Anthony Bourdain — chef, author and host of CNN's "Parts Unknown" — rebuked the pharmaceutical industry for its role in the nation's current opioid abuse epidemic in a recent GQ interview.
Here are three quotes from Mr. Bourdain, who is known for his candor about his own struggles with heroin addiction.
1. On flooding the market: "Look, large corporations track their sales very carefully. If you're pumping in millions of highly addictive narcotic pills to one tiny little town, or one tiny little state, you know what you're doing."
2. On the demographics of addiction: "Now that the white captain of the football team and his cheerleader girlfriend in small-town America are hooked on dope, maybe we'll now stop demonizing heroin as a criminal problem and start dealing with it as the medical and public-health problem that it is."
3. On retribution for big pharma: "These pharmaceutical company executives are dope dealers, and they should be treated worse and more roughly than dope dealers ... Frog-march them out of their door in suburbia, handcuffed and surrounded by Drug Enforcement Administration officers, with their children and neighbors watching. I think you'd start seeing some real behavioral change if you started putting them through that same system as we've been putting young black men for years."
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