Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Heroin is the deadliest drug on the face

of the planet.

JAMES: It's like a mother's hug when you have it,

but it's like a Daddy's smack in the head when you don't have it.

NARRATOR: It starts out a pretty poppy,

but ends up a poisonous liquid, injected into

the veins of addicts.

PATRICIA: It's not a party it ends up to be pain and hurt.

NARRATOR: The global heroin industry funds terrorism and

international crime while undermining the fabric of

society.

EUGENE: If an addict wants to be an addict they're gonna be an

addict.

COP: Put your hands up!

NARRATOR: America is at war -- at home and abroad --

in a desperate attempt to end heroin's worldwide reign.

Producers, traffickers, dealers, users, doctors, police

they're all part of the $300 million a year global

industry that is - Drugs Incorporated.

Vancouver, Canada.

4am.

Lianne Gladue is 42 years old. She's married with 3 children.

LIANNE GLADUE: I don't have a story of: oh my mother hated me,

my dad used to do this to me. I had great parents.

In all honesty I let them down a bit.

NARRATOR: 7 years ago, Lianne took her first hit of heroin.

She's been addicted and homeless ever since.

LIANNE GLADUE: This is my home. These are my neighbors.

These are my storekeepers. This is where I live.

I live in a shelter.

I share a room with 2 other strangers and I share a bathroom

with 45 other people.

My addiction controls me every day.

It controls where I live; it controls who I see,

it controls who I don't see, that's the worse part,

who I don't see.

I wanna give up dope every single day

every time I miss my children.

NARRATOR: Lianne's friend Patricia,

prostitutes to support her habit.

PATRICIA BOYT: Oh, I left home when I was 16.

My dad was an alcoholic and didn't like my boyfriend so I

ended up moving out, ended up surviving by selling marijuana

on the streets.

Then marijuana led to cocaine, and the cocaine led to heroin.

Eventually selling marijuana wasn't fast enough money ...

so I ended up on the corner selling my body to support my

heroin habit.

Come on!

NARRATOR: There's no single path to heroin addiction.

Nearly a quarter of all people who try the drug eventually

become addicted.

PATRICIA BOYT: my first injection I did of heroin,

within 30 days I had my first criminal charge.

NARRATOR: Heroin changes the way the brain works.

So when an addict is deprived of the drug,

they become physically sick.

PATRICIA BOYT: I don't how else to explain it.

It's like a cup of cocoa before bed and having a hot bath.

The nice soothing feeling you get?

The same thing. Hey, how are you?

I do it first to get well and then I do it to get high.

Want some company?

NARRATOR: Vancouver has one of the highest standards of living

in the world.

But the million dollar yachts and beautiful beaches,

stand in stark contrast to Main Street and Hastings in the

Downtown Eastside.

A four by ten block area in the heart of Vancouver's skid row is

home to thousands of addicts -

one of the largest concentrations in North America.

LIANNE GLADUE: We'll walk up Carnagie Alley.

NARRATOR: Lianne's lived in the area for 7 years.

LIANNE GLADUE: This is Carnagie Alley.

More drugs are consumed, sold, bartered than any place else.

I lived right here for 4 years, this was my back yard.

Um, I have looked out my window and seen a person sitting there

and for $5 almost been beaten to death.

I've looked out my window and saw a friend of mine overdosed,

ran down and saved his life.

This is my alley.

This is where I learned to do what I had to do,

which was sell dope to support my heroin habit.

How did I end up down here?

I dabbled with cocaine for numerous years and was able to

continue a functional lifestyle with my family and my children

and my husband.

Then I got sick, medically sick.

Was introduced with morphine which is an opiate,

and I got wired to morphine.

And a doctor that prescribed me an absurd amount of morphine,

that as far as I'm concerned wired me up worse than any

heroin dealer ...

... whatever.

And the College of Physicians ... ... and Surgeons started an

investigation on him.

He immediately cut my prescription,

and I had no means to support my habit.

And so from a small town ... ... a 40 minute ferry ride,

within 6 weeks I was down here learning to sling crack.

NARRATOR: Heroin causes physical changes in the brain that lead

to chemical dependence.

If an addict doesn't shoot up at least twice a day...

they go into withdrawal.

LIANNE GLADUE: You dope sick right now?

NARRATOR: Lianne runs into her friend Meg,

who needs help shooting up.

LIANNE GLADUE: Okay, Meg's dope sick,

so she's got low blood pressure, right.

NARRATOR: 'Dope sick' means she's in withdrawal.

Because she has low blood pressure,

she can't find a vein to inject.

LIANNE GLADUE: I jug everybody.

NARRATOR: Meg needs Lianne to "jug" her,

or shoot heroin directly into her jugular vein.

LIANNE GLADUE: Blow, blow!

NARRATOR: Physical symptoms of heroin withdrawal include severe

muscle pain, vomiting, diarrhea, and in some cases even death.

Addicts will do anything for their next fix.

LIANNE GLADUE: It's just gross what happens here.

The most inhumane things.

People falling asleep and their shoes being taken,

because somebody is dope sick and they need to sell the shoes.

NARRATOR: By 11am, Lianne escapes the chaos of the alleys

and heads to Insite ...

NURSE: What are you using?

LIANNE GLADUE: Heroin

NARRATOR: It's a government run facility that provides users

with clean needles and a safe place to shoot up.

Heroin use is so risky because it's almost always injected.

Sharing needles spreads HIV and other infectious diseases.

