 On Wednesday, Florida's Republican Governor Rick Scott officially declared his state's opiate epidemic a public health emergency. This after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention declared a national opiate epidemic. For more on this, we are joined by Sam Kinones. He's the author of Dreamland, as well as a journalist, former LA Times reporter, author and storyteller. And he joins us today from Los Angeles. Thank you, Sam. My pleasure. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. I want to ask you about this opiate epidemic, and I'm really playing devil's advocate here. But when I see the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, saying there's an opiate epidemic, I'm suspicious. And I think back to the crack epidemic. I remember in the 80s, crack was insurmountable. And we locked up a lot of people of color because of the crack epidemic. When I hear of Governor LaPage of Maine, complaining about people of color coming in to his state in Maine to have sex with our women and then sell them drugs, specifically opiates, I'm suspicious when I hear that there's an opiate epidemic. Is there an opiate epidemic in this country? There certainly is. It's based on deaths. The number of deaths have surpassed the number of first of all, surpassed the number of traffic accident fatalities back in Nevada, sub-2008, I think it was. And just recently, of course, they surpassed the number of deaths due to AIDS at the worst year in 1995 of that epidemic. Cars getting safer? And are we curing AIDS? Yeah, that's part of it. But it's also in the history of modern America. We have never had a year when there's another accidental form of death that overtook automobiles. So that's part of it, certainly. But these are hitting stratospheric new levels for the country. And again, of course, in 2015, there were more deaths due to opiate overdoses than there were deaths due to AIDS in 1995. So the reason for calling it such is because it is the worst drug surge we've had in modern America if you're measuring by the number of deaths due to overdose. That's, I think, where people are coming down on this. Can you give me a number? Oh, I can't remember what the latest numbers are, but it's in the tens of thousands. We're talking about 35,000, 37,000. I think it was. The numbers I don't have the numbers handy. But it's very significant numbers of people. And truthfully, I think that's an undercount. The reason I think that's an undercount is because a lot of this is happening in small counties, counties that don't have really good death investigation systems. They have coroners. They have who are also maybe funeral directors. Maybe they're also ER docs with a full-time job. They don't have a lot of money. They don't have budgets for testing everybody who toxicology reports. I think there have been reports out that somewhere, perhaps between 20 and 30% of the deaths that actually should be counted are not. So it's likely that it's an undercount. But nevertheless, we've definitely had an enormous increase in deaths. And these track almost step-by-step. They track with the amount of opiate painkillers that have been prescribed by doctors all across the country since the mid-1990s. You can see them, the two numbers moving in a lock. Right. I want to get to that. The number of opiates and the number of people dying. Right. There's a twin story in Dreamland. One about the gangs who deal opiates and then the cartels, the illegal Mexican cartels. I want to get to that in a second. I just want to push back on this for a second about people of color and the need to lock them up. Because that is the twin story. There's, is it Purdue Pharmaceuticals invented OxyCotin? And then we have the Mexican drug cartels who are dealing their own OxyCotin. So I want to break this down. Are people dying more from heroin overdoses or OxyCotin overdoses? OxyCotin is called the Wilbilly heroin, right? Right. It depends when you're talking about. I think for the first part of this scourge of the epidemic, I would be very comfortable calling it an epidemic. It was mostly pills people were dying from. And I think one of the things that happened was that this affected, this is all virtually all white people, number one. It's very important to keep that in mind. All the people getting addicted, I would say 90% are white. This happened for a long time in Appalachia and certain Rust Belt areas. That's kind of where the ground zero for this whole problem was Southern Ohio, Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, places like that. What years are we talking about? Beginning in about the mid 90s, 96, 97, 98 and really running up into the 2000s for sure. And we're talking about OxyCotin addiction that bled into heroin addiction. Yes, but it was really OxyCotin addiction that people were dying from that. And that was, opiate prescribing was rampant. It was without any thought. It was and huge amounts. We unleashed an unprecedented amount of opiates on the country in the form of prescription painkillers. First, the smaller doses would be Vicodin and Percocet and mothers like that. But really it was OxyCotin. And OxyCotin was a game changer because it contained in the first 16 years of its life, 14 years of its life, no abuse deterrent. The other drugs Vicodin and Percocet contain Acetaminophen or Tylenol. These are combinations that prevent you from really developing an enormous tolerance and daily habit to these drugs because as you do that, you're destroying your