Geraldo Rivera to pharmaceutical companies: ‘They’re drug pushers in white coats’

Fox News correspondent-at-large Geraldo Rivera got an inside look at the opioid crisis with a visit to the Sarasota County Jail in Florida. Speaking on “Fox & Friends” on Monday.

After his revealing look at the growing and deadly crisis, Rivera was moved to call pharmaceutical companies, “drug pushers in white coats.”

“They’re drug pushers in white coats and they’re big manufacturers, you know, in their suits and ties,” said Rivera.

“It’s a lot different than it used to be and they are responsible for devastating much of our country.”

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than 70,200 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2017, including prescription opioids, which is nearly double the number of people who died from drug overdoses a decade before.

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Sarasota, Florida is among more than 1,500 state and local governments fighting the opioid crisis by taking drug makers to court.

Rivera said on Monday: “1,500 state, county and local governments are all suing big pharma and the distributors of these prescription opioid drugs. Why? Because they have decimated the communities.”

The lead attorney in the Sarasota suit against drug companies, William Robertson Jr., told Fox News: “They started a marketing campaign to change the narrative and what they wanted, and if you look at the statistics, was to convince the mainstream physicians and medical professionals that opioids would be appropriate for chronic pain and they are not because the body gets used to it.”

He added: “If you’re on them a month, you’ve got about (a) 56 percent chance that you’re going to be addicted and that’s an addiction that will last for the rest of your life.”

When Rivera asked some of the inmates if any of them blame the big pharmaceutical companies that produce drugs or the distributors for their addictions, some were blunt in their responses.

“Of course I have a little bit of bitterness towards them. If it wouldn’t have been for prescription pharmaceuticals, I never would have started on opiates in the first place,” one inmate said.

Another inmate told Rivera: “Pharmaceutical companies and the doctor industry in Florida definitely plays a big part in it.”

“When I started my pain management program. I was on a much less dose and my doctor, gradually over time, he got me on the really super-duper heavy stuff, including fentanyl,” a third said.

She added: “I can see both sides of it. We all make choices but if my doctor hadn’t — I don’t know.”

A fourth inmate acknowledged she is lucky to be alive after overdosing six times. She said she blamed her doctors.

“It was more to the doctors prescribing it to me. They said I needed it. And then I just abused it,” the inmate said, before adding, “if it wasn’t for my surgeries that started it, I probably would have never touched it.”

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Opioid drugs have long been used for end-of-life and post-surgery pain but starting in the 1990s, a new generation of the drugs was increasingly used to treat chronic pain.

Lawsuits filed by state and local governments across the country assert that the change was a major factor in a national opioid addiction and overdose crisis.

Rivera said: “It used to be they just were incarcerated. They just were kept off the streets and punished for whatever crime they committed to get the money they needed to buy their prescription drugs. But now in Sarasota and many other places they’re trying a much more comprehensive rehabilitative approach to it where they’re trying to lessen recidivism, get these people on the straight-and-narrow, where they can get some coping skills, some survival skills.”

Rivera said while members of law enforcement are “taking care of those patients” they are also, “busting drug manufacturers.”

He brought up the example of federal prosecutors charging one of the nation’s largest opioid distributors, Rochester Drug Cooperative, and two of its former executives on Tuesday.

“Two of the chief executives were arrested for knowingly and intentionally pedaling opioids, knowing that they were more addictive and more damaging to these people than they were saying,” Rivera said.

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He added that there is “some evidence” the opioid crisis is “plateauing,” saying it’s “because of these aggressive federal actions but there’s a long way obviously to go.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.