Mariana van Zeller

And he's treating this woman's arm.

And the moment he unwraps the gauze, the smell is everything you can imagine.

It's super powerful.

But yet this is a human being who's being treated.

The worst thing I could do is start talking about how much this smelled, right?

And what that taught me, and the guy said so well, as somebody who's been covering the drug epidemic for so long, is that we're approaching it all wrong.

This is a public health crisis that's happening in America.

We essentially have thousands of people on the streets of America nowadays hooked on this drug.

You might think that they're there because they want and they're doing the drugs because they want to.

Nobody wants to be out there like this.

Nobody willingly do this.

It's a public health crisis.

It's like leprosy.

It's so many other diseases that we've been able to combat and fight against.

And here, for some reason, because we think that they have a choice, we allow it to happen.

And the reason also why they're being treated in this like roadside clinic instead of going to hospitals, we spoke to a lot of these users and they were all saying, we go to the hospitals, there's so much stereotyping and they're immediately, they're stigmatized and they're treated as junkies, not treated as human beings.

And that's what with our episode we try to do is really humanize these people and try to show this other side that they're human beings just like us and need help.

Every conversation, every time I bring up the opiate epidemic, somebody has a story like that.

And the vast majority of them starts with an injury.

I had an EP, I'm not going to name him, but I had an executive producer on television that worked with me for some time who had seen my coverage on the opiate epidemic and called me one day and says, hey.