00:00Thank you to Jim O'Neill, to Tom Przewosnik, to Marty McCary, and to Wendy as well.
00:07Thank you for that, for sharing your story.
00:11I spent 14 years a heroin addict, and I've been 43 years in recovery.
00:18And so I spent a lot of time talking about addiction and reading about it.
00:23And typically in most societies, you have about 10% of the population that suffers from addiction.
00:30But when there is availability, that can become a crisis.
00:35And you can have, for example, in Yemen, virtually 100% of the adult population is addicted to cot,
00:43because it's available on every corner.
00:46And my addiction started because of, let me say this, it was precipitated by availability.
00:52In April of 1968, three months before my dad died, the French Connection, the biggest heroin bust in history, heroin recovery, happened all together.
01:11They got out of one automobile 200 pounds of pure heroin, and they ended up getting, I think, about 1,600 pounds over time.
01:21That heroin was then stolen from the evidence locker room in Manhattan DA's office, and it was distributed on the streets of New York.
01:35And for several years, there was $2 heroin, and for several years, there was $2 heroin, so it was available in deuces.
01:41And it was, there were people on every corner in Harlem, every corner in Lower East Side, who were selling $2 heroin.
01:49And 72nd Street in Central Park, there were over 100 dealers selling it at that time.
01:56And, you know, I had iron willpower in other parts of my life.
02:01I gave up candy for Lent when I was 13.
02:04I never ate candy again until I was in college.
02:07I gave up desserts for Lent the following year, and I never had another dessert until I was playing sports in college and trying to bulk up for sports.
02:16I felt I could do anything with my willpower, but this compulsion was absolutely impervious to my will.
02:24And part of the problem was just the availability.
02:28It was too easy to get this drug for me.
02:32And if you look at the waves of addiction that Marty talked about throughout history, they were all precipitated by availability.
02:43The, you know, morphine was invented in 1803.
02:47And during the 1880s and 1890s, there was an addiction crisis in this country.
02:53One, because of the availability of opium that was coming in through immigrant supply chains.
03:00And the other was there was a lot of Civil War veterans who had become addicted, and it was widely available.
03:06Cocaine was available in medicinal drinks and in popular drinks, like Coca-Cola.
03:14And Congress, in response to that crisis, made heroin and cocaine illegal in 1914.
03:23And we had a break from it for many, many years.
03:26And then, you know, the drug culture began in the 1960s, where it was psychedelics, etc.
03:35But the real addiction crisis began after 1969, when that heroin became available.
03:42And you got a whole generation that was hooked on that.
03:45And then in 1970, Congress again acted to criminalize heroin possession.
03:50And we got a little bit of freedom until the 1880s, I mean, 1980s, when there was a drug cartels in Mexico and elsewhere developed supply lanes through the Bahamas and Mexico that the DEA was not ready for at that time.
04:09There were huge surpluses of cocaine in our country.
04:11And the drug dealers figured out a way to market it very cheaply through a new form of cocaine called crack.
04:20And throughout the 80s and 90s, we had the crack crisis in our country because of the availability.
04:25And then in 2000, we had the oxycodone crisis because suddenly opiate pills were available partly because of the agency capture at FDA.
04:41That Marty is now dismantling.
04:45And with that, FDA's action abetted that crisis.
04:50And so when we have that availability, it turns into a national crisis.
04:56And we're still losing 80,000 kids a year.
05:00Three years ago, we lost 106,000 kids to addiction.
05:04And that's double the number of children that died of American kids who died during the 20-year Vietnam War.
05:13It was two Vietnam Wars worth of casualties a year from this crisis.
05:18And as Mark Wayne said, all of us are touched.
05:21President Trump is touched.
05:23His family also suffered from addiction.
05:26In my family, I lost a brother to this disease.
05:31I lost a niece during COVID, a niece who I raised in my house who was like a daughter to me.
05:38I lost another niece to injuries who's now a quadriplegic because of this disease.
05:48But all of our families are touched, every American family.
05:52The financial cost to our country is in the trillions.
05:56And what we're determined to do is to avert a fourth wave of addiction.
06:02You know, I became an addict because it was so available.
06:05But I still had to go to Harlem or I had to go to the South Bronx or I had to go to the Lower East Side.
06:12And now you can go to any gas station.
06:14And the people who are marketing these drugs, we looked, we were met with Pam Bondi yesterday talking about this issue and with these people from the DEA.
06:27And they showed us maps of the places where the vape shops and the smoke shops where this stuff is being sold.
06:38And they're around military reservations in our country and there's, you know, the DEA has done measurements of urine in our troops and they're skyrocketing the more it's directly correlated to the number of vape shops in their area.
06:55They're putting them around schools, they're putting them in our poorest neighborhoods, and now they're putting them in every gas station.
07:11This is really a sinister, sinister industry.
07:17As Marty pointed out, we've been, our agencies have been asleep in the wheel for all of these other crises.
07:26And now we're going to wake up and we're going to stop this before it starts.
07:31So I want to thank all of these ladies and gentlemen for their commitment to making sure that this does not happen again in our country and averting the fourth wave of addiction.
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