I'm Raymond Massey,
and I have a special message for senior citizens.
Today's doctors, drugs and medical devices
truly work medical miracles for young and old alike,
but there are some as phony as a $3 bill,
like this Zerret Applicator, for example,
which has claimed to cure arthritis with Z-rays.
There are no Z-rays.
Investigate before you invest in health services or products.
Help stamp out quackery.
Welcome to the United States of Addiction.
We want everything big, we want everything now,
and we don't want to work for it.
In 2008 I made my first film, Bigger Stronger Faster
about my heroes and their dirty little secret, steroids.
I mean, steroids were for cheaters and losers,
and worse yet, they kill you, right?
Well, actually no. It turns out they won't kill you.
But what I didn't know then
was that there was another skeleton in the closet
that was hidden from view, a real danger lying
beneath the surface, like Jaws waiting to strike.
The actor Heath Ledger was found dead today
in an apartment here in New York city.
Pop superstar Michael Jackson is dead at the age of 50.
Suddenly my heroes started to die, lots of them.
But it wasn't from steroids. It was from drugs.
The full extent of Michael Jackson's
dependence on prescription drugs
is splashed across today's front pages.
And not the illegal kind, like you would expect.
We haven't lost someone to heroin in a while.
We've concluded that the manner of death is accident,
resulting from the abuse of prescription medications.
People were dying from prescription drugs.
Prescription drug abuse is killing more people in this country
than car wrecks.
Legal drugs, the kinds the doctors give us, you know,
the kindly old doctor that used to be by your bedside
when you had the mumps and gave you all your flu shots?
The good guy, the one looking out for our health.
Prosecutors say you didn't need an appointment.
All you had to do was send a doctor a text message and open your wallet.
But these days, the doctors are starting to look more like drug dealers.
Dr. Verbovsky orchestrated a scheme to trade prescriptions
for pills, in exchange for sexual favors and money.
And if they're the dealers, what does that make us,
the junkies?
Today a widespread fondness for pharmaceuticals
has turned the US into a nation of pill-poppers.
How many people in this bitch pop pills?
We only represent 5 percent of the world's population,
yet we consume 75 percent of the world's prescription drugs.
We've got no business popping as many pills as we do.
According to the federal government,
last year more than six million Americans
used OxyContin for recreational purposes.
In 2010,
254 million prescriptions for opioids
were filled in this country. That's enough painkillers
to medicate every American adult around the clock
for a month.
I have never experienced the kind of euphoria
that I got from a pain pill.
We have drugs for everything. Hell, we even have drugs
for things that aren't even diseases.
The first and only FDA approved prescription treatment
for inadequate or not enough lashes.
So, how do we get this way?
- Talk to your doctor. - Ask your doctor.
- Talk to your doctor. - Talk to your doctor.
- Ask your doctor. - Just talk to your doctor.
Every night on TV, you see a weird-ass drug commercial
trying to get you hooked on some legal shit,
and they just keep naming symptoms till they get one
that you fucking got, okay?
It's like, are you sad? Are you lonely?
You got athletes foot? Are you hot? Are you cold?
What you got? You want this pill, huh, motherfucker?
You've got to take this pill!
Ask yourself, is it really a war on drugs,
or are we just a nation of prescription thugs?
Growing up in Poughkeepsie, New York,
my brothers and I never even saw drugs.
My parents were kinda nerds. They didn't even drink.
We practically grew up in church.
Our parents always taught us right from wrong.
We knew drugs were bad, so we got into sports.
From an early age, my big brother Mad Dog was my hero.
We always knew he was destined for greatness,
so when he told us he was going to wrestle for the WWE,
like our heroes the Hulkster and the Warrior,
we believed he'd finally made it.
The sky was the limit for the Bell brothers,
and Mad Dog was leading the charge.
But like most things in life,
the reality of the situation wasn't that easy.
You see, he never really got the big contract.
He wasn't ever allowed to win.
He was more like a carny traveling alongside the circus.
He was feeder material, a jobber.
Like most wrestlers,
Mad Dog was thrown out of the ring and injured
and quickly found himself in the jaws of a serious addiction
of Vicodin and other pain meds.
His wrestling career took a dive,
and Mad Dog never quite recovered from it.
It was his worst fear to be average, a nobody.
Since Bigger Stronger Faster, Mad Dog has been in and out
of rehab, wrestling with a major addiction to prescription pills.
He's decided that he's had enough, so my father's
flying out to California to see if he can help.
-Hey, how you doin'? -Good.
-Hang on, it's still locked. -Good.
What's been going on with you, though,
that you had to have him come out here?
Like, what in general's been going on, drugs or--
Uh, no, not drugs.
No drugs at all?
- No. - Honestly?
I came out 'cause Mike asked me to come out,
try to help him out.
I don't know how long he can keep going like this.
He was the one that told me on camera
all the shit you were doing. I had no idea.
-Yeah. -And I was, like, shaking when I interviewed him. What?
Why didn't he tell me that? He tells me everything.
Usually people do drugs, they just hide it and hide it
and hide it, and he's like, not with me. He's like--
Well, the problem is that I can't hide it
for too long of a time. I can hide it for, depending on the deal,
depending on what the addiction is,
I can hide it for 3-6 months, and then that's when things
start going out of control again.
I've already kind of prepared myself for that phone call
that Mike is dead some place, you know, and I mean,
I've done all the crying. I've had all the feelings.
I've been through all the emotions and things like that,
and it doesn't mean that when it happens,
or if it happens, that I'm not going to be sad.
It just means that I have done everything that I can,
and I'm still doing everything that I can.
Well, he'll break down, and he'll be crying,
and he'll say, like, you know, "Dad, the biggest fear
I ever had in my life was being an average guy."
But you have to be average before you can be any better,
just like you have to crawl before you can walk,
and you have to walk before you can run.
He's stuck, you know. He's stuck right there.
Mad Dog believes that his addictions were fueled
by his lack of success, but the closer he got
to the spotlight, the bigger his problems became.
When I looked my best, I was on...
Before, I used a growth hormone a day.
I was on Cytomel every day. I was on Sustanon
two or three times a week. I was on Winstrol every day.
I was in Ephedra every day. I was on Clenbuterol every day.
I was taking painkillers to get rid of the pain in my neck.
When you wrestled for WWE,
I mean, that's part of not being the average Joe.
Like, you were on tour, you were on TV.
I used to turn it on at college and get all my friends around the TV.
Like, "Ah, that's my brother!" and were so proud of, like.
It's a high being in front of 20,000 people and getting a reaction.
I wasn't in front of 20,000 too often,
but I was in front of 20,000 people a few times.
You walk out, and you're, like, ready to kick ass,
and everybody starts cheering for you, and it feels great.
And then you don't have that anymore, and you're just
getting up, you're going to work, eatin', sleepin', workin'.
Eatin', sleepin', workin'. Eatin', sleepin', workin'.
One of my biggest problems is,
I don't know what my dream is anymore.
My dream when I was a kid was either to be some kind
of pro athlete. Now I just don't know.
That's a huge part of my problem,
is I don't know where to focus my energy.
I've got a family that loves me with all their heart.
I've got two brothers that are my best friends.
I've got a father that's my best friend.
I've got a mother that loves me with all her heart.
- I hurt you guys all the time, you know? - -Yeah.
'Cause I do stupid things. I'm starting to realize
that you guys are much more important than ever
-in making it in any sport or anything else. -Mm-hmm.
How come you never realized it before?
'Cause I was blinded by my own bullshit.
Mike, um, has been close to so many goals so many times,
and then he'll set something else up as a goal
and try to attain that but never quite makes it
and never actually has any happiness
in doing what he's doing. He had a big contract
if he was doing what he thinks he wanted to do,
had the adulation of the crowd all the time.
He'd be the guy that's always in trouble.
He'd be the people that are always blowing it.
He'd be the one that would be in and out of rehab
and the newspapers were following around.
But if I got a contract, and I was anywhere between 21
and 35 even, I'm 36 now, if I got a contract
in that 15 years I was wrestling, I would definitely be
another dead wrestler, absolutely, positively 100 percent.
It was, like, 8:00 at night, our time, and we got the call.
When I heard Daddy say, "No, no, no, no..."
And, uh... so I said, "Oh, don't tell me."
I thought that after 62 days that Mike went off the wagon.
I never, ever thought that Daddy was--
That's what she thought, it was that bad.
