Estimates eight hundred reporters have been killed while doing their jobs in the past decade but only one in ten cases has led to conviction mexico and syria or the world to most dangerous countries for media workers those are the headlines the stream is coming up next. Where ever you. Lie and to me ok youre in the street im really could be today one nation overdosed we look into the Opioid Epidemic in the United States how do you tackle the problem with seemingly a lack of resources. As soon as you do it its like a big blanket just. Everything just feels perfect like your body dont hurt you just feel like a new person you dont think about the negative you dont think about math and its just nothing matters if you are. My mom i dont actually know. That tape is from the powerful new four lines documentary heroines children the film explores the Opioid Epidemic in the United States and what its like for those at the center of the crisis the attics and their loved ones last year sixty four thousand people died of drug overdoses a majority of them from heroin benton all and other opioids this week a White House Commission is delivering recommendations to President Trump the news comes one week after the president declared the crisis a Public Health emergency stopping short of calling it a National Emergency had that declaration been made better all funding would have been allocated so how do you tackle the problem joining us to discuss this we have a new york where we fall and sanchez shes the executive director at the Drug Policy Alliance in new jersey dealt to in just. Shes the medical director at the center for Network Therapy and right here in our studio josh rushing hes host of our desires for lines and he and his producer. Just finished making the film heroines children good to have you here everybody just let me show you this statistic at our audience as well six hundred fifty thousand opioid prescriptions on an average day in the u. S. According to the department of health and Human Services you cant even get your head around that number so what you do with the four times film was you actually said how we make this personal harry how we make this people connect with what really happening when we decided to do it. Theres a ton of coverage on this right there in the states at least a lot of coverage outside of this maybe the most coverage issue. That it has been for a while so we thought theres a lot of context out there rather than retread that. Something really intimate and so what we wanted to do was to give you a film that when you watched it you really felt like you were there and you were connected to these people and you got the very human side of the story so we made a conscious choice to approach it in that very kind of intimate way and stayed away from a lot of the other context thats out there although all that stuff should be reported were just offering this kind of one very specific look at it yeah i did show some people some pictures that you take. And you take pictures as well this is from your instagram feed tell us what were seeing is like. So we got called to a double overdose in chillicothe ohio small town Middle America we go into this little house there are two guys on the floor. To feet completely out of it and its just interesting scenario where youre talking about a dozen cops and e. M. T. Cram into the room theyre moving with a kind of like efficiency that you can only have if youve done something a million times think about the way you make off in the morning without thinking about it theyre moving like that but at the same time the kind of a nerd to it because theyve seen it so much but for me it was just heart stopping these guys when you looked at the guys who had a deed there giving them narc him they gave i want to say five hits in our kim and these guys werent responding to it. Theyre at their poles is weakening theyre losing them theyre trying to save and they got to carry him out of there and the entire thing is just shocking but when you really stop and look at the guys who oh did you have one photo that shows this theyre somewhere between bliss and. Theyre there theyre like in the soundest sleep not disturbed at all even though the theres all this action around im trying to save their lives. For. Most of that we dont show their faces in the dark my photos i only release photos where you cant identify them but since. I publish this since we came out with the story one of those individuals found out he was in the stock and he got back in touch with me and so i now know his story and you know your documentary is haunting us just one word to describe it when you see it and the scenes and seeing these faces and the kids and the effect on them but i think one thing that our International Audience your film has an International Audience the show does as well theyre asking this question this is on twitter and he says why is the Opioid Crisis a uniquely American Experience and why isnt it happening in other g. Twenty countries marie im going to direct this to you actually pulled up some stats here this is boxes came out earlier this year americans consume more opioids than any other countries since standard daily opioid dose for every one Million People and you can see the United States rates right there is this a uniquely american problem and why is. Well the opiate overdose crisis has definitely hit the u. S. Much harder than any other country and some of that may have to do with with prescription practices and broader broader issues but i also think that a factor we have to bear in mind is that the war on drugs in the u. S. Has been so aggressive. And the lack of Public Education about drug use about the risks of drugs has been so serious and widespread that right now you have a problem where a lot of people who use drugs do so underground and do so in a way where they dont know necessarily that if you combine opioids with alcohol or with benzo die as a family that thats going to increase your risk of overdose dramatically. And