internal organs. And so people didn't really die so much of that because it was very hard for you to get up to very high tolerance. It would be very dangerous for you. But OxyCotin includes none of that for the first 14 years of its life until 2010. And so it takes people to very, very high tolerances. And that's where it gets very dangerous. And people begin experimenting with too much. And that's also, however, why people begin then looking for substitutes because on the street, if you can't buy this from your doctor, your doctor cuts you off, your insurance cuts you off, whatever, you have to buy this on the street. It becomes very expensive, a dollar, a milligram, and you're usually up to 200, 300 milligrams a day of this stuff. That's when you begin to look for very cheap substitutes, equally potent or more so, but cheaper, much cheaper. And that is where Mexican heroin enters the picture. We would not have a heroin problem today were it not for OxyCotin. That I think is very, very clear. We would not have the kind of heroin problem we have today were it not for very cheap heroin coming from Mexico. We would not have this problem say back in the 1970s when a lot of our heroin was coming from the Far East, from Turkey, from Burma, from Thailand. It got here weak and cheap and expensive. It was not really much of a substitute for high levels of OxyCotin, but Mexican heroin comes to our country very, very cheap, extraordinarily cheap, and it's very potent and now very prevalent as well. And so as people began to get up to those very high levels, began to look around for a cheaper substitute, and they found it in very cheap Mexican heroin. And this is a story that has repeated now all across the country. But for a long time, people were dying mainly from prescription pills in combination with other stuff, maybe also Xanax, Benzos, and that kind of saying, but they were dying mostly from that. Now, as prescribing has somewhat tapered off, as the pill mills have been shut down, these kinds of things, then now it's heroin that people are dying from from Mexico. In your book, Dreamland, you cover the cities in America that are being devastated by this epidemic. And you've also spent years, I believe you lived in Mexico from 94 to 2004. Right. I was doing all kinds of stuff down there in Mexico, covering economics, politics, a lot of things, but you you learn a lot just roaming the country. What is an opiate? It's a drug derived from the opium poppy, which is the first drug, I believe, that humans as a species, we as a species, harnessed as a first plant, I'm sorry, that we as a species harnessed as a drug. Going back thousands of years, I mean, the first production of the center of opium poppies was thieves in ancient Egypt. That's where we get the opiate seeding comes from that. And through the years, through the centuries, the millennia, really, we have figured out that these drugs are enormously wonderful pain killers, merciful pain killers, truly, and then also extraordinarily enslaving addictive drugs as well. And in the 1800s, we come up with, we derived morphine out of that, out of opium, and we also come up with the hyperdermic needle. And at the end of the 1800s in Germany, they create the thing called, that they eventually called heroin. And that becomes, that really has no use in medicine. It's only survived, heroin is only survived because of the underworld. It's a magnificent drug, drug traffickers. It's, it's very cheap to make. It's easy to condense. It's easy to dilute. And when you get it, it's unlike other opiates, it sends you up and down very quickly. So you have to be buying heroin two, three, four, five times a day. So as a trafficker, you have a customer who buys from you over and over in a one day, one day period. So that's the goldmine right there. Now, for a long time, opium was, was, was opium products were mainly smoked. It was only because of traffickers diluting the heroin that we began to actually inject it. And that began really in New York City with Italian mob type traffickers, diluting the heroin so badly that you had, you could no longer really smoke it. Normally you can smoke the stuff. An opioid you can smoke and then that's opium. And that's a better high than heroin because it hasn't been watered down. No, it can be, it can be the same, the same kind of high. If heroin is the molecular structure of heroin, what it does to your body, to your brain, I should say, not your body, what it does to your brain is it takes it high and then crashes you very similar. I was a crime reporter during the crack years. That's what crack used to do. That's why crack was so wonderful for, for, for, for, for traffickers, for dealers on the street, because they knew that every guy that they, they sold to was going to have to buy from them three, four, five, six times a day. And that's first came opium. Is that correct? Then came morphine. Then came heroin. Opium is something you smoke. Then they isolated it down to morphine, which is something you inject. And that has medicinal values. What is the difference between an opium high and a morphine high? I'm not sure I could tell you that, honestly. I don't know anybody who has an eye on both of them. Is there anything medicinal to smoking opium? If you're in pain? I think it's a, it's a pain killer. If these are all pain killers, that's, that's their main function. That's their main beneficial use to, to humankind. They don't have, believe any other medicinal. If you're in a hospital and you're dying of cancer, smoking opium would relieve the pain. Theoretically, yeah. They wouldn't give it to you, but yeah. They would instead shoot morphine into you, which would relieve the pain. Yes. Actually, morphine now comes in a pill. So it's not shooting anybody, but yeah. And very cheaply too, by the way. It's wonderful, very cheap pain killer. 