebody's overdose they're not going

to die but they are going to keep using they are likely to keep using somewhere other than the supervised consumption site and they will eventually overd and die because the determining factor is not whether or not they have access to supervised consumption site it's that they're addicted to deadly poisonous substances while supervised consumption sites help a small percentage of drug users they aren't solving the problem but which is why Governor Cathy hokel announced the full court press pushing for widespread availability of Overdose reversal medications the FDA approved the sale over the counter without prescription of

the anti-overdose nasal spray Naran and it's now available to buy Ates across New York thanks very much so what does this actually do opioid reversal if you see somebody like overdosing or anything you spray it in their nose and it blocks it it'll bring them back to life if they're like dozing off or anything so we know the fenel can find its way into Coke and even weed so how important is it for New Yorkers to be carrying this around you you'll take something accidentally you don't know you do it by accident and you know

you they put Fentanyl and everything these days so it might be a good idea to have it fentanyl test strips also offer a quick check for deadly fentanyl in drugs a critical yet temp shield in the ongoing battle against overdoses this week Oregon declared a fental state of emergency in Portland just years after officials there decriminalized drug possession measure 110 passed in 2020 with 58% of the vote decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of drugs even methamphetamines and Fentanyl other places like the state of California and the City of Philadelphia also decriminalized drugs and are

now seeing a spike in overdoses Oregon recently de alized use what's your view on that and how is it working out for them there is no evidence it's making anything better the thesis of drug decriminalization in Oregon was that it would be part of a comprehensive reform to move away from the war on drugs and towards a public health focused approach that's not happening the best evidence we have is that organ's rates of OD death are continuing to rise either at the same rate as every other state or slightly faster thanks to measure 110 as

many strategies to combat the crisis fall short psychiatrist and Senior research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute Dr Sally satel advocates for mandated treatment as a solution for both addicts and communities mandated treatment is basically coer treatment I know that's a word that makes people nervous I think about it in kind of in terms of benign paternalism and I'm in uh no way in favor of criminalizing addiction per se but I I do think that you know we have to maintain a civil society and when people commit crime even if it's in the context of

needing to maintain their habit you know we have to keep folks accountable and we can then use the criminal justice system and that leverage as a way to get them into treatment programs one of the most uh developed systems for that is called drug courts drug courts provide a rehab focused option for drug offenses aiming to solve addiction problems missing drug court can lead to arrest more oversight or expulsion and criminal charges just getting to graduation is no easy feed for any of these participants of the drug court I mean we are talking more than

a year of counseling tests and often times setbacks in order to get into a drug court a person will have committed some kind of crime a crime that theoretically they wouldn't have committed but for their addiction they come before the judge and and he or she uh sentences them to to drug court so what does that mean that's it means that they come usually every day to at least at the beginning to a treatment program if they are addicted to an opioid they're given the option of being on methadone or another medication called bubon orine

at the end of our journey we met Alan Justice in the middle of his Allan's a former actor who struggled with opioid addic addiction today he's 7 months clean with the help of methadone and counseling but people you know have that thing like oh methadone no they're they're new drugs now like methadone is it has a stigma over it the best tool for managing recovery for addressing people who are in active drug use and therefore at greatest risk of Overdose that we have is what's talked as medication assisted treatment the selection of FDA approv medications

which substitute for or can be used to step down from particularly opioid addiction that means methodone buprenorphine nxone if you're not on methadone your chances can get as bad as 90% of relapsing after witnessing the drug crisis I'm struck by the unprecedented potency of the Chinese and Mexican made synthetic opioids flooding the US market they're also exception easy to acquire so easy that it takes virtually no time to find on the streets of New York and Philadelphia and the internet brings this crisis to small town America as well this crisis spares no social class it's

everyone's problem as seen in the case of a young professional like Julia garaman the widespread fenel epidemic now sees New Yorkers carrying Naran for emergency revivals it seems to me that there are a couple of options to deal with this crisis at one end is the zero tolerance approach this assumes strict drug laws but also rigorous enforcement which is something that is demonstrably not happening the second Way Forward is a safe use approach some campaigners say that addicts need to have autonomy over their lives but do any of them actually have any control over their

own lives I'd say not they're slaves to ever harder [Music] drugs perhaps as well as acceptance some degree of stigma and accountability like mandated treatment and Drug courts is also necessary to help them out of something that shouldn't be a lifestyle the reality is that we've all known the drug crisis is happen your family loves you and yet America has allowed it the question now is whether it should