Trevor Noah wants the Sackler opioid 'cartel' to be as infamous as El Chapo, Pablo Escobar, so he made a TV show

(Image credit: Screenshot/The Daily Show)

last updated 5 March 2019

"Right now in America, more people are killed by opioids than cars," Trevor Noah said on Wednesday's Daily Show. Opioids "are a national emergency — a genuine national emergency," and "if you listen to the president — which by the way I don't recommend you do — but if you do, he'll point his tiny little blame finger where he normally does: South of the border." Seriously, President Trump "blames Mexico for everything," he said. "But in reality, the opioid crisis is as American as baseball or student loan debt."

It's American doctors who widely over-prescribed large amounts of opioids, but they're "basically low-level henchmen," Noah said, and "at the top of the cartel" are the pharmaceutical companies that make and pushed the drugs — like Insys Therapeutics, which "didn't just bribe doctors to push opioids, they sent strippers to bribe the doctors. And let me just say, when a stripper starts paying you, something fishy is going on." And that's "small-time compared to the Pablo Escobar of opioids, the Sackler family," Noah said. He read some of what he called the "straight-up evil" allegations from the Massachusetts case blaming the Sacklers and their company, Purdue Pharma, for making billions by lying about the addictiveness of OxyContin, blaming the addicts, and trying to get approval for children's OxyContin.

"Knowing all the shady s--t that these people are accused of, you'd think the Sackler family would be shunned from society — but in fact, it's the exact opposite," Noah said. "So really, the Sackler family should be as notorious as Pablo Escobar or El Chapo, because they've also gotten so many Americans hooked on drugs. The one difference is, everyone knows those other guys and they know how bad they are, because they've seen TV shows about them." There's no such show about the Sacklers, but The Daily Show changed that. Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.