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Podcast: Americast
Episode: Fentanyl: War on Drugs 2.0?
Description: Fentanyl is a pharmaceutical drug that can be prescribed by a doctor to treat severe pain. But like its predecessors, that drug has been illegally manufactured and sold by criminal gangs.The president has called the crisis an “American tragedy” but many angles to the epidemic lie elsewhere in China and Mexico. Ben Westhoff was the first journalist to enter a Chinese fentanyl lab posing as a buyer. He spoke with us about the origins of the epidemic, the scale of the problem for US towns and cities and the hope that exists for solutions to t...