10 cents a pill or something like that. And you get addicted to both? I, yes. Right. You can, Sheriff. You can get addicted to it. Is it psychologically and physiologically addictive? Or both. Both. But certainly physiologically addictive. That's the difference here. Physiologically. They change, they change the brain chemistry in a significant way. That brain surgeons would be far better. Neurosciences would be far better able to, to describe to you, but certainly that's, that's, that's what opiates do. Is morphine used for end of life issues? In other words, if you're going in for major surgery, they're not going to give you morphine because they're afraid you're going to become addicted to it. Is that a fair statement? Uh, no, I mean, soldiers have been given morphine for, for many, many, many, many years. I think, I think no, it's, it's, I was, I just had a heart attack and I was given a morphine, you know, during my operation. So I think morphine is still very much in use and as well as should be. So these are good drugs to use in certain situations. What about the, so did you find it addictive? Did you, do you crave it? No, I just had very little amount and they didn't give me any to take home. Okay. That's a big difference here. Okay. And you're saying that heroin came from the streets of New York City. This is fascinating. You're saying that heroin came from the streets of New York City because the mafia was watering down. Well, no, it was invented by Bayer in, in Germany really. The, um, it's a long story, but basically it was invented by Bayer in, in Germany. It then was pervaded by doctors as a non-addictive painkiller. And it was used in a lot of, uh, the, the elixirs, I guess you might say at the late 1800s, early 1900s until they began to feel realized that it was really addictive. And then it becomes more, uh, the, the, the cost and benefits of heroin, the costs are far outweigh the benefits. And so it really should have been pushed to the back of the shelf, figuratively speaking, and left it, right? Well, um, it, it wasn't because, um, the, the underworld discovered it. And in, particularly in New York City, that's where all the heroin manufacturers were when the drug was legal. And it, it remained as kind of the center and it began to get a lot of the opium from the Far East. Once again, why was heroin more attractive to the mob than opium? Because it's a perfect product for, for you, if you're a drug trafficker, what you want is customers every day, all the time who cannot not buy your product. And heroin, uh, takes you up high and down within a space of a few hours. And so at each crash, you need more. Um, and so you are, uh, creating people who need to buy your product three, four, five times a day. At the same time, it's very easy to conceal. It's very condensable, which is one reason why bikes, for example, a wall will not stop heroin from coming through the Southwest border. It's very condensable. It's also easy to cut so you can, you can take a kilo and cut it into three, four kilos and it will still be able to be sold. And then at the same time, um, it's, it's, uh, it's, it's easy to, you can cut it and make a whole lot more money than you have done, than with, with, uh, with other drugs. So you're creating a faithful, I would say enslaved, uh, uh, uh, customer base. It's very cheap. It's condensable. It's easy to, to make easy and cheap to make. And all of this was, was why this drug that really we should not even be talking about in medical terms, there's no reason to ever use heroin. I don't think there's other drugs that do better job of killing pain without the risk. Right. When you say they're able to cut it, in other words, they're, they're putting diluted. They're diluting it with like baby powder or whatever. Yes. I see. Okay. And the heroin epidemic blew up, you say, in the sixties, the seventies, when did it, I mean, we've had various surges of heroin, heroin use. Charlie, Charlie Parker, uh, was, uh, for example, was one of the great purveyors of heroin in American, uh, underworld culture or, or demimone culture, uh, because, uh, he was such an amazing saxophone player is horribly addicted, died at 35. His body looked like he was at 55 at the time. Uh, Charlie Parker created a whole world of jazz that, that in which people began to use, uh, heroin because bird did. If everybody were allowed to grow opium in their backyard and could have pure heroin, would it be safer? Would they be less likely to overdose? No, no. Well, no, they would be more likely to overdose. It seems to me that they would, they would, uh, well, you would see this though. You would see people who sought and did, and thought about only heroin, talked about only about heroin, thought and did nothing, but, but their lives, their entire lives revolved around heroin because every day they had to do it four or five times a day. And this is what distinguishes heroin addicts from people who are addicted to other opiates. Other opiates don't take you up and down so quickly. Methadone, for example, um, very gradual thing that they can lead you throughout the day. It's still very addictive, but