Name: From Oxycontin to Fentanyl - Mariana van Zeller on Being at the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis
Uploaded: 2023-02-08T19:22:23.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'From Oxycontin to Fentanyl - Mariana van Zeller on Being at the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'From Oxycontin to Fentanyl - Mariana van Zeller on Being at the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2023-02-08. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan experience.
People have a hard time keeping it together when something like marijuana comes
along.
But that doesn't mean that it should be illegal.
That means there should be some real counseling, and there should be places
that people can
go where they can talk to someone, and therapy, and there should be a way to
make it legal.
I 100% agree.
One thing we know is that the war on drugs hasn't worked.
The billions of dollars that the United States has spent on the war on drugs
has actually
had the reverse effect.
And as you know well, the biggest drug epidemic in America's history was
created right here
in America by the pharmaceutical companies.
Yes.
Well, that's how I found out about you from the OxyContin Express.
That was so eye-opening.
And when you did that, what channel were you guys on back then?
Current TV.
It was Al Gore's television channel.
It was Al Gore's?
It was.
That's hilarious.
It was actually a really interesting experiment.
So, it was right before YouTube started.
And basically they were trying to -- the idea was democratizing television.
It was giving young kids out there a platform to go out there and explore the
world and come
back with these stories.
So, that's how I started.
What year was this?
This was 2005 or '06.
Oh, wow.
2005 was when I started, yeah.
Hmm.
So, a long time ago.
And then YouTube came around.
It turns out that YouTube was a bigger success than going TV.
But I really -- the show that I worked on was called Vanguard.
And it was all these young journalists who -- both of us had just graduated.
But they basically gave us cameras and in my case, my husband at the time was
my boyfriend.
We both applied.
They hired us both.
And then we traveled all around the world.
He would film.
I would be on camera.
And then we'd come back.
I'd edit.
He'd write.
We'd do these stories together.
And then what we did was the prescription pill story, the OxyContin Express,
which is how
we met.
Yeah.
Because you tweeted about it.
Well, I think your work really changed the way people were aware of that
problem in Florida.
And it changed the laws because they didn't have databases back then, which was
100% on
purpose.
Yeah.
So, you could go from -- you could go doctor shopping.
You could go from pill mill to pill mill or pain clinic to pain clinic to buy
prescription
pills.
The amazing thing is my husband is still reporting on this.
I actually had a film on CNN that's coming on HBO Max in April.
And it's called American Pain.
So, I don't know -- do you remember the twins that were running American Pain?
It was the biggest pill mill or prescription pain clinic in South Florida.
It's called American Pain.
And it was run by these two twins who were born -- they were born conjoined
twins at birth.
And then they ran a steroid business and they got in trouble.
And then they realized that actually they could make a lot more money from
selling Oxycontin
than they could from selling steroids.
So, they opened this little small strip mall pain clinic.
And, as you saw, you know, people started coming in from all over the country
and buying.
And the doctors wouldn't even look at them.
And they were prescribing pills like it was Tic Tacs.
And this -- we found out about them because we were reporting in Kentucky.
And we were the sheriff who was, you know, overdoses all around them.
People, you know, dying, devastating his community.
And a lot of the pill bottles had this name, American Pain.
And we started -- we went down there and we took out the camera and my husband
took out the camera.
And we -- the first shot we got immediately, within minutes, this big SUV came
with two big guys who were threatening us
and started yelling at us and telling us to leave, that we weren't allowed to
film.
And so, we drove off and I'm driving.
And this is actually in the film.
But I'm driving and my husband's filming.
And they're right behind us.
And we decided to film this as the last thing.
We were heading to the airport.
And we're driving down 985 to head to the airport.
And they start following us.
And then I realized I have very little gas.
So, I stop at the gas station and they stop right behind us.
And they come out of the car.
And these were big guys.
And the day before, we'd been watching The Sopranos.
So, in my mind, they were coming out guns a-blazing and they were going to kill
us both.
So, I drove off.
I was so nervous.
And I drove off.
And they continued following us.
And I didn't put gas in the car.
So, we're 995 and we called 911 and said, "Hey, we're being followed by this
car to explain the situation."
And then I ran out of gas as we were filming.
And I pulled over to the curb.
But they were so sort of surprised.
They had no idea, confused by what was happening, that they just parked behind
us and they never came out of the car.
And then the police arrived.
And then they made up an excuse that they thought I was an old girlfriend or
something like that.
But my husband took down their license plates and found out their names.
