Deadly Dose: Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports debuts Sunday, Nov. 18, 8:00pm ET
Every 19 minutes, someone dies of a
drug overdose in America.
That U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) statistic refers to
legal and illegal drug use, but most of those overdose deaths are due to legal
prescription drugs.
Accidental prescription drug
overdoses in the United
States now kill more people than heroin,
crack, and methamphetamines combined. And, also according to the CDC,
accidental prescription overdoses now kill more Americans than do car
crashes.
In a compelling new documentary, Deadly
Dose: Dr. Sanjay Gupta Reports, CNN chief medical correspondent Dr.
Sanjay Gupta reports how prescription drug misuse has become an
epidemic. He speaks with a survivor, and takes viewers to the front lines
of the crisis – riding along with paramedics, interviewing emergency room
doctors, and listening to panicked calls to a poison response center –
witnessing, first-hand, the too-often deadly consequences of drug
overdoses.
Deadly Dose will debut on Sunday, Nov. 18 at
8:00pm and 11:00pm ET & PT on CNN/U.S. The network will encore the
one-hour documentary on Saturday, Dec. 1 at 8:00pm and 11:00pm ET & PT.
Deadly Dose also features an interview
with former President Bill Clinton, who speaks movingly about the death
of Benjamin Gupta (no relationship to Dr. Sanjay Gupta), the son of a campaign
donor, who died after mixing a prescription pain reliever with alcohol.
Benjamin’s father, Vinod Gupta, and brother, Alex Gupta, talk
about the emotional toll of their loss and their commitment to educating other
families facing the problem of prescription drug misuse.
Former President Clinton spoke with
Dr. Gupta in Arkansas
in mid-November:
“It is a good thing to have a
medicine that will ease your pain. It is not a good thing to take more of
them than you need. It is not a good thing to get even one (sic) to
someone who does not need it. And it is playing with life and death to
give these medicines to people who have imbibed any kind of alcohol, because if
you go to sleep, the medicine might tell your brain to quit breathing.
Most people don’t know these basic things,” says Clinton to Gupta in an interview exclusively
conducted for the documentary.
Dr. Gupta stresses that the epidemic
of prescription drug abuse and accidental overdose knows no geographic
boundaries. It is a growing epidemic in urban, suburban, and rural
populations. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services
Administration, the misuse and abuse of
prescription painkillers were responsible for more than 475,000 emergency room
visits in 2009, a figure which doubled compared to the number of hospital
emergency visits just five years prior.
“The people that have this problem
are your friends and neighbors – and you don’t know about it,” Clinton says in the
documentary.
Deadly Dose explores how this crisis has risen to
epidemic proportions in the United
States, and examines potential solutions for
reversing the epidemic.
Digital resources with more
information on prescription drug misuse in the U.S. may be found at www.cnn.com/health. Articles about the epidemic, including an editorial by Dr. Sanjay
Gupta will also appear in the health section of www.cnn.com. An excerpt from Dr. Gupta’s
interview with former President Clinton will accompany his editorial.
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