Ep. 249 - The First Agency to Sound the Alarm.

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While many people in power ignored the mounting evidence of the Opioid Crisis, one leader refused to turn a blind eye. In 2009, fresh from seven years as NYC’s health commissioner, Dr. Tom Frieden was appointed a director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC) by president Obama. Dr. Frieden immediately got to work and started by wading through eight-hundred-pages of Health Statistics Us. To say he was stunned by what he found is an understatement. The number of lives lost at the hands of opioids was comparable to that of AIDS in Africa, the 1918 influenza pandemic, or a war. Fifteen thousand people died from prescription painkiller overdoses in 2010 alone, and enough narcotics were prescribed to give every adult in America over a month’s worth of pills. One thing was clear. There weren’t just a few careless people dying of overdoses. America was facing an epidemic, and big pharma was pulling the strings. Today, Dr. Frieden joins us to share his insights from his watch as Director of the CDC and his perspective on the state of the opioid epidemic today. For the full story of America’s first real stand against the opioid epidemic, from the first leader to get it right, listen to today’s podcast.