And it was the George brothers, Jeff and Chris George, who were running the
biggest prescription or pill mill in America's history.
They were making, I think, something like $40 million a year out of this small
little pill mill, you know, strip mall clinic.
And it was incredible.
And then a year later, they were, they're now, one of them just left prison and
the other one was still in prison.
So, those were the guys that were following you, the guys that owned the
organization?
Yeah, owned American Pain.
Our organization was just a strip mall clinic, pain clinic, with thousands of
patients that would come in and out.
And, you know, tons of doctors writing prescription pills.
And when we were working at the time where we'd been interviewing off the
record a DEA agent who didn't want to go on the record,
that we later found out was actually investigating them and they had wiretaps.
So, in Darren's movie, he got his hands on all the wiretaps so you could hear
them.
And part of it, there's a part where they talk about us and our film and how we
were trying to look into them.
So, it all sort of came.
Yeah.
That's it.
South Florida Pain Clinic.
Yeah.
So, South Florida Pain Clinic and then they changed to a new location, a bigger
location and called it, yeah, that's it.
And called it American Pain.
Such a, what a great name, by the way.
Yeah.
American Pain.
And those are the two brothers down there with the fish?
Yeah.
That's the two brothers.
Those are the guys that were chasing you.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, they found a loophole.
It's a crazy story.
So, they're in prison and Darren, he sends them an email and says, "Hey guys,
remember that guy that you chased down 995?"
I'm doing a film about you.
Do you want to be interviewed?
And they did.
It's a great film.
What did they say?
Did they just spill the beans about what they did?
They talked a lot about sort of how they grew up and why they did it.
And it's, yeah, I think it's interesting.
They had already gotten in trouble, so they had really nothing to lose at that
point.
But wasn't what they were doing legal?
No, it was, what they were, so that is the difficulty.
And that's why actually so little people, so there should have been a lot more
people that went to prison.
Unfortunately, they didn't.
So, the government gets you through other things, racketeering charges, bribery,
mail fraud, it's always these other.
That's the, you know, the biggest, I think, outrage about the whole opiate
crisis is that there have been almost no pharmaceutical executive that has been
gone to prison.
The pharmaceutical companies are the ones that were actually making the big
money, right?
And it's not just the Sacklers of Purdue.
It's also the generic companies that were making even more.
And no one, nobody was actually, I mean, nothing practically happened to them.
No one did time in prison.
And it's so sad when you find out how many people lost their lives and how many
people, even if they're alive, their lives are destroyed.
I mean, Joe, having traveled and reported on this, the opiate crisis for so
long, it's whole communities that have been devastated.
It's horrible.
It's the biggest sort of outrageous thing that has happened in America.
And it was made here.
Again, we can blame others, but it was made here because we allowed it to
happen.
It's just amazing the deception that was involved, too.
They tried to claim that they weren't addictive and they were just passing them
out to people.
And it's, I mean, I had talked before about this.
I had my nose fixed.
I had a deviated septum.
And when I got out of the operating room, I was kind of shocked that it wasn't
painful.
I was like, this is fine.
This is just a little mildly uncomfortable.
And the doctor tried to give me two different prescriptions for opiates.
And I was like, I'm not going to use those.
And because I had had knee surgery and I also didn't take pain pills.
I don't mind pain.
What I really don't like is feeling stupid.
And when I took, I think it was, I don't remember if it was Percocets or Vicodin.
I don't remember.
But one of my first knee surgeries, they gave me one of those.
And I took it.
And I remember being on my couch when I lived in New York and just sitting
there watching TV like this.
Yeah.
Feeling so stupid and thinking, oh my God, I am never taking this shit again.
Like whatever this is doing to me.
First of all, I don't think it really stopped the pain.
Cause I remember getting up cause I had to go to the bathroom and I was, it was
like liquid fire was going through my knee.
And I was like, if it's still fucking hurts like this and I'm dumb as shit.
Like I am not taking these anymore.
I know it's the days with which they were dispensed and are still being dispensed
to some degree.
My doctor was trying to force me to take them.
He was like, he was like, just, you really should take these.
Like you're going to be in pain.
And I go, well, it's just a little pain.
Like, is it worse than this right now?
And he goes, it could be.
I'm like, how could it get worse?
Why is it going to get worse?
Yeah.
Like if it doesn't, if it just is mildly uncomfortable now.
And like, so the doctor was just like, you should take this.
And I was like, why would I take that?
But I don't, I wasn't, I didn't understand why.
Like, I, like, couldn't I come back to you if I'm in pain?