where they have no ability to get their drugs checked to see if they are contaminated with fentanyl which again makes overdose much more likely it is to these are situations where people are going underground they dont have access to information they dont have access to experts and health and they dont have access to treatment because. Evidence based treatment is actually very very hard to get in the United States medically assisted treatment in particular is very hard to get in the u. S. So people are adrift and dying. Well to enjoy i just want to share this with you this came from jen beijing she is a former member of the stream but also now a Substance Abuse prevention specialist and jensen jess we need to educate the public with p. S. A. Is to help in an old situation over the situation because thats a reality now were way beyond preventing overdoses do you think the general public has enough information of what it means to be an Opioid Crisis right now in the states do they know do they understand what drugs can do unfortunately no its not surprising to. Single day when a parent of a patient of mine walks out of the not to a bar what this all. Means and what this overdose really me so i dont think people are valid you get a bargain price even though you know mr is right. What we want you to talk about i think a lot of people think that in arkansas the answer there is and theyre making that more readily available but the problem isnt my experience is that its not working anymore and its not working because so much care what on the streets is laced with until the carpenter no and the market doesnt really those people respond to it the same way so i watch these guys get five doses of narky and it didnt bring them back and i just want to act and lets just explain just very quickly is a drug that can be administered in different ways that sometimes in a syringe it gets put up your nose it blocks the effect of the opioid so helps people who overdose and come out of the overdose maria were going to say please go ahead i was just going to say that putting a lock son in the hands of First Responders is a positive step and its one of the things that that trump mentioned but precisely for that reason. Is so often in the supply now its really important to get the locks on in the hands of people who use drugs their friends their family members because fentanyl works so quickly that you really need to be overdose reversal medication much more quickly as well if you have any hope of making it work and go to indra just told us how ignorant the American Public is about drugs so sentinel in a sentence is. Fendel is one hundred times more important then around so it is synthetic and not ill tell you to be back on the lot for not abiding patience because im also poly Substance Use mostly been the days of beans being used by these people who are using heroin so they by having those kind of other substances is not possible just the luck times now other than their sheer you know giving the lark said to both family members and to the person who was being given all the prescription is not the solution because all the doors is. Another planned one and its an accidental event so only it will be because even though they have a lot of they cannot be using that. These are people who are organising our lot in the whole home environment so they are now doing the brunt of the family members so our pinafores this wonder is having the lights on there and are reaching people is quite meaningful so weve just scratched the surface of this a p. R. Crisis issue in the United States but last week question if United States declared this situation and national Health Emergency let me just remind you what he said have a listen to this. This epidemic is a national Health Emergency unlike many of us weve seen and what weve seen in our lifetimes nobody has seen anything like whats going on now as americans we cannot allow this to continue it is time to liberate our communities from the scorch of drug addiction never been this way we can be the generation that ends the Opioid Epidemic we can do it. We can do it all heres what people online felt about that this is ken on twitter he says seriously trying to clearing an Opioid Crisis in emergency makes just fifty seven thousand dollars available he goes on to say fifty seven thousand would cover tuition for one counselor is that enough to fix it all it wont buy much airtime for really really good advertisement on it especially picking up on the fact that someone earlier said we need more p s as on this but anthony here feels a little bit differently he says its good that this is being treated as a health issue and not a war what do you make of the announcement. I actually think the funding is a huge problem now we dont have enough funds or even the fund that are available right now i question are we going to spend it in the right direction so everything that the president brought to the table is in the right direction but what are we going to do for the funds that are one number to look how are we going to as support this it will be have going to me is going to be more beds available in patients who are embracing the new woman al of us like our nation and you talk to the question which is quite successful and have the cost of our inpatient treatment so that we we can make a be able to fund made available to treat more people were suffering from disease maria theres a tweet that you shared a couple of days ago here is what donald trump should have said about opioids instead he kind of retort what he should have said to the nation give us a little snippet of what the most important thing that should come in terms of leadership in ita states right now with audience appeal is shit. I think you have to recognize that a big part of the problem has here has been the war on drugs the us has been the the main us response to drug use and the drug trade over the last fifty years has been to criminalize and trauma in his speech even though he mentioned Public