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*** is the
deadliest drug on the face
of the planet.
It's like a mother's
hug when you have it,
but it's like a Daddy's smack in
the head when you don't have it.
It starts
out a pretty poppy,
but ends up a poisonous liquid,
injected into
the veins of addicts.
It's not a party it
ends up to be pain and hurt.
The global ***
industry funds terrorism and
international crime while
undermining the fabric of
society.
If an addict wants to
be an addict they're gonna be an
addict.
Put your hands up!
- America is at war
-- at home and abroad --
in a desperate attempt to end
***'s worldwide reign.
Producers, traffickers,
dealers, users, doctors, police
they're all part of the
$300 million a year global
industry that is -
Drugs Incorporated.
Vancouver, Canada.
Lianne Gladue is 42 years old.
She's married with 3 children.
LIANNE GLADUE: I don't have a
story of: oh my mother hated me,
my dad used to do this to me.
I had great parents.
In all honesty I
let them down a bit.
took her first hit of ***.
She's been addicted and
homeless ever since.
LIANNE GLADUE: This is my home.
These are my neighbors.
These are my storekeepers.
This is where I live.
I live in a shelter.
I share a room with 2 other
strangers and I share a bathroom
with 45 other people.
My addiction controls
me every day.
It controls where I live;
it controls who I see,
it controls who I don't
see, that's the worse part,
who I don't see.
I wanna give up dope
every single day
every time I miss my children.
Lianne's
friend Patricia,
prostitutes to
support her habit.
PATRICIA BOYT: Oh, I
left home when I was 16.
My dad was an alcoholic and
didn't like my boyfriend so I
ended up moving out, ended up
surviving by selling marijuana
on the streets.
Then marijuana led to ***,
and the *** led to ***.
Eventually selling marijuana
wasn't fast enough money
so I ended up on the corner
selling my body to support my
*** habit.
Come on!
There's no single
path to *** addiction.
Nearly a quarter of all people
who try the drug eventually
become addicted.
PATRICIA BOYT: my first
injection I did of ***,
within 30 days I had my
first criminal charge.
*** changes
the way the brain works.
So when an addict is
deprived of the drug,
they become physically sick.
PATRICIA BOYT: I don't
how else to explain it.
It's like a cup of cocoa before
bed and having a hot bath.
The nice soothing
feeling you get?
The same thing.
Hey, how are you?
I do it first to get well
and then I do it to get high.
Want some company?
Vancouver has one of
the highest standards of living
in the world.
But the million dollar
yachts and beautiful beaches,
stand in stark contrast to
Main Street and Hastings in the
Downtown Eastside.
A four by ten block area in the
heart of Vancouver's skid row is
home to thousands
of addicts -
one of the largest
concentrations in North America.
LIANNE GLADUE: We'll
walk up Carnagie Alley.
Lianne's lived
in the area for 7 years.
LIANNE GLADUE: This
is Carnagie Alley.
More drugs are consumed, sold,
bartered than any place else.
I lived right here for 4
years, this was my back yard.
Um, I have looked out my window
and seen a person sitting there
and for $5 almost
been beaten to death.
I've looked out my window and
saw a friend of mine overdosed,
ran down and saved his life.
This is my alley.
This is where I learned
to do what I had to do,
which was sell dope to
support my *** habit.
How did I end up down here?
I dabbled with *** for
numerous years and was able to
continue a functional lifestyle
with my family and my children
and my husband.
Then I got sick, medically sick.
Was introduced with
morphine which is an ***,
and I got wired to morphine.
And a doctor that prescribed me
an absurd amount of morphine,
that as far as I'm concerned
wired me up worse than any
*** dealer
whatever.
And the College of Physicians
and Surgeons started an
investigation on him.
He immediately cut
my prescription,
and I had no means
to support my habit.
And so from a small town
a 40 minute ferry ride,
within 6 weeks I was down
here learning to sling crack.
*** causes physical
changes in the brain that lead
to chemical dependence.
If an addict doesn't shoot
up at least twice a day
they go into withdrawal.
LIANNE GLADUE: You
dope sick right now?