And Daddy grabbed me, and he said,
"Michael died," and I...
I still...
It was a shock.
The first thing I remember when she said that he was dead
was what I said in the movie,
that I think they're going to find him dead some day
because, barring a miracle, there was no way out for him.
After another relapse, Mad Dog crawled up the stairs
of a sober living facility and was barely even able
to knock on the door.
A month later, he was sober.
Two months later, he was dead.
He looked so cool. This is at Sundance.
This was, like, one of his proudest moments.
This is him right here. He's in the box.
I didn't understand how this could happen to my brother.
We were the All-American family. Where did we go wrong?
It was time I talked to my younger brother Smelly.
Maybe he can help me get some answers.
It was on a Sunday.
I talked to Mike on Friday.
He was saying, you know, how he hates being sick.
He told me a time in his life when he felt the best, mentally,
and it was a time that he was in jail,
and he wasn't on anything, and that was the only time
that he said he felt somewhat normal as an adult.
Mad Dog's battle wasn't necessarily
just with prescription drugs.
I think his battle was more with himself.
I come from a family where I am, in my family, the fixer.
Who's having a problem? I have to fix it.
Here. Here's some food, food to fix it.
Here, Mike. Here, Chris. Here, Mark,
and food can fix it, or I can fix it, or we can fix it.
Now this little boy that you were trying to fix
is now taking drugs.
After we lost Mike,
I felt some solace and comfort in the fact
that you and Mark had not done drugs.
For me, I think, you know,
lifting has always kept me on a certain path.
You don't even, like, ever drink or anything.
You have really no addictive behavior in that way, right?
I won't take Advil. I won't take aspirin.
I do think that people need to toughen up.
I don't think that everyone is in such severe pain,
that they always need a drug. Living day to day life
and dealing with day to day stuff isn't fun.
It's not where it's at. You want to be in an altered state,
and I think that was a big thing that Mike dealt with.
He didn't want to deal with reality.
Mad Dog always said, "I'd rather be dead than average."
It was part of his bigger than life persona.
How did he let drugs take that away from him?
Was my brother's death just another sad junkie story,
or were there other forces at work that pushed him into it?
I had to find out.
Mad Dog's addictions began in wrestling.
If I was gonna understand,
I needed to start with the people that knew him best.
Ryan Sakoda was one of Mad Dog's best pupils
before becoming a superstar for the WWE and in Japan.
I never did prescription drugs until I got to WWE,
and the only reason why I did 'em
was because I wanted to keep my job.
Like, when did you take your first painkiller, like,
from a doctor? Was it from a doctor?
No.
I actually got it from a friend.
-Another wrestler? -Another wrestler.
'Cause that wrestler was also a doctor?
No, no, but he was... He's a good friend.
This is my friend Horshu.
He was one of the baddest son-of-a-bitches in the WWE.
I love dogs, man.
Unlike Mad Dog, Horshu won most of his battles in the ring,
but his battle outside the ring nearly cost him his life.
You got to get rid of the Red Bull, buddy.
-Why? -And the cigarette.
-Why? -Because we're going to interview you.
You can't be sitting there
with a Red Bull and a cigarette.
You can't interview me till I finish smoking.
Well, then, finish smoking.
I signed the contract with WCW right out of college,
and then the money started rolling in, and then
the pills came in 'cause I was on the road every day.
You know, it's like, to graduate
to that next level, you have to do certain things
that a lot of people aren't willing to do.
How many pills a day were you doing?
Ninety. Five pills used to be enough for the day.
Now it wasn't enough, so I had to up it to 10.
Ten pills eventually wasn't enough, so I put it to 20.
I used to take 10 at a time when I was doing 90 a day.
I remember my girlfriend, she would lay out, you know,
five Vicodin, three Somas,
two Viagras, two Cialis,
you know, all my vitamins and minerals, and it was just...
It was like a smorgasbord, you know what I mean?
But I did that every day. That was normal.
Viagra and Cialis in the morning?
Yeah, just so I was ready.
Just in case. - Yup, just in case.
Did it ever occur to you, like, "Hey, look,
I've got a problem. I need to stop right now"?
No, I never really worried about it, you know?
Listen, I thought I was invincible.
What the fuck are pills going to do to me,
you know what I mean? I never thought about...
I never thought about dying, you know what I mean?
They found me floating in the pool.
So you blacked out while you were swimming or--
Swimming. So, I was floating,
and apparently someone jumped in and saved me.
Wake up in an ambulance, you know?
Uh, tubes up my nose. I've got shit in my arms,
and I'm... I wake up,
and there was just...
All I could see was just this light.
You would think after something like that,
that that would be it.
Hmm.
Uh...
Uh... but, no.
December 28th of 2009 was the last time I did pills
because that's the day I had a stroke.
I didn't even know I had a stroke
because I had it in my sleep, and I was on so many OxyContins
and Vicodin and Soma, you know what I mean?
You could've shot me, I wouldn't have felt it.
Look, when I was laying there on the sofa,
I was laying there for two days. They said,
"He's not gonna make it through the night.
You need to call his mother, get her out here,
so she can say her goodbyes," you know what I mean?
I didn't go through one minute of withdrawals.
And what they found out, they did a CAT scan
on my brain later. The CAT scan showed
that the part of my brain that was killed
was the part that harbored the addictions.
And then you had to relearn everything, right?
-I had to relearn everything. -How to write--
How to write, how to read, how to walk.
But now you're back smoking again,
-drinking Red Bulls again. -Yup. Yup.
Do you think you still have an addictive personality?
Oh, listen, there's no doubt I'm an addict.
That's for sure. You know what I mean?
I'll be an addict till the day I die.
Aspired to be a wrestler, never aspired to be
a drug addict. That's what my brother used to say.
You know, I'm actually ashamed to admit this to you,
but I actually gave... Uh...
I remember, uh...
You know, Mad Dog asked me. I gave him some shit, you know?
Uh... I think all you guys did, though.
I think it's... It's nobody's fault,
you know what I mean? Everybody's responsible
for their own... What they do, you know?
I forgive you.
Thank you.
My brother would be able to hang out with Razor Ramon,
Jake The Snake and all these guys
because my brother was the guy with the pills.
Now, he never won a match in WWE history, not one.
He was on TV 250 times. He lost 250 times.
He was a jobber. He was the guy that they'd beat up,
but he was the guy they'd beat up that had the pills,
so they kept... "Hey, hire Mike Bell.
Hey, hire Mike Bell." I mean, back then
it was like an open forum, you know?
Do I blame wrestling for that?
Like, no, I don't blame wrestling.
I think it goes in the NFL. I think it goes on in the UFC.
I think it goes on in baseball. I think it goes on in sports.
I think it goes on in high schools. It goes on everywhere.
My brother, in Bigger Stronger Faster, says,
if I only would've made it, everything would've changed.
-Right. -How do you feel about that?
I think it's a joke.
My buddy Jeff knows about success.
He got a scholarship to an Ivy League school
and went on to play in the NFL.
The grass is always greener, you know?
If you can say, "but if only," it's comfortable for people
to do that, but you know, when you get to the other side of it,
and you have those material goods, and you have the things
you thought you wanted, you know, those boxes are checked.
That's when some real soul-searching happens.
Chris Leben climbed the ranks of the UFC and achieved
the fame and fortune that Mad Dog dreamed of.
But the fight with his own demons
proved to be more than he could handle.
My motto was, everything in excess, nothing in moderation.
Go fast, kick ass, chug beers, crank tunes, you know.
Just, like, in full speed ahead. I would drink and party
and stuff, you know. When I first started with the UFC,
and people were, like, "Oh my God, look. Chris Leben's
out drinking, and he's got a fight coming up," da, da, da.
Well, I figured out that I could still take the edge off
by taking a pill, and nobody would know.
What I realized is that it worked not only for my pain
but for me, for my anxiety, and it mellowed me out.
Where you're in a position of perceived power or class
in the society, you can get whatever you want.
People... The funniest thing for me
was when I got to the NFL, and I had more disposable income
than I ever had in my life, everyone wanted
to give me things. I was, like, this is so backwards.
-Including drugs. -Including drugs.
I mean, I was a kid that didn't come from a lot, you know?
Now I'm somebody. Being somebody,
I didn't ever feel like I was worthy to be somebody.