Health and he did talk about creasing access to the locks on and a couple of other measures that might be helpful overwhelmingly he repeated the same lines of the past he talked about Prevention Strategies and ad campaigns that were all about just saying no which is the same campaign that nancy reagan pushed in the one nine hundred eighty s. And which failed he talked about using drug courts which are again a criminal justice tool criminalizing a medical issue he talked about enforcing criminal laws and he talked about building a wall on the border even though the fact is most immigrants are more law abiding than u. S. Citizens and even though organized crime across the world has always found ways around every wall every border that the u. S. Has has put up to stop the drug supply so my bottom line message is we need to have a new approach you cannot keep doing the same thing over and over again expect a different result the war on drugs has led us to this place where the u. S. Does have the strong magic increase and opioid overdose lets think about some new alternatives lets think about ways to acknowledge that you know what some people are going to use drugs lets teach them how to avoid the harms that sometimes go with drug misuse lets teach them to avoid mixing opioids with alcohol or bends or die as a power which makes them more likely to die. Lets treat kids with respect and give them meaningful education about drugs lets offer good treatment. Evidence based treatment medication assisted treatment to those who need it lets reduce harms by offering frank supervised consumption sites for people who do use drugs so that at least theyre using drugs with clean needles and arent exposed to infection so that at least somebody is watching them while theyre consuming to prevent the risk of overdose so there are a lot of measures that one could adopt that other countries have adopted that some cities even in the u. S. Have have been exploring. And increasingly states want to take explore but that werent part of speech. And so that view is a huge problem and you know maria even as we look at new alternatives though there are people online who want to remember one thing this is allison she says generally addiction was viewed as a moral failing or a choice not a medical condition warranting science based treatment that slowly changing but why its only changing people have some theories josh ill show you this week we got a lot of other ones just like this from dorian who says look at the incarceration rates for blacks on drugs versus whites white people need help and blacks get thrown on infill and he references another tweets the crack epidemic from the eightys here in the u. S. Do you see a disparity there or do you see a difference there i think is spot on i think the criminalization of it and i think that the media narrative the way they treated the crap epidemic in the eightys and the way we treat this now and i do believe that race is a big part of it of who the victims are. I dont think that the answer now is to cover the story the way we wrongly covered that one i mean i wish wed go back and cover that one in a different way but i certainly believe that race has played a part in this kind of narrative changing and we share with you whats going on on the web site white house were doing this show its a meeting of the president s commission on combating drug addiction and. Just listen in for a talk. It sounds. And i think the blueprint if we stay the course and per his beer and recognize that we are dealing with a brutal will. Not bring on its own to be successful and we need to follow through the growth. Addiction is and that i think in many respects. We need. But dont enjoy this is a White House Commission its how fully informing the president and the Current Administration in better ways to tackle the opiate crisis is even just seeing meetings like that is not a step in the right direction to choose beginning to change the start. You know i think as a person and. Im dressed the same from the top view but i think as a treat or being an addiction psychiatrist i look at this very differently decriminalizing which i really did talk about the economy single the truck charges as a part and then the realizing the drugs exist in the south what do they need. Then a person actively uses drugs they incur charges and then they. Meaningfully engage in treatment in the treatment. Of these charges that they incurred while they were using come back to bite them and so they are not able to go back into the workforce and that becomes a trigger for them to relapse so i would think its important to really address decriminalizing. The drug charges that helps us in two different ways one it pushes people who are using to go back into work for so that a white future relapses and secondly the two hundred billion dollars have been spent on criminal Justice System and if even a release like twenty five percent of that money that can be directed to the treatment and that will be meaningful at this point i think all of these factors are very or finding funding and funding this is the point in going ahead with all these beautiful a view that we have on the table so i hear what youre saying there i want to bring in this comment you tube live beyond us watching the show and says the only way to stop the Opioid Crisis to have only reform the pharmaceutical industry is in the corporatization of health care and no one knows that better josh than someone who sent us a video comment this is maureen shes the head of an Advocacy Group and her son is a recovering addict and this is what she told the story of how to listen. I became a bobbin my something connected to legally prescribe uncontrolled controlled narcotic painkillers. That happened in florida and that happened during a time when the Florida Medical board apparently felt that for scribing three hundred oxy cotton two hundred and you know add some than x. In there was an acceptable except the bold medical standard of care this went