Lianne runs
into her friend Meg,
who needs help shooting up.
LIANNE GLADUE: Okay,
Meg's dope sick,
so she's got low
blood pressure, right.
'Dope sick'
means she's in withdrawal.
Because she has low
blood pressure,
she can't find a vein to inject.
LIANNE GLADUE: I jug everybody.
Meg needs
Lianne to "jug" her,
or shoot *** directly
into her jugular vein.
LIANNE GLADUE: Blow, blow!
Physical symptoms of
*** withdrawal include severe
muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhea,
and in some cases even death.
Addicts will do anything
for their next fix.
LIANNE GLADUE: It's just
gross what happens here.
The most inhumane things.
People falling asleep and
their shoes being taken,
because somebody is dope sick
and they need to sell the shoes.
By 11am, Lianne
escapes the chaos of the alleys
and heads to Insite
What are you using?
LIANNE GLADUE: ***
It's a government run
facility that provides users
with clean needles and a
safe place to shoot up.
*** use is so risky because
it's almost always injected.
Sharing needles spreads ***
and other infectious diseases.
The Insite project was set up in
Eastside posted the highest
rates of *** in
the western world.
JAMES WHITMORE: If we
didn't have Insite,
we wouldn't have lives, right?
This place does save lives.
Because it's injected,
***'s impact on the brain
is extreme.
Unlike other drugs that
rely on snorting or smoking,
***'s effects are
felt within seconds.
It quickly crosses from the
blood stream into the brain,
releasing huge amounts of
dopamine which trigger a
euphoric state in the user.
The high is intense
but the low that
follows is unbearable.
JAMES WHITMORE: It's like a
Mother's hug when you have it,
but it's like a Daddy's smack in
the head when you don't have it.
It hurts when you don't have it.
It's *** right.?
Lianne
prepares her ***.
LIANNE GLADUE: They call it the
devil's dandruff. It's all evil.
She goes through
the same routine every day.
LIANNE GLADUE: The golden
liquid is John Travolta in Pulp
Fiction, Train Spotting,
made it look real romantic.
As far as I'm concerned
this still kills people.
It's the very thing I need to
live without being dope sick.
Ah we got it. And done.
As the ***
courses through her veins,
Lianne descends into remorse.
LIANNE GLADUE:This is a disease.
It is not a moral decision
addiction.
I didn't go at 12 years old,
roll out of bed and say
I want to be a junkie.
The streets of
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside
are flooded with
high-grade ***.
That's $1,000
worth of dope right there.
And it's taken an
epic journey to get here.
*** begins it's life as
a beautiful flower, grown
Afghanistan's Helmand Province.
In Helmand Province, poppy
farmer Ahmad Ollah harvests
his crop.
He scores the poppies so they
bleed *** sap --
the raw ingredient of ***.
Ahmad relies on the sale of his
crop to feed the 18 members of
his family through the
long Afghan winter.
A car arrives with a
message--envoys of a local
warlord want to buy his ***.
Two million people across the
country are involved in the
cultivation of *** poppies.
More than 75 percent of the
world's *** supply originates
here.
The buyers inspect Ahmad's ***
Ahmad was
hoping for $40 per kilo.
Unfortunately for Ahmad, the
buyer only pays $34 per kilo.
The raw *** is taken to the
home of Mansur Khan -
a tribal leader, who has
his own personal militia.
He's one of a group of
drug warlords who control
large areas of Afghanistan.
Khan prepares to ship
the *** to Iran,
where it will be
turned into ***.
His smugglers choose a crossing
point in one of the Afghan
provinces that border Iran.
The terrain is dangerous and
there's constant threat of
ambush by both the Allied
forces and the Iranian military.
The convoy suddenly stops when
they're radioed by a scout on
horseback.
The spies have helped
them avoid an ambush by
the Iranian military.
Producers in Iran and
Afghanistan can use simple
methods to process
the *** into ***.
The lab isn't high tech.
First, the villagers use a
wooden block and a car jack to
press all the moisture
out of the raw ***.
The dry *** sap is heated in
an iron cauldron with water and
treated with a series of
chemicals to produce the ***.