Now all of a sudden, girls in particular, that I know
weren't interested in me, were starting to act
like they were interested in me. I'm going, hang on.
They only want to be with me, so they can hang out
with the UFC fighter Chris Leben.
I allowed those things to really drag me down
into a pretty dark spot, and for me,
uh... pills were the way out of that dark spot.
I'm the golden child. I'm an Ivy League-educated
NFL football player, and I'm a drug addict.
I mean, I have my big counter on my wall, and I'd be,
"Okay, today I'm going to take five pills."
5, 5, 5, 4, 4, 3, 3.
Now I switch to Perco... I had it all written out.
-Jeez. -I had a big plate... And how I would get down,
spend a few days on the bathroom floor, puking, da, da, da.
Go in, perform, make my money, so I can keep doing it.
It got to the place where I was waking up on my couch,
covered in piss, not knowing what time of day it was,
what day it was, and when I would wake up covered in piss,
I would just take more drugs and pass back out.
Did you ever do anything, like, you're really
embarrassed about when you were on pills?
Everything. My whole life, man.
I got sick when I fought Brian Stann.
I told everybody it was sugar. Nobody, nobody, knows this.
I was backstage, diarrhea-ing, vomiting between my legs,
and they're calling, "Chris Leben out to fight!
Here you go! Let's go, Chris, let's go!"
I stepped into the fucking cage like that.
I see both sides of the issue. You know, one side I see that...
You know, honestly, those painkillers enabled me to play
for as long as I did because they killed a pain
that otherwise I couldn't even bend down to tie my shoes.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but they also created a monster.
I could tell you stories about guys that in particular,
you know, OxyContin, that used to do heroin
and quit doing heroin to take OxyContin
because it's better! I mean, and it feels the fucking same to me,
feels the same, and look, if I can think about heroin,
you think about how horrible and terrible of a drug it is
and where you're going to end up if you start that.
OxyContin feels exactly the fucking same,
but it's not. It's wrapped up in a little blue pill,
comes in a bottle with a prescription label on it,
with your name on it, says "Take two of these," whatever, you know?
So, wait a second. The drugs that the doctors are giving us
are the same as the drugs being sold on the streets?
Well, if you look at the chemical makeup of opiates
like codeine, OxyContin, Vicodin and morphine,
they are all directly or synthetically derived
from the unripe seed pods of the opium poppy.
Guess what else is made from the opium poppy.
Heroin, that's right, good ol' H,
and it's not just the opiates that share a common source
with their street brothers. Take Adderall and Ritalin,
which are made from the same stuff as meth.
So, basically those pills that you have your children popping
are street-legal meth. Man, Heisenberg could've
saved himself a load of trouble if he just opened a pill mill.
You're goddamn right.
But hold on a second. Punky Brewster told me drugs are bad.
Drugs are bad for you.
Grow up.
Illegal drugs are bad news. Don't mess with them.
We must wage what I have called total war against public enemy
number 1 in the United States, the problem of dangerous drugs.
In 1971, then President and huge Elvis fan Richard Nixon
began the war on drugs. Since then, the war on drugs
has cost the US over one trillion dollars,
and the prison population has risen over 700 percent.
Sounds like we're winning.
So, I get it.
Drugs are bad, and the people who use drugs are bad guys
and criminals, like Tony Montana, but Mad Dog
and his friends weren't even talking about illegal drugs.
They were talking about legal drugs, prescription drugs,
the kind you keep in your medicine cabinet.
There may be a drug addict in your house, and you may be
their supplier. Federal authorities call it an epidemic.
When you think of drug addicts,
you don't think of a housewife with four kids.
Mm-mm. No, but we're everywhere.
You know? Everywhere.
You know other people like you?
Uh-huh. There's lots of us.
Everyone's affected by this epidemic,
like Betsey Degree.
She's a housewife from Minnesota.
When her daughter was prescribed Adderall,
Betsey turned to the medicine cabinet to solve her troubles.
I ended up, you know, taking one,
and then taking two, and then taking all of them,
and then I just started telling her
that she didn't have ADHD and took it all from her.
Yup, I took it from my daughter.
When my daughter did take it,
this is how I justified it, when she did take it,
she might have been able to focus more in school,
but it took the joy from her, so I kind of felt like...
I justified it, like, well, it really isn't good for her.
And every time I'd get it refilled, I'd say,
"I'm not going to do it this time," you know?
And I always did.
Everywhere I go, the story's still the same,
like my friend Colby from the gym, and he's just a kid.
When I was 15 I shattered my femur bone in four places.
Basically they put me on opiates from that point,
and it just escalated with the dose strengths.
And how old were you at this time?
I started at 15.
Do you think there's a problem with kids in high school
and stuff doing prescription drugs?
Oh, yeah. Definitely. I think it's so accessible,
and you're not really taught about it in DARE
or in all these other programs, you know.
It's always about marijuana, or it's about cocaine.
This is crack.
We grew up in the generation of, like, "Just say no"
and "Drugs are bad." None of that ever sunk in?
Nope. Nope, that never sunk in. All that did
was create shame for people who couldn't, you know?
This is your brain on drugs.
Any questions?
There's a stigma around it, too,
that we made this choice to just be drug addicts, you know.
Anybody can get addicted to these.
Like I said, I was an innocent...
I'm not innocent, but I was 16 years old, you know?
It wasn't like I was seeking opiates.
Prescription drugs aren't just hurting
the people taking them either.
They're destroying families, like my friend Dustin.
His own addictions almost cost him his son.
The stupidest thing I ever did, eating Percocet,
was raise kids... because there was lots of conversations
that I should've had that I didn't have.
My son was 16 years old, 2011 December 19th,
and he got ran over by a car. Lots of things came to light.
Okay, he was high. I didn't realize he was doing it
'cause I was high, okay? That moment in my life
was a huge wake-up call.
It was a spiritual awakening, nothing short of it,
because I sat there in the hospital,
and I was just like, this... you know what I mean?
This... I, in a way, caused this to happen
because I was okay with so many things.
Who taught you how to do this stuff?
You, all right? I learned it by watching you!
Another factor is, like, I kind of came from a family
of addicts in a sense, too, which I also think
is a very big thing with why it's so easy for teens
to abuse pain medications because, you know, well,
we come from addicts, you know. That's kind of like
the human condition, is that we're kind of
born to be addicted to things.
Why do you think people in America
are so easy to just pop a pill?
Well, it's just because all of us do.
I mean, it's just like you follow the flock, man.
No one ever said, "Well you shouldn't do
the prescription drugs that the doctor said you can take."
That's just a scary situation all the way around. I mean,
how many people are running around on this planet
hyped up on pain pills 'cause their doctor told them they can be?
That are completely checked out,
on autopilot, raising children, running businesses,
flying airplanes, you know what I mean?
And you wouldn't even know.
You would never know it, and it's okay
'cause they have a hall pass, you know what I'm saying?
They're not drinking whiskey. They're not doing illegal drugs.
Their doctor said, "Here you go. Take these three times a day,"
you know? And lots of people will start to abuse them
beyond that, but they've got that little hall pass,
that little pill bottle with their name on it.
They can take it anywhere in hell all the time.
You can get pills anywhere. I never ran out of pills.
Look, I would go to CVS with these prescriptions,
Walgreen's with these prescriptions,
Rite Aid with these prescriptions,
a mom & pop's pharmacy with these prescriptions,
you know what I mean? I was driving around all day
getting pills filled, you know what I mean?
I had one that was 78 doctors in the last 12 months.
- Really? -Seventy-eight different physicians
ordered controlled substances for this person.
So, they're just dri... I mean, they're putting on
hundreds of miles a day going to clinics.
The circle just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger.
I got a bad knee right now. I know what it feels like
every day, and I see him prancing in here like...
You know, but they're on... but yet the doctor's ordered
240 oxycodone tablets for him. I mean, okay, you're either
really well-pain-managed, or you have little or no pain,
and you're just getting a prescription.
Well, I mean, you know, I think a hydrocodone-Tylenol
combinations, you know, in whatever strength you want,
all the different Vicodin strengths, you know,
that's probably the one that's the most, and then the oxy,
oxycodone, OxyContin. Just that whole group
of medication prescribing, I mean, in my 25 years
of practicing it's gone up dramatically. It's amazing.
I mean, if we did a handful a day years ago,
and now it's a handful an hour.