Like if I'm not in pain now, why do you want me?
It was this weird conversation where it's like, I don't know if he was incentivized
to try,
to try to prescribe them if he felt like it would be good for him.
I didn't, I didn't understand it.
Like, couldn't you just, if you wrote the prescriptions and I didn't take it,
like, what do you care?
But he wanted me to take them.
Yeah.
It was weird.
So strange.
I mean, that's what was happening with OxyContin.
That's what was happening later on.
We did another story on fentanyl.
That was what was happening with fentanyl too.
You had a company and we investigated one particular company.
And I think it's the only CEO of a company that he's now in prison actually for
what he was doing.
Yeah.
He was bribing essentially.
And he was charged with bribing.
He was bribing doctors.
And there was a quota.
And he was basically telling them if you prescribe more of our product, which
was fentanyl,
a spray fentanyl called substance.
If you prescribe more, we will give you more money.
And he was paying them out and taking them on trips, luxurious trips around the
world and telling
them not only to prescribe this medication to people who have headaches and
back pain.
A medication that is made and FDA approved only for breakthrough cancer
patients.
But yet you go to the doctor and you say you have a headache and this guy knows
that he can
get a kickback from the company and so, oh, you should take this drug.
How much of a kickback was it?
Oh, it was significant.
It was in the thousands of dollars.
Some doctors got hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And so they were incentivized.
Yeah.
There was a big incentive to do it.
Yeah.
And they were also invited to these luxury vacations to go to speaking fees.
What they said is that they were paying them for speaking fees, which basically
was good.
Bribes.
Yeah.
I have a good friend who used to be a pharmaceutical representative.
And he explained to me how it works that he would not just know the doctor, but
he got to
know, he knew who the doctor's kids' names were.
He would show up at their baseball games and he would give them gifts.
He would take them out to dinners.
And it was all about cultivating these relationships.
And that it was all about like, I'm your friend.
And you know, like they wanted to have this sort of weird cronyism, weird sort
of relationship
where even if it wasn't illegal, like clearly he was influencing them to sell
more pills.
It's so crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's crazy.
And it's crazy that it's still happening.
And it's just shocking that not more people have gotten in trouble because of
it.
What has changed in Florida?
Because they did change and they made a database, right?
Yeah.
There's a database right now, which was the biggest thing that didn't.
So you could go to 10 doctors in one day and get 150 pills from each doctor.
And at the end of the day, you'd have 1,500 pills and no one would know about
it.
And then you'd grab those pills and go and sell them to other places of the
country where
you could get 20 times more for the same drug.
Yeah.
So the database is, it's just much harder.
I think there's one of the things that I remember that we reported on, that you
shouldn't
be able to prescribe and dispense at the same location because it's a conflict
of interest,
right?
If you're going to make money out of the selling of those pills, you shouldn't,
it shouldn't
be at the same place where you're prescribing them because then there's an
incentive for
you to prescribe because you're making money from the sale of those pills.
So that was happening in Florida as well.
And it's not allowed in a lot of other states.
And then the horrible truth is that a lot of those people became addicted and
then they
had to get it on the black market.
So then they were getting fentanyl laced heroin and massive amount of overdoses.
Yeah.
The progression was Oxycontin and then it was fentanyl, and then it was heroin
and then
it became fentanyl.

From Oxycontin to Fentanyl - Mariana van Zeller on Being at the Frontlines of the Opioid Crisis

The Joe Rogan experience.
People have a hard time keeping it together when something like marijuana comes
along.
But that doesn't mean that it should be illegal.
That means there should be some real counseling, and there should be places
that people can
go where they can talk to someone, and therapy, and there should be a way to
make it legal.
I 100% agree.
One thing we know is that the war on drugs hasn't worked.
The billions of dollars that the United States has spent on the war on drugs
has actually
had the reverse effect.
And as you know well, the biggest drug epidemic in America's history was
created right here
in America by the pharmaceutical companies.
Yes.
Well, that's how I found out about you from the OxyContin Express.
That was so eye-opening.
And when you did that, what channel were you guys on back then?
Current TV.
It was Al Gore's television channel.
It was Al Gore's?
It was.
That's hilarious.
It was actually a really interesting experiment.
So, it was right before YouTube started.
And basically they were trying to -- the idea was democratizing television.
It was giving young kids out there a platform to go out there and explore the
world and come
back with these stories.
So, that's how I started.
What year was this?
This was 2005 or '06.
Oh, wow.