Then all the moisture is pressed
out of the mixture using a
wooden plank.
Finally, the *** is dried
out over a fire and tested.
An Afghan farmer earns more
than the average yearly wage by
selling the *** needed to
make just one kilo of ***.
By the time that kilo reaches
America, it's worth $130,000.
The business of ***
production isn't just about
feeding hungry farmers.
Since 2005 the Taliban -
the protectors and
sponsors of Al Qaeda
-- have skimmed more than
$450 million in profits from
the *** business.
Khan trafficks his *** to
international crime syndicates
in Iran who turn it into
*** and sell it for up
to $5,000 a kilo.
The border is fiercely guarded
because Iran has the highest
*** addiction
rate in the world.
Camel caravans leave smugglers
vulnerable to attack.
This time the smugglers
aren't not so lucky.
The Iranians ambush
them at the border.
Lives are lost.
And the shipment is seized.
Last year, the Iranian
authorities destroyed more
than 16 tons of *** and
But warlords like
Khan are persistent.
Afghan *** is smuggled across
so many different land borders
it's impossible to
intercept every shipment.
The drugs are trucked by
international crime
syndicates to Turkey.
From there, they move to Holland
a major distribution point for
Europe and the West.
Rotterdam is the third
largest port in the world.
Its 25 miles
of harbor handle over
a million tons of cargo a day.
but not all of it's legal.
Officer Onno van Elswijk has one
of the most difficult jobs in
the port: he determines which
ships to search for drugs.
OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK:
Last year we had about
Rotterdam.
so it's impossible
to check them all.
The traffickers
use ingenious methods
to smuggle ***.
OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: They try
to mislead us in a thousand ways
and it's our job to see what
their new ideas of smuggling.
But Officer van
Elswijk has a high tech weapon
in his arsenal-- an X-ray
machine so powerful it can see
through the steel walls
of shipping containers.
OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: We've got
a container with flowers over
here.
We found *** in the
cabin of the truck.
You can see all
package of, of ***,
and it's about 60 kilograms.
Even though it
fits into the cab of a truck,
this 60 kilo load is worth
$2 million on the street.
OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: We see
it as a game of cat and mouse.
They try every time to
think of something new.
This time
it's only an exercise.
OFFICER VAN HESE: These
are steel pipes, Er,
the sense of the
drugs is on the pipes,
we train the dogs with
these kind of pipes,
we put it everything, and
the dogs, the dog will find.
Despite the border
police's best efforts,
the world's streets last year.
But that's only one
part of a vast supply.
Perhaps to ensure
prices remain high,
traffickers have stockpiled
It's enough to keep the world's
*** addicts fixed
for two years.
The UN speculates that funding
from this store of drugs may be
used to finance
terrorist attacks.
This man, known by the alias
JJ, is a *** dealer.
He's the bottom rung of the
*** retail trade--
a dealer who sells *** to
support his own habit.
*** is up to 70 percent pure
when it leaves the producer.
But by the time it reaches
JJ, it's been cut
down several times.
JJ cuts his *** with sleeping
pills to increase its volume so
he can make more money.
Other dealers will often mix
in anything at hand: including
harmful brick dust,
chalk, even rat poison.
Each bag weighs around
a tenth of a gram.
He'll sell them as $10
hits on the street.
JJ gets paid $50 a day.
His habit demands a
relentless schedule.
JJ is part of a crew that
operates in Chicago's Westside
a part of the city
Poverty and crime
blight the area.
Rates of ***
addiction are high.
Hey how you doing ?
JJ's boss, Stretch,
has been on the streets since
he was a kid.
His father was a crack addict,
so Stretch had to fend for
himself from an early age.
Thanks baby.
Stretch employs
divided into 7 crews
around Chicago's Westside.
He lives in constant
fear of the police.
More than 10,000 people are
serving jail time for drug
offenses in Illinois- totalling
nearly a quarter of the state's
overall prison population.
Stretch's crews work
together to sell ***
and watch out for the cops.
In a week, Stretch's dealers
each sell about 7 grams,
worth $700.
But if the cops stop them,
they won't find any drugs.