When they stopped making the OxyContin
in the crushable form,
where you could shoot it
and snort it and smoke it, when they got rid of that,
there OxyContin lost 80 percent of its revenue.
Eight percent, so what does that tell you right there?
It tells you that people are over-prescribing OxyContin and overusing it.
By how much?
-By 80 percent. -Thank you.
This is Richard Taite. He runs Cliffside Malibu,
one of the most successful rehab facilities in California.
There could not be a more clear statistic.
Eighty percent of the people using that drug are using it
in a way that it is not intended.
So, now the question is, is...
are 80 percent of the doctors in on it?
So, it's like Shakedown Street. You go see your doctor.
You talk to him about the football game,
about everything else that happened during the month
you didn't see him, except for your health.
He writes you the script and charges you $120,
and you're on your way to Costco or Sam's Club.
You have something called addictionologists, or doctors.
You don't even know... The average lay person doesn't even know.
What happens is they get literally about 1,000 people
at a time paying $500 a pop to come in and fill out
their prescriptions once a month,
and the doctors keep them sick.
Well, you do the math. 1,000 times 500
is $500,000 a month. That's $6 million a year.
These doctors are profiting by keeping you sick.
I've got the answer right here, ladies and gentlemen,
to everything that ails you. Now step right up.
Despite taking an oath to preserve our health,
these doctors seem to be more concerned
with profit than healing.
I think that there's a small number of bad actors
that just have no conscience whatsoever,
but some of these people just don't know better.
They just don't have the education.
I think a whole generation of doctors grew up
really not recognizing how dangerous these drugs are.
I can tell you that when I went to medical school,
we had one lecture on pain,
and in that one lecture we were told
if a patient has pain, and you give them an opiate,
they will not get addicted. Totally wrong.
And yet that's what I learned when I became a doctor.
That's what a whole generation of doctors learned.
It's a fine line because I can't say what your pain is.
Who am I to sit here and tell you, "No, you don't."
We're gonna go back and forth on that one.
Again, there's the rub.
Should we do away with pain medicines?
That's ridiculous! No, 'cause it's very valuable
to not have to suffer through pain.
How do I know that your lumbar spine isn't out of whack,
and that's why you're always having this chronic pain?
Yeah.
And what do we do about it? I mean, I think you're probably
going to find there aren't a lot of easy answers.
They say the hardest part of addiction
is admitting you have a problem,
so maybe it's about time to come clean
about my own addictions. You see, the truth was
Mad Dog wasn't the only Bell brother
that was popping too many pills.
This is my Dodge Durango. I've had this since 2006, I think.
You can see here, I had a little fender bender.
This was from Vicodin. I pulled into a spot.
I wasn't paying attention 'cause I was all out of my mind.
This is the worst over here. You see, like, the headlight
will even come out. This whole dent right here,
I was taking Klonopin and I was taking hydrocodone,
and a lot of them, and Percocet.
I fell asleep, and I smashed my car into three other cars.
And then this is real fun when you try to go on a date.
And the date opens the door, and that's what she hears.
Um, insurance doesn't like to pay for things
when you're fucked up either. Like, it's hard to tell them,
you know, "Hey, I was on a bunch of prescription drugs,
and I went off the road." It's embarrassing, you know?
I had a nice car. It was a brand-new car, and it was nice,
and now it's a piece of shit.
For me, I had the hip replacement surgery,
and they gave me, you know, a bunch of pills to get better,
and then it got to a point where I probably didn't need them,
but I was still in pain because they did both hips
at the same time. One hip failed,
but they didn't know it. It just got to a point
where I was spending probably $500 a week
on prescription drugs. You know, like just
buying them off of people on the street
because I needed it, because I was so...
I got to the point where I was so highly addicted.
How do I tell my parents that just lost their first son
that, like, "Hey, I'm addicted to drugs,
and I can't get off of them?"
You could've told me because, to me,
I wouldn't have thought, "Oh, here we just lost Mike.
Now we're gonna lose Chris." Okay, there's a big difference
in being addicted because you have pain,
and you're trying to overcome the pain,
and the difference in Mike,
where he was, like, always trying to get high.
But I think it starts with pain,
and then it turns into like an addiction,
where you sort of just like the feeling of being loopy.
I didn't know that. I'm so sorry
that you had that trouble, but, um, I'm not sure if--
But you guys are also the reason I stopped doing it,
so you can't be sorry. In the back of my mind,
I'm like, I've got to do this for my family.
Well, really, you have to do it for yourself.
Until you're ready in here,
you're not going to accomplish anything.
When we were young, did you ever think
that any of your kids would grow up and have a drug problem
or become a drug addict like Mike and I did?
A drug addict? And I'm just...
You know, I guess this is what you call it now
if you take prescription...
I'm just looking at it differently as it was then.
It's weird. I never did, you know, illegal drugs.
I did prescription drugs illegally.
When Mike died, I was, like, sort of, you know...
At first, I was, like, "Oh, my God. This is crazy.
I need to get off these pills.
I need to stop living my life this way.
I need to go back to what I was doing,"
and then I just got worse. I went to a doctor
and said I couldn't focus. She didn't run any tests.
She didn't do anything. She just said, "Oh, okay.
Why don't you try Adderall?"
You know? And then that same doctor, you know,
'cause I was coming off the opiates,
had me on Suboxone, had me on Klonopin and Adderall,
because of all those effects, even prescribed me Viagra.
I didn't need Viagra, but next time she prescribed it--
Were you even dating anybody, or...
I mean, it's not like you were married and having--
No, I was dating somebody, yeah, at the time.
Viagra was like, "I'll take it 'cause it's fun."
Like, I'll take it not because, you know,
not because I need it.
Let me just try this and see if it works,
-and then if it works-- -Works on what?
Um, whatever, like, does it make you feel better?
Does it give you pleasure? Does it get you high?
Does it get you to make you happy? Does it make you,
you know, not as sad? Just because a doctor
gave it to me, you know, the doctor could be just...
Sometimes the doctors are just as bad as the drug dealers
on the street. That's why there's thugs on every level.
It all comes down to money in the United States, you know.
In this country, if you follow the money,
you're going to come to the answer
to most of what the problems are.
-Well, the love of money is the root of all evil. -Yeah.
-The love of it and not having it. -Right.
I like having it, don't have the love of it.
The real story that needs to be told here
is, you know, how these pharmaceutical companies...
They produce all these pills, you know what I mean?
And they flood the market with them.
Look, all those guys,
the pharmaceutical companies, the doctors,
the people that sell it, they're all drug dealers.
That's the bottom line. They're all drug dealers.
It's all about money, that's all it is.
Look, this whole world centers around money,
you know what I mean? It takes money.
And for Big Pharma, money is good.
Their senior executive
with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline
had a pep rally in Las Vegas for their sales team.
There are people in this room who are going to make
an ungodly sum of money. Who wants to be a millionaire?
In the past ten years, the 11 largest drug companies
made $711 billion. $711 billion?
If we were looking for a bad guy,
sounds like we may have found our man.
The pharmaceutical industry remains the most profitable
business in the US. More success and financial gain
for the companies will always remain possible,
as long as more Americans are encouraged to take drugs.
Pharmaceuticals have always been around,
from the apothecary of the Middle Ages
to the snake oil salesmen of the Wild West.
All he wants is a miracle, folks!
How can I deny him? If he's willing to pay for it.
-he's going to get it. -Any price.
There have always been sellers of potions and tinctures,
with the promise of miracle cures and remedies,
and most of them were far from helpful.
So, to protect us from these scam artists and charlatans,
we created agencies like the FDA
and required pharmaceutical companies
to work under strict regulations.
But that cut into their ability
to make drugs for profit, and that's not American.
Those regulations were getting in the way of big business,
and Pharma needed a hero. Enter everyone's favorite
President and big business poster child, Ronald Reagan.
The only way to stop abusing them is to stop using them.
While Nancy Reagan was waging her war on drugs,
Ronnie and his administration were lifting a moratorium
on advertising to consumers. You know, for freedom.
Big Pharma was born. Drug companies were now ready
to take on the American public, and Reagan had given 'em access
to the big guns: direct to consumer marketing.
And in 1997, everyone's favorite saxophone-wielding President
Bill Clinton and his administration
loosened up the regulations even further,
making us one of only two countries in the entire world
that think that advertising to consumers is a good idea.
I mean, I have to say this was the advertising and marketing
coup of the century. You couldn't do that before.
