John Oliver On The Opioid Epidemic [VIDEO]

The Week recaps:

“I would like to talk to you about drugs,” John Oliver said on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, but not in some 1960s “reefer madness” way. “Unfortunately, America is now in the midst of a new drug crisis, and it seems that no one is safe from it,” he said. That would be the “epidemic of addiction to opioids, like heroin and prescription painkillers,” he said, and it’s a serious one: As of 2015, an estimated 2.6 million Americans were addicted to these drugs, and some 30,000 Americans die from overdoses each year from heroin and prescription opioids. Oliver focused on the prescription variety, the chemical cousins of heroin that some 75 percent of U.S. heroin addicts started their addiction with.