you don't end up talking about dope all day long. You can actually function as a, as a human being in the world instead of constantly, this is, this is the, the common denominator among all. Uh, heroin, I actually just want to talk about dope all day long. They have no interest in anything else. It's just as big kind of the most boring people in the world basically is because all they want to do is talk about the next time they buy dope or what good dope they had or where to get the next dose. Well, I've heard that Philip Seymour Hoffman, who died from a heroin overdose, and Lenny Bruce, who died from a heroin overdose. One narrative is that they were able to function on heroin that Philip Seymour Hoffman was able to do death of a salesman every night. Well, sure. You, you, you can, you can function on it, but you are, you were always enslaved to it. You can, you can, there are, there, yeah, sure. People can function on it, but you must always be doing it all day long. Okay. I just want to make sure I understand what heroin is before we get to oxycontin. The image in the movies is the guy shooting up, vomiting, passing out. I've been told that's not really what chippers do that they, that they use heroin and they get through the day and they're able to write novels and there's a lot of that. I think every, I would, would, you know, I think Charlie Parker was a perfect example of that, honestly, that, that here was one of the most creative improvisational minds of our, of our century. And he was a slave. He was a slave to that drug and he, and a lot of younger guys got it enslaved to it as well. I'd be hard-pressed for me to say that he was more creative when he was on, was on, when he was on dope than he would not, than he would have been had he not been on dope. Obviously I'm not pushing people to try heroin. I just am suspicious of drug wars and, you know, Eric Clapton wrote Layla on heroin. And my question is people are enslaved to alcohol and people are enslaved to heroin. Alcohol, you can live longer because you can go to a bar and grab a quick drink and then go back to work. I mean, does heroin destroy your body or is it what it's mixed in with that's destroying your body? No, I think it doesn't destroy your body. It destroys, it controls your mind. That's for sure. I think that you, you, you need it. You have, you feel this overpowering need for it. You can never be far away from it and in some sense, you know, yes, there's, there are a lot of similarities between alcohol or cigarettes, too. You know, you need, when I used to smoke many, many years ago, I kind of, I needed a cigarette every whatever it was, every few minutes, every half hour, whatever it was, you know, with, with, with heroin, you need, you need a fix all the, all the time. And it's, I believe it to be a more overpowering addiction. I've actually read that cigarettes are as addictive as heroin. I guess the question I have, and then I want to move on to oxy cotton. My question is, I was told as a kid, don't ever try heroin. If you so much as touch it, you'll be enslaved to it for the rest of your life and it'll kill you. And I just wonder how addictive heroin actually is. And I wonder if the drug itself is going to kill me, or is the dependency on the underworld for that drug, the thing that ends up killing you. That's what I wonder. That's a very, that's a, that's a good question. My feeling is, though, that these are remarkably enslaving, enslaving drugs. They are, there is no, I do not believe, I grew up in the seventies when you could recreationally use marijuana and that kind of thing. And those are some other things you could kind of recreationally use. I don't believe in the recreational use of these drugs, of the opiate class of drugs. I don't, I believe that it is so dangerous. It's more like kind of Russian roulette. And when you get addicted to this stuff, it's, it takes years to get off. It's, that's the thing. It's, it is so scary. It is so mind controlling. Basically, it's an enslavement. Cigarettes are also, I can tell you, kind of an enslavement as well. There was not a sense of, I did, I was not going to overdose on nicotine and die. Right. What I understood is that Lenny Bruce O. Deed and Philip Seymour Hoffman O. Deed, because they knew that the heroin had been diluted. So they didn't know how much of it to shoot. If there were a regulated heroin in America, if you knew what you were getting, then you would know the proper dosage. That's possible. That's, I suppose that's possible. Again, I'm not defending. I'm an alcohol. I mean, I hear you. I hear what you're saying. I'm not defending this. I suppose that is, that is, that is, I suppose that is possible. It, to me, feels like a, I've just seen the remarkable enslavement that this creates. And, it is one of the great threats to personal freedom in America today, if you ask me, is the opiate widespread availability of opiate class of drugs. Not only that, but it turns everybody who uses them into the most boring, the most sheep-like people. Yeah. It's a very scary, scary thing. Unlike cigarettes and un-really like alcohol, too. It's a very scary thing to see how listless people who are addicted to heroin can become, and how very desperate, very quickly, people addicted to alcohol. I know that there is an opiate epidemic. I'm not arguing with you. And I'm just playing devil's advocate here. I do believe on a gut level. I have a friend who lives in Vermont, and she was telling me, we have an opiate