The Crime of the Century

Morning, morning.

- Oh, so they're working on him?

They worked on him.

- Oh, really? - Yeah.

- Which unit is it? Upstairs?

- It's up on the top corner. - On top here?

January 13, 2021.

We'll get started at 0540 hours.

Victim's information:

date of birth: 9,'97.

Long history of drug use.

The mother called in at 0306 hours

for medical assistance

for her son, the victim.

She found him in his bedroom.

She said he was cold to the touch.

Officers and medics arrived on scene.

The lower half of the body-- the legs--were cold,

but the upper body was still warm,

so officers and the medics started performing CPR

for approximately 15 minutes.

See if it works.

It's worked like money

the last several times I've done it.

In the victim's bedroom,

we found a spoon with a brown residue

inside of a shoebox

as well as a needle and several baggies.

- So that's positive off the spoon.

Fentanyl.

Yeah.

- Ultimately was pronounced deceased

0336 hours.

Well, it's gonna be

a beautiful, sunny day today.

And we can expect much more of the same...

[whistle blows, people shouting]

[singer vocalizing irregularly]

[music fades, wind howls gently]

narrator: For thousands of years,

a demand for opioid has attracted commerce

and crime.

The narcotic comes from the resin

that oozes from the bulb of the poppy.

From the reign of King Tut,

the Egyptians were the first to cultivate vast fields

of the drug,

which they sold throughout the Mediterranean.

Alexander the Great expanded the market

by introducing opium to India,

where today it is still cultivated by hand.

It's known for soothing pain,

but carries the looming danger of desperate addiction.

During the Inquisition, Catholic clerics called it

the stuff of the devil,

but its lure and commercial value

were hard to resist.

By the 16th century,

the resin was rolled into black pills

called "Stones of Immortality"

and marketed as a pain killer called laudanum.

During the Industrial Revolution,

infants were narcotized with laudanum

by mothers without childcare who needed to leave home

to work the factories and the mines.

The smoking of opium expanded the global market into China,

where millions became addicted.

By the 19th century, the British East India Company

built vast opium factories,

where the stuff was rolled into cannonballs

and then shipped off to Chinese merchants

called the hong.

American dealers like John Jacob Astor

and FDR's grandfather, Warren Delano,

cashed in by manufacturing the stuff in Turkey.

By 1839,

opium was the world's most traded commodity.

Concerned by addiction and overdoses,

the Chinese emperor appointed a drug czar,

who dumped thousands of cannonballs of opium

into the sea.

In a fury, opium companies pushed the British government

to start a war with China

to keep the profits flowing.

In time, opium developed as a prescription drug.

- The Merck Company launched a product

called morphine.

Bayer introduced

a cough suppressant

called heroin.

When addiction rose to dangerous levels,

the U.S. made heroin illegal,

creating a new global crime business

dominated by the Italian mafia and Mexican cartels.

Big pharma turned to the mass manufacturer

of other opium products like morphine and oxycodone

and learned how to mechanize the process.

They created a demand for narcotics,

addicting millions of men, women, and children

which, in turn, fueled the illegal drug trade

from pill mills to heroin dealers,

to illegal fentanyl factories.

The terrible truth is that the business

of criminal cartels and pharmaceutical companies

is connected.

Together, they generate $100 billion of income a year

by cultivating and catering

to a desperate need for opioids.

That business model has a terrible cost.

Within the last 20 years,

more than 500,000 Americans

have been killed by overdoses.

- You know, when I started off

telling the story of the opium crisis,

I'd never written about

the pharmaceutical industry before,

but I'd written a lot about illicit drugs.

I had done some big stories about

the Sinaloa drug cartel.

I was impressed by the logistical complexity

and the seriousness with which they thought about the idea

of innovating product lines.

Like when they first were really rolling out

methamphetamine in a big way,

they would actually send free samples to key markets,

and the way they thought about wholesale distribution,

sort of how far down the chain they'd go,

bringing the money back to Mexico,

the way they'd institutionalized corruption.

So I was looking at cocaine and methamphetamine,

but increasingly it seemed that

Mexican heroin was making a comeback in a big way

in the United States.

What creates the market

for this very dynamic drug cartel,

where they're thinking all the time

about their different products, and what should we send,

and, you know, how's pot doing versus cocaine,

and--no, truly--

and what they realize is, God, there's all these people now

who want heroin.

It turns out that that was a population

of hundreds of thousands, and millions of people

who had been abusing prescription drugs,

whether they were getting them from a doctor

or buying them on the street.

And for a variety of reasons,

it was getting harder to obtain,

and they find themselves buying heroin.

You suddenly had this huge population of buyers

who'd kind of come into the market

through the back door.

They'd come in through the world

of illicit pharmaceuticals.

And I started looking at opioids,

and when you do that,

you pretty quickly stumble on the Sackler family.

- I often say I approach collecting

as a biologist,

that I want enough data

to be able to draw valid conclusions.

Art is a passion pursued with discipline.

Science is a discipline pursued with passion.

You have to really pursue the object.

You just don't sit there

and have the objects come to you.

You want to be a great collector,

you better think of the fact

that you're gonna commit yourself

to a real passionate hunt.

narrator: Arthur Sackler's passion

as a collector made him famous.

With his brothers, the Sackler family

chiseled its reputation for generosity

on the walls of museums and colleges.

No American family has profited more

from controlled substances-- from Valium to OxyContin--

than the Sacklers.

They built a fortune of more than $14 billion

by becoming some of the world's

most successful drug pushers.