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The Daily host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with New York Times investigative reporter Azam Ahmed about the need for a new framework to address the new synthetic drug crisis.<\/p>\nnew video loaded: The New Drug Crisis No One’s Ready For<\/p>\n
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The New Drug Crisis No One’s Ready ForThe Daily host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with New York Times investigative reporter Azam Ahmed about the need for a new framework to address the new synthetic drug crisis.<\/p>\n
\u2013 It\u2019s treating it as a public health crisis and not a criminal problem. \u2013 Exactly. Which is something the United States has always struggled with. \u2013 It sounds like what you\u2019ve learned is that we don\u2019t have the language to describe what we\u2019re seeing. And so, a first step is to just, all of us, wrap our minds around what this is and really change our entire framework of thinking about it. \u2013 I think that\u2019s right. I think it\u2019s also just looking at it with, like, dispassionate, brutal honesty, which has always been hard for us. We are still thinking that blowing up boats or, like, targeting kingpins is going to stop this, and it\u2019s clearly not. You can have little bits of pressure, and maybe that can even be a good thing to force the Mexicans to actually do something about this gigantic industry within their borders. But that\u2019s not going to solve it. We are still getting this kind of retrograde rhetoric coming out of the White House and other corners of the U.S. government about cracking down more. We\u2019ve never needed more creative thinking about this problem, because it\u2019s never been more dangerous or creative. We\u2019re kind of moving in opposite directions on one of the most costly issues of our time. \u2013 One of the things that you\u2019re doing with this reporting is forcing us, honestly, to look at this thing with very clear eyes, and to understand that we are that society that\u2019s in the throes of an addiction crisis, and that it is happening in ways that I don\u2019t think any of us expected it to. And I don\u2019t know if any of us really, totally, understand.<\/p>\n
The Daily host Natalie Kitroeff speaks with New York Times investigative reporter Azam Ahmed about the need for a new framework to address the new synthetic drug crisis.<\/p>\n
May 26, 2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"new video loaded: The New Drug Crisis No One’s Ready For transcript Back transcript The New Drug Crisis…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":243650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[303,3777,33804,9,11,10,8098],"class_list":["post-243649","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-crime","tag-criminal-justice","tag-drug-abuse","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-headlines","tag-new-york-news","tag-prison"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/243650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}