Episode Transcript: #372 - Mariana van Zeller

from the show on Vanguard, the OxyContin Express, which I remember watching it in my house and

thinking, this is the craziest thing I have ever heard in my life. I couldn't believe that all the

things you were telling me about the whole system of pain management centers and how it's set up in

Florida was true, and the statistics on how many people are addicted to OxyContin and how many

prescriptions are being given out for OxyContin in Florida is just absolutely bananas.

And I watched it, and I said, this is so far beyond out of control that it's amazing that I'm just

hearing about it now from a documentary on Current TV, which is not the most widely viewed channel.

I mean, I felt like this should be on every channel, on the front page of every newspaper.

There's a hijacking going on down there. They've hijacked the legal system somehow or another,

and absolutely willfully put these things into position in order to extract money and do it at

the expense of all these people being addicted. I mean, how did you find out about this, and how did

you go about doing that piece? It's interesting you say that. I mean, it was exactly the same for us,

the same surprise that we got when we started looking into this story. We found a little news

clipping on one newspaper about some deaths in Florida because of prescription drugs, and some,

there were more pain clinics around than McDonald's, and we thought, wow, this is really interesting.

We should investigate this. And we started looking into it, and then we found out that there were seven

people every day dying from prescription pill abuse. That all over the U.S., there are more people dying

from a prescription pill overdose and heroin, cocaine, and ecstasy combined, that just last year,

it surpassed car accidents to become the number one cause of accidental deaths in the United States.