Once a customer makes a buy,
Stretch sends one of his crew
members to fetch the drugs
from a nearby hiding place.
A different member
takes the payment.
Then the handover's made
and the deal is done.
With so much money
changing hands,
there's always a threat of
violence from rival crews.
But for Stretch, the money
from a good week makes
it worth the risk.
$17,000 a week is a
fortune to Stretch.
But for the big shots,
it's chump change.
Stretch buys from a
mysterious Mr Big,
whose connections bring
*** into the city.
I'm pretty
much a broker, okay?
Money comes, money
goes, I don't count it.
A man using the alias
'Eugene' is one of a handful of
Chicago's *** brokers;
he buys directly from the
traffickers and sells to
dealers on the street.
Well when
drugs come into the,
to the city by infrastructures
that we all know,
I mean just like,
just like anything
import or domestic, gets
to stores and things like that,
that's the way drugs
come into the city,
they're just housed discreetly.
Nothing special,
nothing secret to it.
The only thing that would be
secret is who has it
and who's moving it.
Eugene doesn't get
his hands dirty--
unless it's to deliver
punishment.
For him, violence is a
tool of the business.
There has been times
where It's been handled
violently when I have to
regulate a situation
where I'm not so diplomatic.
Where I have to threaten or act.
A lot of times I
don't do it myself.
A lot of times
I do it myself.
Each makes a statement.
When I do it myself,
it makes a statement that
I can or that I will.
When I have someone else do it,
it shows the extension of power.
Eugene likens his
philosophy of drug-dealing to an
almost religious experience.
I'm, I'm pretty much
the, the peacemaker, the, um
the keeper of
flocks.
Kind of like a minister
does in a church.
You know, how a minister, Er,
can have thousands of people
following him, Er
not because
he's paying them,
just from the reverence alone.
My reign is from
reverence alone.
Eugene reigns over
his drug dealing family.
He shows his love by
keeping them supplied
with high-grade ***.
I can't save the world.
If an addict wants
to be an addict,
they're gonna be an addict, and
they're gonna get the drugs,
whether it's through
you or around you.
So let me ask you a question,
if you had a brother,
and your brother was an addict,
you don't want them to get drugs
at all, we know this.
But if he must get drugs
get that drug from me.
Because I'm gonna make
sure that you're safe,
I have an interest in you
that you nobody else has.
That is my role in
the environment.
Newark, New Jersey.
gathering for Operation
Four Seasons.
The target: a major ***
market in a run- down housing
project in North Newark.
We'll set up
somewhere over here.
The aim: to take out
the boss and all his dealers
simultaneously, and to
hit the stash house where
the drugs are kept.
Undercover officer, code name
Chill, is leading the operation.
It's like,
it's like a pharmacy.
A lot of guns.
This is really a bad spot.
The raid is part of
Police Director Garry McCarthy's
War on Drugs.
DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY: The war
on drugs absolutely can be won.
Simply measuring arrests and
seizures is not going to be an
effective measure.
Um, on a national level we
should be looking at taking out
large organizations that
eliminate supply but by taking
it from top to bottom.
Taking it all the way
down to a street level,
which is obviously something
that's difficult to do.
In 2007 more than 1.8
million drug-related arrests
were made in the US.
Got nothing on you at all?
And America's prisons
hold half a million drug
offenders -- more than any
other country in the world.
Drug abuse costs the US economy
more than $180 billion a year.
Put your hands up!
Across America, entire
neighborhoods are abandoned to
dealers and drug users.
In Newark, McCarthy's strategy
is to flood the streets with
police and take control of the
drug dealing neighborhoods to
reduce crime for the
residents of Newark.
DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY:
Narcotics users,
people who are
addicted to narcotics,
will commit burglaries, they
will do robberies to obtain
money to buy drugs.
When they're under
arrest for narcotics,
they're not committing
a burglary or a robbery.
After months of
undercover police work,
the trap is finally set.
I wanna thank everyone
for coming out this morning.
My name's Vinnie.
I'm with DEA
The north end approach with
be vehicle 9 and go down North
Cedar Lane and try and squeeze
everybody towards the south.