This is my friend Dr. Garber.
In 1997, he became the first person in the United States
to receive a PhD in homeopathy.
I mean, the fact that you can present a problem
to an audience as big as a TV audience and say,
"Ask your doctor if such and such is right for you,"
Wow! I'll ask my doctor. So I go to my doctor.
Lo and behold, because the rep from the company was just there
with a truckload of samples, he goes, "Well, gee, let's see."
He opens up the drawer, gives the person like a month's worth
of samples, just, they're free, and then there goes
the prescription writing, and then that's it forever.
So I get it. You give 'em the first taste for free,
and then they're hooked. We tried to talk to a bunch
of people from various pharma companies, but they didn't seem
to want anything to do with us, so I talked to Gwen Olsen.
She was a pharma rep for 15 years
and wrote the book Confessions of an Rx Drug Pusher.
I knew at some point that was what my job was.
I was a drug pusher. I was just doing it legally
and with the... You know, being condoned
by society, and when people would say,
"Well, you sell drugs," then I would always say,
"Oh, yes, ethical pharmaceuticals." As if.
I've never seen a commercial for OxyContin.
I've never seen one for Vicodin, and--
They don't need them. The drugs sell themselves.
So, why do they advertise the other types of drugs?
Because they have to get the consumer to believe
that they need them.
Hey, Pete. Yeah, it's me, big brother.
Put the remote down and listen.
So, you cut back on the cheeseburgers
and stopped using your exercise bike as a coat rack.
That's it? You're done? I don't think so.
If there was a panacea that came onto the market tomorrow,
do you believe that they'd have to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars in advertising on prime time TV
for the rest of the world to know about it?
It would be word of mouth.
People would know about it in a heartbeat.
Women who take Lipitor or the other statin drugs
for cholesterol have approaching a 50 percent greater chance
of developing diabetes, according to this study.
Well, what about all these statin drugs?
Like, they're, you know, saving people's lives.
We need statin drugs.
Statin drugs are one of the biggest...
I call it a big fat lie
because that's what the cholesterol lie is.
The sickest people I've ever seen in my 32 years of practice
were people whose cholesterol was too low.
Without enough cholesterol in your system,
your immune system can't work properly.
All the long-term data on the statins show
that you will die sooner if your cholesterol is lower,
particularly if you're over 55, if you're female or male.
There is no benefit to the drugs.
I'm not saying that there aren't some individuals
who should monitor their cholesterol
because of the risk factor, correct.
There are other means of lowering cholesterol,
besides taking the toxic drugs that the statins are.
This is a very ingenious marketing plan.
What is one of the major side effects
of cholesterol-lowering drugs? Do you happen to know?
Impotence. Impotence is one of the things
that's complained about most frequently for men
that are on cholesterol drugs. Well, guess what the same
manufacturer's number-two-selling drug is that makes Lipitor?
- Viagra. - Viagra! Hey! Now we've got a patient population
that we can sell our next drug to.
Every time I take something, I always feel weird,
and then somebody will say, a doctor will say,
"Well, for the weirdness you're feeling
by taking something, take something else."
And the next thing you know, I'm taking nine things.
Okay. Okay, you're going to wind up like Anna Nicole Smith.
Like, there was a point in time when I had my hip surgery.
I just got so conditioned to, like, taking a pill,
that when the next thing came up, like, oh, these painkillers
are causing me anxiety, so then I need the Xanax,
and I can't sleep, so you need the Ambien.
-Right. -And you can't focus,
so you need the Adderall, and then, like, I was...
I had like probably ten prescription bottles
you know, in my cabinet.
That's causing this problem, so take this, and that's causing
this problem, so take this, and then before you know it,
you do have ten prescription bottles on your...
because of one problem.
Why take it if you don't need it, you know?
A lot of people have this misconception
that the pharmaceutical industry is altruistic,
and they're philanthropists and that they're looking
to heal the world. There couldn't be anything
further from the truth. The pharmaceutical industry is...
Their vested interest is in making their stockholders money
because the pharmaceutical industry isn't in the business
of health and healing. It's in the business
of disease management and symptoms maintenance.
Big Pharma has a economic incentive to classify things,
so that they can create pills for them, right?
Do you know what restless leg syndrome was?
- I didn't. - Neither did I.
Uh, I'm so sorry!
Oh! Oh!
Oh!
It's my restless leg syndrome!
You know, they're sitting there because they drank
six cups of coffee today,
and they've got all these refined carbohydrates
and sugars running through their body, and they're
looking down and going, "Yeah, that's what I've got,
restless leg syndrome. Let me go get a prescription for that."
And I mean, there the indoctrination
goes right in. 75 percent of the time,
statistics say that if they go in and request a drug,
the doctor will give it to them because the doctor
considers it his business, and they're his customer.
That's the problem with the advertising,
the Big Pharma advertising campaign.
What they tell you is, "Whatever your symptom is,
we've got a pill for it." Okay?
But that's not the way the world works, okay?
You actually have to be a human being and feel your feelings.
If your brother dies, okay, you can expect to feel sad.
Feeling your feelings is hard, but lucky for us,
Big Pharma has a solution: psych meds.
Finally, we have the perfect pill that promises
to take away all of our bad feelings
and replace them with sunshine and little happy trees.
With all these scenes of trees and green grass
and convertible cars and pillow clouds in the sky,
if life is like that when you're on the purple pill,
give me some purple pills!
In 2001, the first Zoloft ads hit the airwaves,
and we finally discovered that we were suffering
from depression. America had a sickness,
and depression was its name. Suddenly the market was flooded
with a tsunami of new psych meds.
Now, one in every ten Americans
are on antidepressants, including our dogs.
You heard it right: Doggie Prozac,
a beef-flavored version of the well-known human antidepressant.
This little guy? This is Radar.
He belongs to a friend of mine, Ryan,
who goes to my brother's gym.
Radar's been feeling a little down lately,
so Ryan took him to the doctor.
So, we talked to the vet, and she finally...
She prescribed him Prozac. It's like a doggie-specific Prozac.
It's little eight-milligram tablets
that come, like, flavored and smell like a treat.
Have you ever taken any prescription drugs?
Uh, I was on Zoloft for three months,
about six years ago at this point.
And why did you quit taking it?
I just hated it. It turned me into a zombie.
And you don't fear that for your dog?
I mean, I do. Like, this is kind of...
Like, I was on Prozac for three months.
I fucking hated it, but I'm gonna give
the same shit to him.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good point.
There's been a huge change in the nature
of how people think of as being illnesses.
Doctor and author David Healy is one of the most outspoken
critics of antidepressants, especially SSRIs.
Every disease can be oversold.
One of the ones being oversold at the moment,
even though it's a real illness,
is bipolar disorder. It's a rare condition.
It's become, in the last 10 or 15 years,
five thousand times more common than it was before.
Ever since they were introduced first in the late 1950s,
it's been recognized back then
that antidepressants don't suit all people.
If you're on an antidepressant that doesn't suit you,
it can make you suicidal,
and it can also make you homicidal.
This can happen to you, even if you're a healthy volunteer
taking these pills.
It's not something linked to the illness.
It's a thing caused by the pill
and the fact that the pill is the wrong pill for you.
When drugs worked for tuberculosis,
tuberculosis vanished.
When drugs supposedly worked for depression,
or bipolar disorder these days, the illness doesn't vanish.
It gets incredibly more common.
Where the right kind of treatment can help save a life
and save a career and save a marriage,
all too often it's a condition that doesn't need treatment
and where treatment can cause you to lose your life
and lose your marriage and lose your career.
That's a billion-dollar industry.
Exactly, and they're not going to give it up easily
because there is no medical scientific evidence required
to diagnose someone to take a psychiatric drug,
so it is the most lucrative, cooperative, collusive effort
that there is between allopathic healers and psychiatry.
We've been sold the idea that these things work,
that if you put your kids on Ritalin, they'll do better at school.
If you're at work, and you're taking an antidepressant,
you'll do better at work.
It seems rational to take them.
It's not that we're irrational, we're trying to be rational,
and we've been sold a bag of goods.
People think that because it's prescribed by a doctor,
it's safe, and it's approved by the FDA, so it's safe.
I mean, these are illusory impressions
that the public has, and it's not true.
To get a drug approved, a company only has to submit
two positive studies to the FDA showing that the drugs
worked better than a placebo, not better than another drug
already on the market, just better than a fake pill.
