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This week, disaster struck The Politics Guys. Well, okay, maybe not disaster exactly, but a truly nasty flu bug felled Trey late in the week. We’d planned to have Trey run the show along with a special more far left than Mike guest co-host, but that all fell apart when Trey’s thermometer hit 105 yesterday afternoon. (He got some good drugs and is feeling slightly better today.)
Mike and Jay had planned to take the week off and so neither of them was ready to do anything but provide off-the-cuff, uninformed opinions. (Yes, we realize that sometimes it seems like they do that every week, but trust us, they spend a lot of time preparing.)
And so, instead of throwing together some shoddy instant-analysis of the news (which you can get so many other places) we decided instead to run Mike’s recent talk with San Quinones about the opioid epidemic.
Sam lived for 10 years as a freelance writer in Mexico, where he wrote his first two books, returning to the U.S. in 2004 to work for the L.A. Times, covering immigration, drug trafficking, neighborhood stories, and gangs. In 2014 he resigned from the Times to return to freelancing, working for publications including National Geographic, the New York Times, and Los Angeles Magazine. He’s the author of three books, including Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, which appeared on numerous ‘best book of the year’ lists and won the National Book Critics Circle award for nonfiction. He’s spoken about the crisis in many venues, including Marc Maron’s WTF and Russ Roberts’ EconTalk (two of Mike’s favorite podcasts), and he recently testified on the opioid crisis before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee.
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