If you see runners, those are
the people you wanna grab.
Hitting this area just
the way we been hitting it, we,
we wasn't, really
wasn't putting a dent.
But being that we got
multiple agencies involved,
this operation is getting the
bottom, the middle and the top.
The main thing that the Director
of the Newark Police Department
is trying to do is that once
we establish it and we get it,
we keep it.
The police will work
with other professionals to help
rebuild the community.
But Chill's job is to first
take down the bad guys.
Oh, we're gonna great
satisfaction here because we're
going to accomplish our task.
Chill calls in the
SWAT team to raid the kingpin's
stash house.
LIEUTENANT RUBEL: Anywhere
there's usually drug activity
there's a possibility
of weapons.
They go hand in hand
in the, Er, in the US.
The SWA team locks and loads.
They're armed with military
style guns and body armor.
Chill leads the team
to the stash house.
The whole, the whole
crew gonna be behind us,
we're taking the lead.
We're the generals.
I'm hoping to find Chill.
Tell him we're
in a black truck.
We're in a
black, Er, black truck.
All Perimeter teams,
Er, just standby
The perimeter
teams wait for the signal.
Airwolf 1 coming
into the, Er, the area.
SWAT OFFICER: About 30
seconds away alright?
Channel 1.
All units converge please!
The SWAT team
goes in hard and fast.
SWAT COP: Police!
Search Warrant.
The idea is to
surprise the suspects
before they can get rid of the
drugs.
LIEUTENANT RUBEL: As we got
to the second floor, the, Er,
lady that was in there
was in the bathroom.
Er, it appeared she had
something in her mouth but we
couldn't prove that that
was drugs at the moment.
And right now they're still
searching for any illegal
substances or weapons
in the house right now.
Now it's time to take
down the project's dealers.
They wanna
get little change bro!
They wanna
get little change bro!
But back at the
stash house, there's a problem.
The dog hasn't found any drugs.
I've been doing this
so long till I used to be very
discouraged, cos sometimes
you'll come here,
you may get the big motherload.
And then sometimes you'll
come here with a big fat zero.
Chill does get one
vital piece of information --
before the raid, the police only
knew this dealer's street alias
-- now they have his real name.
As long as we get the one
that actually doing the selling
out of there, that will give us
a more better positive result,
whether or not we
got the drugs or not.
At least we got him and
take him out of the complex.
In Newark, property
values are 30 percent below the
state average.
School dropout is double.
For Garry McCarthy,
rehabilitation begins with
isolating dealers and
offering hope beyond drugs.
DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY:
Narcotics is not the crime,
you know.
Shootings,robberies,burglaries,
those are the crimes.
Narcotics is the problem.
It's a social condition that
needs to be corrected on a
separate level.
Block by block,
project by project,
McCarthy is closing down
the city's drug markets,
trying to lift the shadow of
drug- related crime in Newark.
My guys just saw
you do a purchase, okay?
So right now you're
under arrest.
What did you
see me purchasing? Nothing.
*** addiction
is the dark underbelly
of American life.
Addicts are targeted by cops
and dismissed as criminal
junkies by mainstream society.
In Newark, addicts are locked up
so they won't fund their
habit through crime.
But one man in Chicago is
taking a different approach.
Greg Scott, Research Director of
the Chicago Recovery Alliance,
sees the 50,000 addicts in
his city not as criminals,
but victims in need
of medical treatment.
GREG SCOTT: I specialize in
going into homeless encampments,
shooting galleries,
crack houses, um,
other areas where people
are in their natural
setting using their drugs.
Greg's day begins on
the wrong side of the tracks.
He heads to some of the city's
most dangerous neighborhoods
to help homeless addicts.
GREG SCOTT: Joseph!
Opiates, like ***,
kill more people
than any other narcotic
around 100,000 a year
worldwide.
Its victims die primarily
from infection from
dirty needles or overdose.
GREG SCOTT: Yo!
Greg is
trying to fight both.
I think all the
kids is over here.
GREG SCOTT: Popeye!
How you doing, man?
I will retrieve, I'll
pick up dirty syringes,
whatever they may have to give
me and I distribute to
them sterile syringes,
clean paraphernalia.
