As the U.S. continues to deal with the fallout from the devastating opioid epidemic that has killed over 500,000 people in the country since 1999, we speak with Academy Award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney, whose latest documentary, “The Crime of the Century,” looks at the pharmaceutical industry’s methods in promoting and selling the powerful drugs. “I realized that the big problem here was that we had been seeing it as a crisis, like a natural disaster, like a flood or a hurricane, rather than as a series of crimes,” says Gibney. “You had these terrible incentives, where the incentive is not to cure the patient. The incentive is to just make as much money as possible.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says U.S. drug overdose deaths skyrocketed to a record 93,000 last year — a nearly 30% increase. It is the largest one-year increase ever recorded, with overdoses rising in 48 of 50 states.
I think this started for me when I had a discussion with a group of investigative journalists at The Washington Post, who collaborated with me on this project, as well as some other journalists, and they sketched out the scope of this opioid crisis over the course of 20 years. And as they talked to me, I realized that the big problem here was that we had been seeing it as a crisis, like a natural disaster, like a flood or a hurricane, rather than as a series of crimes. And the crimes really coalesce around the idea of fraud.
— source democracynow.org | Jul 19, 2021