Then to make things easier on Pharma, they get to pick and choose
which studies they submit, meaning they could have
forty eight studies that say a drug is terrible
and causes half the people who take it to grow tails...
Well, you did it again.
Gee, what a mess.
But as long as they produce two positive studies,
the FDA approves the drugs, and we get another bottle on our shelves.
Very frequently, companies would come,
and they'd throw down millions of dollars and say,
"Run it until you get this result."
And what happens to the other 48 bad studies?
They get filed away with the Ark of the Covenant
in that warehouse from "Indiana Jones."
The value in drugs these days depends on companies
being able to hide the data and conjure up the idea
that these drugs are worth more than they actually are.
The research I do,
which is the comparative effectiveness in drugs,
has always been left to the pharma companies to do.
The federal government doesn't fund that.
Now there are a lot of consulting firms
that will come in and do the same kind of research.
I call them "Results 'R Us." You tell me what you want to know,
and I'll manipulate the data to find it.
When it comes to publication, a lot of times, you know,
a negative result or an indifferent result isn't published.
I guess you could call it publication bias.
Even the journals, "New England Journal of Medicine"
or "JAMA," etc. they know. You're basically saying,
Oh, we didn't like the big study, and this new drug,
everything's wonderful and had no effect.
But isn't that dangerous to people taking it
if they don't know the information?
Under the influence of control trials,
believing that's the best kind of evidence,
doctors stopped listening to patients
and looking at patients and going by what they saw
right in front of their eyes. They looked away
from the patient and looked at the scientific evidence instead.
What they they thought they were seeing were articles
by reputable academics in the best journals in the field,
but what they were actually looking at
was ghost-written articles and that no one had any access
to the underlying clinical trials behind these articles.
So, the companies could say whatever they want.
I started to recognize that I wasn't getting the full picture.
The information was being presented to me
through rose-colored glasses, so that I would present it
to physicians through rose-colored glasses.
I was being encouraged to misinform people,
and if I was misinforming doctors,
that meant doctors were misinforming their patients.
So, there was no informed consent taking place in the medical arena.
A new report raises serious questions about the safety
of prescription drugs in this country.
More than ever, medications
that are supposed to help people are instead
making them sick, and in some cases even killing them.
Anybody who has a guaranteed insurance reimbursement
will be a victim of these things.
Three out of ten older people are taking at least
five prescription drugs multiple times a day.
Now, I asked our expert why this is happening.
Tonight I'm told they just don't know any better.
I don't care if you're a foster child,
if you are an elderly person that has Medicare,
if you are an indigent person that has Medicaid.
All the people who take a group of drugs
used to treat conditions including asthma,
depression, and epilepsy may have an increased risk
of dementia and even death.
If you are someone that they can be guaranteed,
has a government job that you're going to get reimbursement,
you're going to get put on one of these drugs
because that means a refill every month,
and that is a compliant patient,
and they're going to get more money in the till down the road.
Those are the patients Pharma loves,
and if they can get your kids, wow.
Then they've got a lifelong customer.
Mom, I want an allergy medicine
that won't make me drowsy.
Children's Claritin Chewables!
Your child may be taking what is called
the most abused drug in America,
and you may be completely unaware
of how dangerous it can be.
It's true. Adderall has been named
as the most abused and overused legal drug.
Adderall has become the new gateway drug for kids.
According to the DEA, 6,000 kids a day
use prescription drugs to get high
for the very first time, and it's killing them, too.
The District Attorney's Office has opened a child death investigation
after a child overdosed on prescription drugs
early this morning.
Tomorrow a summit will be held
to talk about the growing problem
of babies born to addictive prescription drugs.
Many of those who are affected aren't taking pills to get high
but to get better, following a doctor's orders
and accidentally developing an unshakeable addiction.
It's the worst epidemic we face in America today.
Addiction?
Prescription drug addiction.
-Okay? I mean, we have-- -Is it bigger than alcohol?
Way bigger. Every 19 minutes, someone dies in this country
of an accidental overdose. Every 19 minutes.
That means that you take a couple of pills
before you go to bed, thinking you're going to get
your daughter to school in the morning,
and you just don't wake up.
The deeper you dig, the worse these guys look.
Recent publications have revealed safety problems
with the drug Vioxx.
With billions being made and not much to lose,
critics say even in the case of crime, for this industry,
nothing is likely to change.
Unless people go to jail, unless the fines are much larger
than they have been, the companies will find
that it's cheaper to cheat.
In a combination civil and criminal settlement,
Pfizer has agreed to pay $2.3 billion,
the largest health care fraud settlement
in the history of the Department of Justice.
But at the same time, the company made, I believe,
$8 billion in profit last year.
What some industry folks are skeptical about
is that this isn't anything more than just the cost
of doing business for a lot of these drug companies.
Internal documents show that after this company positively,
absolutely knew that they had a medication
that was infected with the AIDS virus, they took the product
off the market in the US, and then they dumped it
in France, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
Hold on, Mike. So hold on, hold on.
So you're telling me that Bayer knew
that this drug was infected with the AIDS virus,
they yanked it from the market in America,
and then they dumped it in markets overseas?
They had to figure out a way, Joe, to make a profit
on a product that they could not sell in America.
You know, these guys are no joke.
They're printing money. They know what they're doing,
and they're great at it.
And if they can condition a public, an entire culture
to something that's not true, they're saving a lot of money.
You know? And it doesn't help anybody.
It's killing a lot of people.
My niece was... She was attending Indiana University.
She was a pre-med student, and she was in a car accident,
and so they started her on mood stabilizers
and antipsychotics and antidepressants,
and by the time it was over, she was on 14 different drugs.
She had to drop out of school. She wasn't able to work.
She cold turkey-ed off of her drugs, trying to recuperate,
and that is an absolute no-no. I mean, you never, ever, ever
want to stop taking a psychiatric drug cold turkey
because you will go into an absolute tailspin.
So, out of desperation,
she walked into her younger sister's room,
took an angel-shaped oil lantern out of that room
and poured the oil over herself, and she ignited it,
and she burned herself alive.
And once I had done my due diligence and my research on it,
and I realized that the information had been there,
that these drugs caused suicidal ideation from the get-go,
and that it had been covered up by the pharmaceutical industry
and by the FDA, that... I got angry.
I spoke out when they murdered my niece,
and that's what happened to my niece.
They murdered your brother, they murdered my niece,
because they knew that these things existed,
and they knew that there were people that were vulnerable
that would be taking them, and they did not inform us.
The onus is on them. People ask me all the time,
"Oh, aren't you afraid the pharmaceutical industry
is going to kill you?" Hell, no. I'm afraid
they're going to kill you and you and you
and everybody I know and everybody I love,
and I'm still going to be sitting here, screaming
at the top of my lungs. That's what I'm afraid of.
So, whatever that anybody can do to add their voice
to this choir, it's a moral obligation.
So, was Gwen right?
Had Pharma really killed her niece?
Had they killed my brother?
This is Greg Critser. He's a journalist who wrote
one of the top books on America's relationship
to pharmaceuticals called Generation RX.
It seems like we have this culture of addiction, right?
And we have Big Pharma, who's...
Obviously they're making these drugs
because there's a demand for them.
They're also creating a demand.
There's doctors who are pushing the drugs, and you have good doctors
and bad doctors. You have good drugs and bad drugs.
You have, you know... Who is the bad guys
and the good guys in all this, or is there any,
or are they just thugs on different levels, you know?
Yeah, I mean, as a journalist, I'm always looking for bad guys,
and I did my book about prescription drugs,
and some people said, you know, oh, you know,
"Critser really let them off the hook, you know. He didn't condemn them."
And my feeling was, "I'm just going to show you what they do,
and you decide if it's bad or not."
We Americans are pretty quick to string up a bad guy,
from the commies of the Cold War
to the jihadists in the War on Terror.
It feels good to point the finger at someone,
and you can't really ask for a more deserving bunch of guys
than Big Pharma.
But easy bad guys are just lazy writing.
Nothing ruins a film like an easy bad guy.
What about all the good Pharma has done?
Modern medicine has beaten diseases
that have ravaged mankind and killed millions
over the century. Chicken pox, diphtheria,
malaria, measles, polio, HIV all but eradicated
by pharmaceuticals, and that's just in the past century,
so maybe Pharma is not actually the disease
but just another symptom of America's culture of addiction.