2005 was when I started, yeah.
Hmm.
So, a long time ago.
And then YouTube came around.
It turns out that YouTube was a bigger success than going TV.
But I really -- the show that I worked on was called Vanguard.
And it was all these young journalists who -- both of us had just graduated.
But they basically gave us cameras and in my case, my husband at the time was
my boyfriend.
We both applied.
They hired us both.
And then we traveled all around the world.
He would film.
I would be on camera.
And then we'd come back.
I'd edit.
He'd write.
We'd do these stories together.
And then what we did was the prescription pill story, the OxyContin Express,
which is how
we met.
Yeah.
Because you tweeted about it.
Well, I think your work really changed the way people were aware of that
problem in Florida.
And it changed the laws because they didn't have databases back then, which was
100% on
purpose.
Yeah.
So, you could go from -- you could go doctor shopping.
You could go from pill mill to pill mill or pain clinic to pain clinic to buy
prescription
pills.
The amazing thing is my husband is still reporting on this.
I actually had a film on CNN that's coming on HBO Max in April.
And it's called American Pain.
So, I don't know -- do you remember the twins that were running American Pain?
It was the biggest pill mill or prescription pain clinic in South Florida.
It's called American Pain.
And it was run by these two twins who were born -- they were born conjoined
twins at birth.
And then they ran a steroid business and they got in trouble.
And then they realized that actually they could make a lot more money from
selling Oxycontin
than they could from selling steroids.
So, they opened this little small strip mall pain clinic.
And, as you saw, you know, people started coming in from all over the country
and buying.
And the doctors wouldn't even look at them.
And they were prescribing pills like it was Tic Tacs.
And this -- we found out about them because we were reporting in Kentucky.
And we were the sheriff who was, you know, overdoses all around them.
People, you know, dying, devastating his community.
And a lot of the pill bottles had this name, American Pain.
And we started -- we went down there and we took out the camera and my husband
took out the camera.
And we -- the first shot we got immediately, within minutes, this big SUV came
with two big guys who were threatening us
and started yelling at us and telling us to leave, that we weren't allowed to
film.
And so, we drove off and I'm driving.
And this is actually in the film.
But I'm driving and my husband's filming.
And they're right behind us.
And we decided to film this as the last thing.
We were heading to the airport.
And we're driving down 985 to head to the airport.
And they start following us.
And then I realized I have very little gas.
So, I stop at the gas station and they stop right behind us.
And they come out of the car.
And these were big guys.
And the day before, we'd been watching The Sopranos.
So, in my mind, they were coming out guns a-blazing and they were going to kill
us both.
So, I drove off.
I was so nervous.
And I drove off.
And they continued following us.
And I didn't put gas in the car.
So, we're 995 and we called 911 and said, "Hey, we're being followed by this
car to explain the situation."
And then I ran out of gas as we were filming.
And I pulled over to the curb.
But they were so sort of surprised.
They had no idea, confused by what was happening, that they just parked behind
us and they never came out of the car.
And then the police arrived.
And then they made up an excuse that they thought I was an old girlfriend or
something like that.
But my husband took down their license plates and found out their names.
And it was the George brothers, Jeff and Chris George, who were running the
biggest prescription or pill mill in America's history.
They were making, I think, something like $40 million a year out of this small
little pill mill, you know, strip mall clinic.
And it was incredible.
And then a year later, they were, they're now, one of them just left prison and
the other one was still in prison.
So, those were the guys that were following you, the guys that owned the
organization?
Yeah, owned American Pain.
Our organization was just a strip mall clinic, pain clinic, with thousands of
patients that would come in and out.
And, you know, tons of doctors writing prescription pills.
And when we were working at the time where we'd been interviewing off the
record a DEA agent who didn't want to go on the record,
that we later found out was actually investigating them and they had wiretaps.
So, in Darren's movie, he got his hands on all the wiretaps so you could hear
them.
And part of it, there's a part where they talk about us and our film and how we
were trying to look into them.
So, it all sort of came.
Yeah.
That's it.
South Florida Pain Clinic.
Yeah.
So, South Florida Pain Clinic and then they changed to a new location, a bigger
location and called it, yeah, that's it.
And called it American Pain.
Such a, what a great name, by the way.
Yeah.
American Pain.
And those are the two brothers down there with the fish?
Yeah.
That's the two brothers.
Those are the guys that were chasing you.
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, they found a loophole.
It's a crazy story.
So, they're in prison and Darren, he sends them an email and says, "Hey guys,
remember that guy that you chased down 995?"