How you doing ?
Very good
Greg's not just
handing out clean needles.
He's also armed with a weapon
that can combat overdose
the *** antidote.
GREG SCOTT:I also distribute
to them Narcan or Naloxone,
the generic name, which
is the *** antidote.
It's an antagonist that reverses
the effects of an ***
overdose which for
these folks is ***.
So we've got a 10
shot vial, 10mm,
muscle syringes so you don't
have to go in the tongue.
Distributing
naloxone like this isn't legal
everywhere; Greg's group was
the first to offer
it free to addicts.
STEVE KAMENICKY: I've been
doing *** 36 years.
Prior to Narcan we used to
wrestle with the people you know
trying to keep them awake.
Some people just
about literally,
almost beat them black and
blue just so they wouldn't fall
deeper into their, into
their nod, you know.
Cos once you get too far
into it, you're dead.
Going 'on the nod'
means losing consciousness,
but an overdose can take the nod
too far and the brain forgets to
keep the body breathing.
Thousands of people in the
US die from the effects
of *** every year.
No,I think it's clotted.
No not yet.
NARRATOR : Later in the day,
Greg joins up with his mobile
clinic to hand out clean
needles and give free Hepatitis
vaccinations to addicts.
Greg is part of the larger
'harm reduction movement' that
includes thousands of
volunteers around the country.
GREG SCOTT: Every year
we directly reach
injection drug users.
And we reach ..
another close to
exchange.
It feel good!
The methods of 'harm
reduction' are controversial.
Greg's primary objective
isn't to get users into
addiction treatment.
It's simply to teach them
safer injection practices.
GREG SCOTT: They're sort of
surprised usually when they come
on for the first time that
we're not gonna preach to them,
and tell them: You
gotta stop using.
You know, we're not going
to say: This is bad for you.
They know It's bad for them.
We're going to
do two tests
Hepatitis C and syphilis.
Greg's work
is close to his heart.
GREG SCOTT: I have a good deal
of personal experience with drug
abuse, drug addiction.
And I have lost some of my
dearest friends and some of my
relatives to overdose.
The US government
spends less than a quarter of
its drug control
budget on treatment.
And the ban on federal funding
for needle exchanges has only
recently been lifted.
Most money is spent
on law enforcement.
Greg works late into the night.
GREG SCOTT: I'm heading off
to the Westside of Chicago.
There's a house there, you
might call it a crack house,
a shooting gallery.
About 10 people live
there on any given day.
The number varies.
And they've had probably 3
overdoses in the last 3 weeks.
One of which was fatal.
This is not real
hard to understand.
You're going to be in this house
and you're gonna shoot dope,
you're all going to come in
here and learn about this.
It takes, what, 10 or 15 minutes
of your time to save your
*** lives?
Greg is
fighting an uphill battle.
Despite Naloxone's
life saving benefits,
addicts are reluctant to take
anything that might rob them of
their high.
GREG SCOTT: Now this
bottle is 10 doses 10 lives.
Now this bottle cost the needle
exchange 2 dollars and 67 cents.
To you it's free.
Now think about this.
Is your life worth 27 cents?
I think it is.
Why do I worry about
these guys so much? Why?
Crack *** addict
'Cat' is in charge of the house.
With so many drugs around, she
doesn't want to risk the cops
turning up to investigate
an overdose death.
Sometimes it is
a shooting gallery
and lately it has been.
We have hookers, we have drug
addicts, we have dope fiends,
we have family.
Kind of like the United Nations.
But people have been
dying around me too much.
They don't care about themselves
when they're doing the ***.
Because of
Greg's outreach group,
Naloxone has saved 1,000
Chicago addicts from overdose.
You all right?
No, she's not all right.
Well you're not
really breathing
Greg's work
soon takes an urgent turn.
A *** from the
crack house is overdosing.
Just do it.
GREG SCOTT: Laura,
I'm gonna have to
Just do it:
GREG SCOTT: I'm gonna
have to do it, Laura.
- Just give it to her!
- Don't don't put it
Greg, she's
been up for 3 days.