I think, you know, one of the big problems
is culture, like you're talking about.
I mean, I don't necessarily call it an addiction culture.
I call it a fix-things-quickly culture.
Why do you think it's so easy for people
just to go for the quick, easy fix?
Well, I mean, going for the quick, easy fix is human.
I mean, we want to minimize our expenditure of calories.
It's very fundamental. That's always going to be there.
The question is why does the system accommodate it?
And I think that's pure free market capitalism.
It takes one to know one, as they say.
Maybe the reason Pharma is so good
at preying on our addictive natures
is that they're addicts, too.
And what's their addiction? Profit.
Drug companies used to think of themselves
as medical science companies.
They were often led by a scientist or a physician.
If you could get ten percent profit a year, that would be great.
We could roll out one new drug a year, great.
If you look at the records of the congressional hearings
in 1983 on prescription drug advertising,
there's all these letters, and these letter that go on
and on about what an awful idea this is, et cetera, et cetera.
Well, they're all from the presidents
of the major pharmaceutical companies.
So, those guys changed, you know?
The next generation were not doctors.
They were people who were interested in 15 percent.
I want ads in the Boy Scout magazine,
in every college paper, full-page ads in color.
It seems like the pharma companies are just, like,
addicted to money. I mean, they're like addicts
in themselves, in a way.
That's not news. That's not news.
That's what they do, right? I mean, they're in it to win it.
I mean, you go to a barber, you're going to get a haircut.
You go to a bar, you're going to get a drink.
I like to think of drug companies
as motion picture makers.
They've decided, "I've got this movie
I'm going to show you guys.
I'm going to show it to you so often,
that you're going to internalize it."
And at some point if you get
one of these afflictions, you're going to say,
"Hmm. I'm going to try that." I think when you create
a culture in which the default is the pill,
and not other things that might make you better,
then you end up with addiction.
The origin of the word for pharmaceutical is pharmakon,
P-H-A-R-M-A-K-O-N. It's Greek,
and it has two meanings. One meaning is cure,
and the other meaning is poison.
It's a very insightful word because when you think about it
almost all medicine is poison.
It's something that's foreign to our body,
that one part of our body or another
is going to have to react to, as like an invading force.
Now, sometimes it reacts a good way and we get better,
but there's a price for the poison, is what I like to say.
So, you know, in America we have...
We say we have a war on drugs, right?
Yup. War on drugs. No, man. No.
Fuck, man. It's a war on money.
It's who can get the most amount of money,
you know what I mean?
I made my money in a lot of wrong ways back in the day, too,
you know what I mean?
Everybody's on the take. Yeah, fuck yeah, man.
-I would be, you know. -Yeah.
But why is nobody stopping it?
Why is nobody stopping a machine that prints money?
Like the government.
I don't want to answer that. You know the answer to that.
Everybody who's watching this knows the answer to that.
Why does Big Oil get government subsidies?
Because they sponsor campaigns. Okay?
Why is Big Pharma allowed to continue to make money?
Because they're one of the most powerful
lobbying interests in the world.
I think we're at a point where the United States and Europe
and most major companies need to ask themselves
whether the health care economy is sustainable
with these companies in it, and I think,
the way they're operating, it's not.
This is where we need some political leadership.
But finding political leadership
might prove to be harder than you think.
In 2013, Big Pharma spent close to $226 million
on lobbying our government with an army of 1,445 lobbyists.
Congress only has 535 members. So, that means Pharma spent
upwards of $422,000 per congressman, making sure
the US Government knew exactly what Pharma wanted.
That's a lot of influence.
And in 1992, Congress passed
the Prescription Drug User Fee Act, which allows
pharma companies to pay a fast-track fee to the FDA
of up to $350,000 per drug
to speed up the approval process.
Like the Fastpass line at Disneyland, their drugs
get bumped to the front of the line, and the result?
More drugs hitting the market and Pharma's profits exploding.
If success is measured by return on the dollar,
the pharmaceutical industry made a killing.
Maybe Horshu was right. Maybe everybody is on the take.
They say if you have a problem in America, you can visit
your local congressman. I tried it in my last film.
Maybe it will work better this time.
This is California Congressman Ted Lieu.
In a state with one of the highest rates
of opiate addiction and overdoses in the country,
Congressman Lieu, unlike a lot of other politicians,
is actually trying to do something about it.
For a long time we've had a war on illegal drugs.
These are legal drugs that are killing far more people,
and we need to have systems in place,
where we can identify someone that may be abusing these painkillers.
The CURES system, for example, is a database
that would let pharmacies and doctors know if a patient
is going to multiple pharmacies and multiple doctors,
trying to get the same prescription medication.
Is there any sort of motion to make the CURES program
or a program like it national?
So, it would be great if there was a national fully-funded program.
As you know, it's been difficult
to get things through Congress these days, so I don't have
high hopes for that, so the individual states
I believe will have to pick up the slack.
What's your feeling on the medical marijuana stuff?
Well, people are not dying from medical marijuana.
They are dying from legal prescription drugs,
especially these powerful painkillers.
I had a question for you because I think this is pretty crazy.
It's like you can just go on Craigslist, right,
and you can type in, like, OxyContin, Xanax,
whatever you want, and you can just pull it up and get it,
and they've done stuff like outlawed escorts on Craigslist,
Right.
But they haven't done anything about the prescription drugs.
How do we get people like that to cooperate?
I did not know that until you told me.
So, let me ask you this.
When you put that in a Craigslist,
is it a doctor that issues a prescription,
or do you just get something mailed to your home?
No, it's some dude, you know.
And you just get it--
Oh, you go meet some shady guy
in some shady part of town.
And you have, you know, pink, delivery only,
$10, and click on it. "Minimum $10.
Must have address. Discreet delivery.
Must have callback number. Limited amount.
Send email to firewooddelivery@gmail.com.
Wait for callback or text tone."
That's illegal.
So, they could just stop this.
Well, they could put in these words and say,
"Anything with this word will be removed."
-I got it. -I mean, it could be that simple, right?
Yeah, that's crazy. Thank you.
Look at this, it's a box of 'em.
Oh, my goodness.
Hey, I have a little more than ten.
I only want to sell all at once.
That's just illegal. That's amazing.
Okay. All right. Thank you.
Thanks for showing that to me.
Thanks. Cool.
Senator Lieu's holding a press conference
to have Craigslist stop letting people advertise
prescription drugs on their website,
and this is all because of this film,
which is kinda crazy.
It's interesting that you can make a movie
and actually affect a change in people and affect things
that happen every day, and maybe save some lives
along the way. If not, then I just ratted out
all these people's drug hookups,
and they'll probably hate me,
but I wasn't the guy that shut down the prostitutes,
if anybody out there's wondering.
If you're on Craigslist selling dope,
we're gonna put you in jail, and that's my message to you.
Senator Lieu.
Thank you.
Thank you, Assistant Chair Pentis.
More people die from prescription painkillers
than cocaine and heroin combined,
and Craigslist is helping facilitate this.
That's why last month, Nevada State Senator Segerblom
and I sent a letter to Craigslist asking them
to take down these ads. To date, they have not.
We're calling again for Craigslist to immediately ban
these ads, the same way that Craigslist did so
with prostitution ads. This is a huge problem.
It's time for Craigslist to do the responsible thing,
which is ban these ads.
The whole reason why I knew about buying drugs on Craigslist
is because I've done it. I'm not happy to say
that I've done it, but I have done it,
and I think that that's the only way you can affect change,
is to go out and be honest with people and tell them
what you did, and I was addicted to pills
'cause I had a hip problem, but it's no different
from somebody who gets addicted to it 'cause they like to be high.
My brother died, and a big reason why he's not here is prescription drugs,
and so till you see that happen, till you see people
go down that path, people think it's a joke,
but it's not a joke. It's serious.
-Get out of here! -Thank you!
I first learned about Chris's addiction and stuff like that
from his friend Leland, who called me a couple of times.
It was kind of strange 'cause I'd get a phone call,
and he be, like, "Hey, man, you know, your brother's
having some issues, and I think maybe it's developing
into a problem, you know?" And then we'd communicate again
a few months later, and I'd be like, "How's Chris doing?"
'cause he'd always give me a straight up answer,
and he's like, you know, he seemed like he's refocused.