I'm doing a film about you.
Do you want to be interviewed?
And they did.
It's a great film.
What did they say?
Did they just spill the beans about what they did?
They talked a lot about sort of how they grew up and why they did it.
And it's, yeah, I think it's interesting.
They had already gotten in trouble, so they had really nothing to lose at that
point.
But wasn't what they were doing legal?
No, it was, what they were, so that is the difficulty.
And that's why actually so little people, so there should have been a lot more
people that went to prison.
Unfortunately, they didn't.
So, the government gets you through other things, racketeering charges, bribery,
mail fraud, it's always these other.
That's the, you know, the biggest, I think, outrage about the whole opiate
crisis is that there have been almost no pharmaceutical executive that has been
gone to prison.
The pharmaceutical companies are the ones that were actually making the big
money, right?
And it's not just the Sacklers of Purdue.
It's also the generic companies that were making even more.
And no one, nobody was actually, I mean, nothing practically happened to them.
No one did time in prison.
And it's so sad when you find out how many people lost their lives and how many
people, even if they're alive, their lives are destroyed.
I mean, Joe, having traveled and reported on this, the opiate crisis for so
long, it's whole communities that have been devastated.
It's horrible.
It's the biggest sort of outrageous thing that has happened in America.
And it was made here.
Again, we can blame others, but it was made here because we allowed it to
happen.
It's just amazing the deception that was involved, too.
They tried to claim that they weren't addictive and they were just passing them
out to people.
And it's, I mean, I had talked before about this.
I had my nose fixed.
I had a deviated septum.
And when I got out of the operating room, I was kind of shocked that it wasn't
painful.
I was like, this is fine.
This is just a little mildly uncomfortable.
And the doctor tried to give me two different prescriptions for opiates.
And I was like, I'm not going to use those.
And because I had had knee surgery and I also didn't take pain pills.
I don't mind pain.
What I really don't like is feeling stupid.
And when I took, I think it was, I don't remember if it was Percocets or Vicodin.
I don't remember.
But one of my first knee surgeries, they gave me one of those.
And I took it.
And I remember being on my couch when I lived in New York and just sitting
there watching TV like this.
Yeah.
Feeling so stupid and thinking, oh my God, I am never taking this shit again.
Like whatever this is doing to me.
First of all, I don't think it really stopped the pain.
Cause I remember getting up cause I had to go to the bathroom and I was, it was
like liquid fire was going through my knee.
And I was like, if it's still fucking hurts like this and I'm dumb as shit.
Like I am not taking these anymore.
I know it's the days with which they were dispensed and are still being dispensed
to some degree.
My doctor was trying to force me to take them.
He was like, he was like, just, you really should take these.
Like you're going to be in pain.
And I go, well, it's just a little pain.
Like, is it worse than this right now?
And he goes, it could be.
I'm like, how could it get worse?
Why is it going to get worse?
Yeah.
Like if it doesn't, if it just is mildly uncomfortable now.
And like, so the doctor was just like, you should take this.
And I was like, why would I take that?
But I don't, I wasn't, I didn't understand why.
Like, I, like, couldn't I come back to you if I'm in pain?
Like if I'm not in pain now, why do you want me?
It was this weird conversation where it's like, I don't know if he was incentivized
to try,
to try to prescribe them if he felt like it would be good for him.
I didn't, I didn't understand it.
Like, couldn't you just, if you wrote the prescriptions and I didn't take it,
like, what do you care?
But he wanted me to take them.
Yeah.
It was weird.
So strange.
I mean, that's what was happening with OxyContin.
That's what was happening later on.
We did another story on fentanyl.
That was what was happening with fentanyl too.
You had a company and we investigated one particular company.
And I think it's the only CEO of a company that he's now in prison actually for
what he was doing.
Yeah.
He was bribing essentially.
And he was charged with bribing.
He was bribing doctors.
And there was a quota.
And he was basically telling them if you prescribe more of our product, which
was fentanyl,
a spray fentanyl called substance.
If you prescribe more, we will give you more money.
And he was paying them out and taking them on trips, luxurious trips around the
world and telling
them not only to prescribe this medication to people who have headaches and
back pain.
A medication that is made and FDA approved only for breakthrough cancer
patients.
But yet you go to the doctor and you say you have a headache and this guy knows
that he can
get a kickback from the company and so, oh, you should take this drug.
How much of a kickback was it?
Oh, it was significant.
It was in the thousands of dollars.
Some doctors got hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And so they 