GREG SCOTT: Laura,
you're falling out.
She's been up
for 3 days, she
GREG SCOTT: Laura, I'm only
gonna give you a half cc.
Just give it to her!
Greg hits her
with the *** antidote.
GREG SCOTT:We had
a little Narcan.
So it'll wake you up
just enough to breathe.
But Laura's had too
much dope and the antidote
doesn't seem to be working.
Sit down right here.
Sit.
Greg gives
her another shot.
The Naloxone courses through
her bloodstream and blocks the
***'s path to her brain,
rendering it entirely harmless.
GREG SCOTT: This is the 24th
time that I've used Narcan
on somebody.
Addiction is a disease
and this is a manifestation of
that disease.
I've never
overdosed in 20 years.
Really?
You just had 2 shots of narcan.
Well, I'm saying I would
have slept for a while but I
would have felt well but
I wouldn't have died.
I'm not going to come up
with an excuse for using.
Because you like doing it.
Okay.
And that's okay, it doesn't
make you a bad person.
Just don't involve me in
yourself killing yourself.
When that last thing goes psstt,
they don't know if they're going
to live or die.
Greg's work is very good.
That's all I've got to say.
GREG SCOTT: Yeah,
well Laura's alive.
And it cost 27 cents.
*** is
a destructive force,
ripping apart the
fabric of society.
In Vancouver, hundreds of
addicts are dying from ***.
In Chicago, drug related
murders happen nearly every day.
The US government
treats *** addiction
as a law enforcement problem
but around the world,
other governments treat
it as a medical condition.
Switzerland is one of the
richest and most conservative
countries in Europe.
But during the '80s and '90s
Switzerland was in the grips of
a *** plague.
In the capital Bern,drug-related
crime was through the roof.
*** was a national disgrace.
DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI:I used to
live right next to
the needle park.
It was horrible.
People died there.
There was petty crime
all around in the city.
It was just totally out of hand.
It was a terrible situation.
In response
to public outcry,
the government comes up with a
solution beyond clean needles
and drug counselling: A
revolutionary program that
offers free *** to addicts
who meet certain criteria and
have a doctor's prescription.
And it's all courtesy
of the Swiss taxpayers.
Dr Christoph Bürki is part
of the radical experiment.
His clinic in Bern is one of 23
centers around the country that
dispense *** like medicine.
DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: So this
is where we keep the ***.
It comes in those 10 grams
ampoules that will later on be
dissolved with sterile water.
Every patient in this
clinic receives a controlled
dose of pharmaceutical
grade ***.
DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: And as
you can see it's a transparent,
clear fluid.
It's nothing compared to that
soup like consistency of the
street *** in a syringe.
Here it's 100
percent pure ***.
Before Burki's clinic,
*** addiction forced his
patients into a life of crime,
prostitution and homelessness.
They were disconnected
from medical services
and addiction treatment.
DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: The type of
patient we have in this clinic
is a different one.
It's a it's a patient that
we normally don't
get in touch with.
They were out in the street but
we didn't really
get in touch with.
We couldn't really integrate
them into a treatment.
Now here it's possible.
They do come every day.
Karen has
turned her life around,
thanks to her commitment
to this radical program.
Dr Burki has no illusions about
why his patients come to him.
DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: They come
to me because I or my team
provides them with ***.
But through that contact we
can start making
other things an issue.
We can start working really on
mental health issues as well as
other issues in their life.
And that's the core value
of *** prescription.
It's incredible and
I like it every day.
You get in touch with people
through this type of treatment
that you, that before that
in the professional field,
we did not get in touch with.
So this is absolutely
fascinating.
The free ***
program may be controversial,
but there's been a 60 percent
drop in felonies committed by
its patients since it began.
And the overall societal cost
per addict has been cut in half.
The program doesn't
solve every problem,
but it does reduce the impact
of some of Switzerland's most
troubled addicts.
The *** trade funds
terrorism, international crime,
and domestic gangsters.
SWAT COP: Police!
Search Warrant.
While destroying millions of lives.
Still there are more than 11 million
*** users worldwide.
Society foots the bill
for the destruction left behind.