John Oliver tackles America's opioid and heroin crisis, and boy is he mad at Big Pharma

"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. Now, according to the U.S. surgeon general, some 250 million opioid prescriptions are written each year, equal to one for each adult. It wasn't always this way — as recently as the early 1990s, doctors were "excessively wary" about prescribing these powerful, addictive drugs, Oliver said. And it wasn't just Big Pharma — patient advocates argued that excessive fear of opioids was causing injured and dying people too much pain. But when Perdue — maker of OxyContin — and other drug companies got involved in the late 1990s, he said, all hell broke loose.

After discussing Perdue's shady marketing and downplaying of addiction risk, Oliver said we "may be glad to hear that in 2007 they admitted some responsibility," paying out $634 million. "But at a certain point, the question has to become less 'What did we do wrong?' and more 'What do we do now?'" Oliver said. "There is no one simple answer here." We need to be more careful about prescribing opioids and make alternative treatments more widely available, he said, but "not all opioid addicts will respond to the same treatments, and not all people in pain will find relief from alternative therapies. This is going to take a massive effort and a significant investment — it won't be cheap, it won't be quick, and it won't be easy. And it is hard not to be angry at the drug companies, like Purdue, whose promise of cheap, quick, easy pain solution helped put us in this f---ing mess." Watch below, and be warned, that last F-bomb isn't bleeped out. Peter Weber

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