Brian Mann

speaker

1,618 appearances 207 recordings 3 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard today

Brian Mann’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 166 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 21.

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Consider This from NPR · Reporting on how America reduced the number of opioid deaths · 30 Mar 2025 podcast

Okay. So I want to talk about the hopeful, happy parts in just a second. But let me begin with some of the maybe darker reasons this could be happening. So one thing is that a lot of people have died, Scott. I mean, this has been bad. Like, this has been terrifying. 114,000 people in one year, 110,000 in another year. So a lot of the most vulnerable people are gone.

And that's certainly some part of it. Another thing that's happening is that people on the streets regularly tell me that they've learned how to use fentanyl, this really dangerous drug, more safely. Not safely. I don't want to sugarcoat this again, but they're better. They don't use it as carelessly as they used to.

And so some people who are still in very severe, very unhealthy addiction to this toxic drug are surviving. They're living longer. And that is a good thing because it means they have more chances to recover, more chances to get out of this cycle. I don't want to say that they've recovered or they're healthy or they're off the street. They're still in a really dark place.

Yeah, and I think the data here is really strong, that we have seen one of the most effective public policy responses to a health crisis in U.S. history, right? So what the Biden administration did, they came in after a year when drug deaths had spiked 30%. That's what happened in the last year of the Trump administration.

They inherit a raging, burning crisis of death across the country, and they immediately begin implementing policies really significant changes. First of all, they work to get naloxone, that medication that reverses overdoses. They really push to get that out on the street, get it everywhere. They just flooded the field with naloxone and Narcan. And I find it now everywhere.

And I want to introduce you to Scout Gilson. She actually works now as a harm reduction person in Philadelphia, but she was on the street. She was a fentanyl user. She talks about what it was like before the Biden team made naloxone really readily available.

Wow. That kind of calculation, Scott, was happening every day on every street in America. People were thinking, do I help that person survive or do I save it for myself? And now, That's not what it's like. Everybody has Narcan.

There's also a whole range of other things, much of it funded by the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act that made insurance coverage really widely available for people who need addiction treatment. They also made it really easy comparatively to get buprenorphine and methadone. These are medications that help people avoid relapses into fentanyl use.

All of those things hitting the field at the same time, the Biden team inherits a 30% increase in drug deaths. As they left the White House, drug deaths were dropping by about 25%. So that's the arc that they managed to pull off in four years.

It was really powerful to watch as a journalist. On the one hand, Scott, day after day, I was seeing this data solidify, showing this public health victory, this policy victory. And then what I would do is turn on the radio and I would hear Kamala Harris, the vice president and the candidate talking about fentanyl as if it's sort of a problem that they can't really deal with.

At one point in the debate with Trump, she referenced the fact that he and his political allies had torpedoed an effort to increase security, including drug security, on the southern border. Here she is.

Meanwhile, let me let me pivot and give you a taste of how then candidate Trump was talking about this. Here he is out on the campaign trail.

And what now President Trump was saying there on the campaign trail is just not factual. You know, fentanyl was spreading rapidly in the U.S. during his first term. Drug deaths, as we've mentioned, were skyrocketing. And yet he was clearly the one with the more powerful message leading up to the election day.

You know, addiction destroyed my family. I have a beloved stepbrother who I grew up with, Rick, who, you know, got drawn into the prescription pain epidemic and eventually died from complications relating to his addiction. My father was deep in addiction for much of my childhood and much of my adult life.

And the thing that's really has been powerful for me is that I didn't understand any of that. I was like most Americans. I think I had deep stigma about it. I hated it. I was scared of it. And only when I started understanding that there are treatments, there are really good medical-based, science-based ways of helping people recover, did I start to put those pieces together.

And I have huge regret about how I thought about my own family, how I navigated my own life before getting into this. And so I do try to say to people that this addiction thing that is so scary and often ugly, frankly, Thank you so much for having me. I didn't know enough about that in my own family to help get to those places. I turned away from it, honestly.

And so that is a reason that I continue to be very loyal to this beat and this subject because I love the idea that bit by bit, more Americans are realizing there is another side to this story and another side to how we respond to this.

Oh, a thousand percent. And there have been moments along the way that I've had these, you know, real flinch moments when I learned something about this. And I think, oh God, if I had known that a decade ago, 15 years ago, I would have known what to do. I would have had a better vocabulary for this.

Yeah. I think my brother, Rick, who was injured, you know, working in a factory and was put on pain pills for his back. And I can remember feeling how much of a personal failing it was for him to not kick his opioid addiction, his desire for that and his, he would relapse and he would relapse. And I felt like then at a point I gave up on him. I, that's just the truth.

I gave, I said, that's that, you know, he doesn't have the character. He doesn't have the strength. That's not somebody I really want to associate with. And what I now know, Scott, is that relapse is a cornerstone part of this illness. It's as normal to this illness as as, you know, things that you do for diabetes or you do for cancer. You have to expect relapse to happen. It's part of the arc.

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