epidemic and we have to hire more police, because people from New York are coming into Vermont and dealing heroin to our kids. And it just sounds like the same song I've heard over and over again. There always has to be a boogie man for the police to ask for more money. We always have an epidemic. It's always a crisis. There are always toe tags in the morgue that can be traced to a specific drug so that we can give money to the police and lock up more people of color. It just seems to be the same song over and over again. You mentioned 50,000 people dying each year from opiate overdoses. More people are dying from medical malpractice in hospitals. More people are dying from guns. I mean, we choose... No, that's not true. That's not true. 30,000 people kill themselves every year from guns, right? Yeah, and that's exactly right. That's what it says. The more people die from this, then from guns. And we have outstripped in many states homicides and suicides. Do not equal a number of people who have been dying from this. How do you measure an opiate death? Does it have to be an overdose? Yeah, that's what they're measuring. Sometimes it can be poly drug use. It can get a little fuzzy. What exactly killed the person? Was it Xanax? Was it a huge amount of boxy cotton or was it alcohol? But basically, I think what they're seeing is that this is killing people across the country, off coast to coast. I'm just raising this possibility. The police see what they want to see. They write down what they want to write down when somebody dies. And when they're pushing for funding because of a certain problem, i.e., opiates, that's the new thing now. Okay, he died from an opiate. He died from an overdose when, in fact, it could be a lot of things. The police, first of all, aren't doing this. It's coroners who are doing this. It's medical examiners who are... Police don't have any role at all in saying why a person died. There's a group think among coroners. You don't know coroners. You don't know coroners, if you say that. No, that's not true. There is a problem. I would say that it's not a perfect system. But the problem would tend to lend itself to undercounting, not overcounting. The real problem is that across the country, see, this starts in areas, rural areas, areas without a whole lot of budget. Small counties, states with way too many counties. Kentucky has 120 counties. Now, what does that mean with regard to this? It means that in every... There's 4 million people in Kentucky. We have... And in California, we have 58 million... 58 counties for 40 million people. So in the Kentucky context, for example, what you get are doctors who are overworked. Doctors who have regularized, well as this responsibility, they don't really want of being the coroner or the medical examiner. They don't have budgets. They also have... In these smallish counties, you can get certain influences, people begging. You see the deceased parents in church all the time, and they come up to you and say, you know, can you really lead out that there was a needle by his side or the real cause of death? Can you fudge it somehow? This kind of thing. This starts because... And is kind of covered up. Because I think we have a medical examination, a death examination system in this country that is really underfunded or depends on counting. So some counties have a lot of money. They do a good job. Other counties don't. They don't do such a good job. And so that is really where the problem lies. It's not that the police are telling the coroners you have to say something about how this guy died that's nonsense. That's baloney. That's ridiculous. You need to understand how these death systems work, if your death investigations work. And that is really what's what's going on in all this. To me, we have undercounted, if there's anything, the number of people dying from the stuff. I want to get to OxyCot in a second. We're talking with Sam Kinyonez. He's a journalist. He's been with the LA Times for years. His book Dreamland is the tale of America's opiate epidemic. It was published by Bloomsbury Press, rave reviews from Salon, Christian Science Monitor, Kirkus Reviews, and the people who work on the show have been trying to get you on it for a long time. And I thank you for taking time to do this. I don't want to belabor the point about not trusting numbers. When you don't have an answer to how somebody died, one of the easiest things to say is, oh, overdose. Next. No, I mean, no, when you do have an answer, again, that's not how this works. People do toxicology reports. They come up with a number of drugs that are in the system. Opiates are a big part of that. That's how you make that determination. You're not just winging it. Sometimes, sometimes they do when they don't have money for those toxicology reports, which is why I'm saying that frequently these drugs are, as a cause of death are undercounted, not overcounted. By the way, you're right and I'm wrong. I mean that, but I just like to play the devil's advocate. And there's this little piece in my brain, especially because the crack epidemic in the 80s turned out to be hyperbole, right? It depends on who you talk to. Well, let me ask you about that because I believed that we rely too about the crack epidemic, that they said that crack is the hardest thing to kick, that you can't kick crack. Once you smoke it, you're addicted forever. And they discovered that that wasn't true, that it wasn't as dangerous. Well, it is horribly difficult to kick. I was a crime reporter during the crack years, and it is no joke. It is probably easier to kick those than opiates. I would give it that. Will you be addicted for the rest of your life on crack? No, you can get off of it. But my God, I saw many people struggle and struggle. And it was brutal. Right. It was not a not a damn joke. Okay, so Rush Limbaugh, I guess 13 years ago, 12 years ago, was arrested in Florida for illegally purchasing and using hillbilly heroin, OxyContin. He was able to do his show every day. He was taking like a handful of pills every day. Right. When did OxyContin begin? 