It seems like things are good, things are moving forward
with his movie and with his career and stuff
and looks like it's good. And then I get another call
a few months later again, like, "Hey, it looks like things
aren't going so good" and stuff like that.
And then, finally it kind of climaxed to a point,
where his girlfriend, she called me one day,
and it was kinda scary. I mean, first of all,
it was a phone number that, I don't really ever pick up my phone.
I, like, never answer my phone, but I just had a sense
that, like, there was just something... Something was off,
you know, something was... I just had a sense
that something may be wrong, and so I answered it,
and it was his girlfriend and she couldn't talk.
I didn't even understand who it was. I was just, like,
you know, who the hell? And she's like, "It's Lauren,"
and I'm like, "Lauren? Oh, okay. Chris's girlfriend."
And then, she was very, you know,
very, very upset, hysterical.
And then, so I was just trying
to calm her down and get a sense
of what the hell was going on,
and she said that she was outside his apartment,
and she was scared to go in because she was scared
what she would find, you know?
She didn't know how messed up he would be.
She didn't know if he'd be dead, laying on the floor dead.
Luckily, she didn't find me dead,
but I wasn't too far from it. The truth was,
even making this film, I'd been lying to everyone.
My addiction to pills hadn't actually ended
after my hip surgery. I traded pills for alcohol,
which led me right back to the pills.
My family rallied the troops, and the next thing I knew,
I was back with Richard Taite at Cliffside Malibu,
but this time as a patient.
After 60 days of rehab, I finally got to come home.
I'm so happy you're home.
I prayed so much for this.
I'm just so happy you're doing better.
I'm sorry.
No, it's okay.
I needed to go to rehab, so, like, whatever I did
whether it was subconsciously... It definitely wasn't
consciously. It was subconsciously.
Whatever I did subconsciously was like some sort of
weird cry for help because I didn't know how to say it.
I knew I had a problem still, and I couldn't...
Like, I was like, whoa, we're... Like, also like, yeah.
I went out, and I raised the money for this movie,
and I got funded on this movie, and they're like, "Okay, here,
go ahead, go make your movie." What am I gonna do, turn around
and, like, "Well, here's the problem with the movie.
I'm actually a drug addict and an alcoholic, and I can't
admit it to you?" So, like, let's not make the movie.
I was sort of like wheels in motion, and I'm like, you know,
when they said, "Okay, you won, you got the money."
I'm like, shit.
Now I got the money. Now I actually have to do it.
With you, you know. I know, you know...
If I get phone calls a lot, and you're excited,
I know that you're doing good, but it's when you don't want
to talk when I know you're not doing good, and I don't want
to make that phone call.
You kind of play these things out,
and you're just gonna be, like, "Oh, he's just gonna
tell me to fuck off," and I don't know why.
But I wouldn't do that. I respect you probably more than anybody.
You'd be the only person I'd listen to.
Yeah.
The only one.
Uh, yeah. It's tough, like I said.
I'm certainly welled up right now over it.
There's so much that I've lied about.
There's so much that I feel sorry, like feel bad for.
Even during the course of this movie, I'm a liar, you know.
In the middle of the movie, I go to the State Capitol,
and I talk to the Senator, and I say to him, you know,
"You can buy these drugs on Craigslist,"
and he said, "Well, how do you know?" and I said,
"Well, I used to do it years ago." I was doing it
while I was making the movie. I was on the phone
calling people on Craigslist buying Xanax.
If you're an addict, you don't have a choice. Okay?
You don't have control over it.
It's got control over you.
What this is, it's a behavioral disorder. You habituate,
you do over and over and over again certain actions,
and you create a neural pathway in your brain, okay?
And that's the action that you're more likely to repeat.
Any time you're out of balance with anything,
at its most simplest level, it's a behavior
that you want to change,
and you have to replace it with a behavior
that is more mindful and balanced.
So, you change that behavior that's causing you wreckage,
or grief in some way, and you replace it
with the behavior that serves you.
The problem with people is that they don't want
to take responsibility. They want to blame someone else.
The pharmaceutical industry isn't doing this to us
if we don't allow it to be done.
There's something called consumer demand.
If there was no consumer demand, they would stop
pushing the things down our throats.
So, people have to be proactive,
and they have to start self-educating
and be their own health advocate.
If you don't speak up for you,
no one is going to speak up for you.
This is Kat Taylor. She's a child psychologist
specializing in families dealing with addiction.
Why do you think addiction is such a big problem in America?
Our culture trains us to avoid bad things,
and I work with a lot of children, and I ask them
to identify a time they felt sad, and I have
a lot of children that will not identify a time
they feel sad because we're not supposed to be sad.
We get these messages in our media and in our culture
that everything's supposed to be great.
Anybody could just go to Facebook, right?
Everything looks wonderful on Facebook, right?
We're all launching our own little campaigns
about how great our lives are, and we want to have
the white picket fence.
We want to have that American dream,
and it's just going to be... Everything's gonna be great,
so this abject denial of anything negative
leads us to feel very uncomfortable.
A lot of times those feelings are normal.
Negative feelings are normal. Sad feelings are normal.
It's part of life. We have to accept it.
As I was going through the footage of this film,
I came across an interview my father did with my brother
right before he died
that seems to get to the heart of the matter.
So, what's your plan? What do you think you're gonna do?
Yeah, what I need to do is, all the energy and time
and money that I waste and spend on self-destructing,
I need to spend on self-improving.
The biggest thing that you said
is that you don't want to be
an average Joe, and my point is there's nothing wrong
with being an average Joe 'cause average Joe is the guy
who fights for his country, you know. He doesn't know
how to do it, but he gets to Normandy, on the beach,
and he decides, "I'm gonna step up and get this done."
That's average Joe. He steps up to the plate
and takes care of the problem, whatever the problem is,
Like, I don't really feel like there's any problem
with being an average Joe, but you do. You think that...
You think I think you think that you need to be,
or you want to be a superstar of some kind.
Well, I thought I was over that, and apparently I'm not.
You know what I mean? Like--
Well, but that's the thing, though.
I don't think that would make you happy, even if you were.
You can't go on to be a superstar,
a super personality, a super anything,
until you step up to the plate and manage your own problem.
You could go on and be great and happy.
You could end up dead doing what you're doing.
Uh, that's not what I want for you.
Okay.
And I'm here because I'm willing to do
whatever it takes to help you. I love you.
I don't know what else to say at this point.
Me neither, but I think we should talk again
before they leave, though. All right? Love you.
Love you.
Thanks for coming out.
Yeah. I can't get up anymore.
At the beginning of this movie,
I said my heroes were dying,
but maybe I just chose the wrong heroes.
Maybe the real heroes are the average Joes,
people like my father. Maybe if Mad Dog and I
were satisfied with what we had, instead of feeling like
the grass is always greener, we wouldn't have turned
into something outside of ourselves for our happiness.
In a much bigger thing, this movie is not really
about just prescription drugs. It's about addiction.
It's about why are we hooked on shit?
Why are we so easy to... I need my Starbucks every day.
I need this every day. I need that every day.
When we are at sort of at our limit of how many addictions
we could have, something new comes out, you know what I mean?
If there's anything I've learned over the course
of making this film, America is a nation of addicts.
We live in a quick-fix consumer culture,
where the good life is just a purchase away.
Whether it's a new car, a new iPhone or a new pill,
all of your problems can be solved
with this amazing new product, and that is something
that Big Pharma has exploited incredibly well
and to disastrous effect.
We are constantly bombarded
by images of unattainable lifestyles inhabited
by always smiling people who seem to have no problems.
But the real world is full of problems,
and we're never told what to do
with the emptiness that leaves behind.
I am on a lot of prescription pills, though.
Oh, was that a story? No, it's an addiction.
Is being hooked on video games a medical condition?
Startling new insight into the addictive power
of sugary, salty and fatty foods...
Coffee addiction is real,
and Americans drink more coffee than anyone else.
We've been reporting on Internet addictions
on a mom who spent 50 hours a week playing online games
and a dad who became obsessed with Internet porn sites.
Somewhere along the way, we traded doing the hard thing
for doing the easy thing, and it hasn't suited us well.
In our push to become the greatest country in the world,
we have lost sight of what made us that way in the first place.
It's time for America to detox.
We need to examine
why we are so quick to eat that cheeseburger,
drink that coffee or take those pills.
Do we really need it, or are we just feeding
the addict that hides in us all?