on for over three years of grossly negligent prescribing. We have folks that have become addicted all of the close the border you know because of the oxycontin express. This is a man made. Epidemic and it is controlled by the physician community. So josh says this is a manmade epidemic does that ring true from the reporting you did yeah i absolutely think so and in fact its one thing talk about the criminalization of it now has created this that problem the problem but that also dovetails with a movement in the medical industry to treat pain this is came out in the ninetys that patient had a right to say they were in pain and that a doctor should treat it that came around the same time as all is coming up in these type of programs where you would review doctors so if doctors didnt treat pain they might start to lose business to start those customers this also converges that same time that the companies who create these pills are incentivizing the doctors on the back end and also advertising for these pills which is unusual in america that you can advertise for a prescription pill is good compared to other countries so this is really driven from the corporate side the corporatization of the american medical industry like that person said i think theyre spot on i talked to so many people i talked to one bad his son played Division One College football really top tier athlete. Twelve kids on his Football Team which was Akron University ended up in rehab from opioids two of them including his son ended up dead and his sons addiction started with sixty vike in pills that were prescribed by the doctor theres another thing that happens in the us is the way we accept authority and we think that doctors are authorities and that they have our best interest in mind so if they give your son sixty five couldnt say he needs us after the surgery we just we do it meanwhile the companies that made those pills were telling the doctors theyre not addictive dont worry about it and all of this kind of convergence together into a perfect storm of what were seeing now still seem to i study this conversation with a look at how many thousands of opioid prescriptions were dispensed every day to people around the United States so im wondering is the pressure now coming back on the doctors in the medical professionals who are writing these prescription to say hold on a minute maybe we helped start this crisis. Can we help to end it. Beautiful question and this is a side look at the crisis started in the beginning of the turn of the century but the transaction is ration and the elevation body pushed the doctors to a halt and make pain as a fifth vital signs and therefore iti percent of the patients identified themselves with some sort of pain and that led to this you know im partial process of writing of pain pills and here we are in the midst of all good graces and lets look at the prescription for being built in the past couple of years i want to sixty five percent of these bills were prescribed not by the specialist an hour by the pain specialist being doctors but by the Nurse Practitioners and Family Physicians and its really going to educate these people not to write. Pain medication for every person walks and not delivered or lives i dont think that in itself is control that you know there are good solution that regular cable is that let these prescription be able being pills to the specialist or treating the underlying pain say for example if someone brought their apple then the person who was treating that will be an arguably this and that person should be the one who should also be controlling the pain perception that goes to that bridge that may be the way to start winter and how long you dont want the bin medication every day read to be any concern about the person getting addicted to where they should be referred to an addiction psychiatrist to work in our hand has been and the are the business and so on in us are being introduced to it is a big back pain then we are working with that being management person and with the addictions i bought i think that will be a better direction to take thank you dr indra thank you maria as well and thank you guy. Part of this program many of us what this from dr thomas on twitter who says we need all encompassing continuum of care the entire system needs to be reformed and how we approach is that the demick needs reform as well as on the. Children out. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Where there is water there is life but finding it in australias arid desert is a skilled few still possess they took us to a small wet spot. And this was this is a very important place theyve been telling us about for the last five days. And under orders against all. Operation is passing on its knowledge the rainmakers of the outback at this time. Sometimes feel that we are really looking into the hearts and the song of those directly involved in advance taking place very good at telling all sides of the story from the political elite to those people who. Know whats happening. Thats very important for me as a generation african. Continent is misrepresented and weve changed that your story is important to us it doesnt matter where you come from. Sub zero temperatures the stream altitudes. This is where the hard part because of the extraordinary journey from polish to tajikistan bribed by ordinary joining the border with too high up theres no oxygen. Just to experience life simple pleasures. Risking it all in the car to stop at this time on aljazeera. And discover a wealth of wood winning programming from around the world powerful documentary as we were running away for our life from a brutal regime that kills its opponents debates and discussions were getting comments on what the International Community should do how worried should we therefore me that this guy has the Nuclear Codes on a scale of one to ten ten challenge your perception. Aljazeera. For the First Time Since the latest rangar crisis began minimize leader visits rakhine state