1996 is when they released it for the pharma, the company that makes it released a drug in 1996. And it got, what makes a difference from other drugs is that the way it was promoted, promoted to doctors very, very aggressively, almost like over-the-counter medicine to doctors, giveaways, claims that this was virtually non-addictive when you used to treat pain, all of that kind of stuff. And that's really what set that drug apart. Apart from the other thing that I mentioned earlier, which is that this was an opiate without any abuse to turn it involved. And that was a crucial, that combination right there turned it into this major juggernaut of a drug, $36 billion, I think, was a figure I saw of sales of OxyContin since 1996 when it came out. And it, again, turned people into the kind of addicts that drugs up to that point had not. But also have to say that these were years also when doctors rethought completely how they prescribed this stuff. They completely rethought how it was supposed to be prescribed and they began sending huge amounts of these drugs home with people. That never ever happened. That did not happen before, like say the mid-90s roughly. And that is also a big part of why we got a whole nation of people strung out on this stuff. A nation of people strung out on OxyContin. Nobody should feel any pain. Nobody has to deal with the truth. And how did that manifest itself in the 2016 presidential election vis-a-vis the 2012 presidential election? I think in a lot of areas where Donald Trump needed to win in order to become president, you can take a look at those areas, those counties. We talk about Ohio, talk about Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan, those swing states. And you take a look at the counties where he won by 65, 70, 75 percent as opposed to Romney the four years before. You know, with 49 percent. So all what a lot of those counties have in common is widespread opiate addiction. And not just widespread opiate addiction, but widespread awareness that they now have a big problem with opiates. And these are counties that we're doing actually fairly well. If you just look at the very superficial unemployment numbers, they drop from 2010, you could see drops from say 14, 16, 18 percent down in 2016 to five, six, seven percent unemployment. Of course, that hid a real somber reality, which is that a lot of people were too strung out to even look for work. And so they weren't counted. But also you would think with numbers like that, that people would be more optimistic. What lends itself to a feeling of foreboding and pessimism is the fact that everybody knows somebody now who's strung out, even if maybe in their own family hasn't touched their family. Everybody in that community knows somebody, the pastor's kid, the quarterback, whatever it is, workers on the line where you might work. And this lends itself to a kind of a feeling of like things are not going well. It's a kind of an opiate malaise, I think, that really, I believe was a crucial, crucial, I mean, essential component in why Donald Trump won states that put him over the top, those five states in particular that I mentioned. It's a problem all over the country. But if you look at the counties where he won really big in the state of Ohio, the Lingepin of all this, you look at the state, the counties that he won really big by 70, 75%, all those counties have horrible, horrible problems. They also have problems with unemployment, a whole bunch of other stuff. But one of the common denominators is opiate addiction. I think Trump in many ways is like Oxycontin. He's the drug. Well, what he has been is, in my opinion, these pills offered an easy answer to a complicated problem. The complicated problem was the mystery of human pain. How do you deal with it? It's a true mystery. The pain in the human body. How do you deal with that? Medicine began to say, we have one answer for everybody. And it's an easy one. It's cheap. Hallelujah. And it's called opiate painkillers. And we just blast everybody with it. And that's what happened for 20, what's been doing after 20 years. They're taking for psychic pain as well, right? I mean, that's where a variety of things. There's so many examples of this. You can go on and on and on. Right. But the same thing I think is true of some of the policy prescriptions he's come up with. Primarily, the wall to solve all our problems of drug addiction and immigration. That's the same thing. This seems to me to be, again, a simple silver bullet magical solution to a very, very, a set of very, very complicated problems that need to be dealt with in an adult way and not at a childish level. Right. Sam Kinones is a journalist. He's former LA Times reporter. His latest book is Dreamland, The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic. We didn't even scratch the surface. Thank you for your time. My pleasure, David. Have a good day.