The Insite project was set up in 2003 after Vancouver's Downtown

Eastside posted the highest rates of HIV in

the western world.

JAMES WHITMORE: If we didn't have Insite,

we wouldn't have lives, right? This place does save lives.

NARRATOR: Because it's injected, heroin's impact on the brain

is extreme.

Unlike other drugs that rely on snorting or smoking,

heroin's effects are felt within seconds.

It quickly crosses from the blood stream into the brain,

releasing huge amounts of dopamine which trigger a

euphoric state in the user.

The high is intense...

but the low that follows is unbearable.

JAMES WHITMORE: It's like a Mother's hug when you have it,

but it's like a Daddy's smack in the head when you don't have it.

It hurts when you don't have it. It's heroin right.?

NARRATOR: Lianne prepares her heroin.

LIANNE GLADUE: They call it the devil's dandruff. It's all evil.

NARRATOR: She goes through the same routine every day.

LIANNE GLADUE: The golden liquid is John Travolta in Pulp

Fiction, Train Spotting, made it look real romantic.

As far as I'm concerned this still kills people.

It's the very thing I need to live without being dope sick.

Ah we got it. And... done.

NARRATOR: As the heroin courses through her veins,

Lianne descends into remorse.

LIANNE GLADUE:This is a disease. It is not a moral decision

addiction.

I didn't go at 12 years old, roll out of bed and say

I want to be a junkie.

NARRATOR: The streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside

are flooded with high-grade heroin.

DEALER: That's $1,000 worth of dope right there.

NARRATOR: And it's taken an epic journey to get here.

Heroin begins it's life as a beautiful flower, grown

7,000 miles away in places like Afghanistan's Helmand Province.

In Helmand Province, poppy farmer Ahmad Ollah harvests

his crop.

He scores the poppies so they bleed opium sap --

the raw ingredient of heroin.

Ahmad relies on the sale of his crop to feed the 18 members of

his family through the long Afghan winter.

A car arrives with a message--envoys of a local

warlord want to buy his opium.

Two million people across the country are involved in the

cultivation of opium poppies.

More than 75 percent of the world's heroin supply originates

here. The buyers inspect Ahmad's opium

NARRATOR: Ahmad was hoping for $40 per kilo.

Unfortunately for Ahmad, the buyer only pays $34 per kilo.

The raw opium is taken to the home of Mansur Khan -

a tribal leader, who has his own personal militia.

He's one of a group of drug warlords who control

large areas of Afghanistan.

Khan prepares to ship the opium to Iran,

where it will be turned into heroin.

His smugglers choose a crossing point in one of the Afghan

provinces that border Iran.

The terrain is dangerous and there's constant threat of

ambush by both the Allied forces and the Iranian military.

The convoy suddenly stops when they're radioed by a scout on

horseback.

The spies have helped them avoid an ambush by

the Iranian military.

Producers in Iran and Afghanistan can use simple

methods to process the opium into heroin.

The lab isn't high tech.

First, the villagers use a wooden block and a car jack to

press all the moisture out of the raw opium.

The dry opium sap is heated in an iron cauldron with water and

treated with a series of chemicals to produce the heroin.

Then all the moisture is pressed out of the mixture using a

wooden plank.

Finally, the heroin is dried out over a fire and tested.

An Afghan farmer earns more than the average yearly wage by

selling the opium needed to make just one kilo of heroin.

By the time that kilo reaches America, it's worth $130,000.

The business of heroin production isn't just about

feeding hungry farmers.

Since 2005 the Taliban -

the protectors and sponsors of Al Qaeda

-- have skimmed more than $450 million in profits from

the heroin business.

Khan trafficks his opium to international crime syndicates

in Iran who turn it into heroin and sell it for up

to $5,000 a kilo.

The border is fiercely guarded because Iran has the highest

heroin addiction rate in the world.

Camel caravans leave smugglers vulnerable to attack.

This time the smugglers aren't not so lucky.

The Iranians ambush them at the border.

Lives are lost. And the shipment is seized.

Last year, the Iranian authorities destroyed more

than 16 tons of heroin and 400 tons of opium.

But warlords like Khan are persistent.

Afghan heroin is smuggled across so many different land borders

it's impossible to intercept every shipment.

The drugs are trucked by international crime

syndicates to Turkey.

From there, they move to Holland

a major distribution point for Europe and the West.

Rotterdam is the third largest port in the world.

Its 25 miles of harbor handle over

a million tons of cargo a day.

but not all of it's legal.

Officer Onno van Elswijk has one of the most difficult jobs in

the port: he determines which ships to search for drugs.

OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: Last year we had about

38,000 ships in the port of Rotterdam.

so it's impossible to check them all.

NARRATOR: The traffickers use ingenious methods

to smuggle heroin.

OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: They try to mislead us in a thousand ways

and ... it's our job to see what their new ideas of smuggling.

NARRATOR: But Officer van Elswijk has a high tech weapon

in his arsenal-- an X-ray machine so powerful it can see

through the steel walls of shipping containers.

OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: We've got a container with flowers over

here.

We found heroin in the cabin of the truck.

You can see all package of, of heroin,

and it's about 60 kilograms.

NARRATOR: Even though it fits into the cab of a truck,

this 60 kilo load is worth $2 million on the street.

OFFICER ONNO ELSWIJK: We see it as a game of cat and mouse.

They try every time to think of something new.

NARRATOR: This time it's only an exercise.

OFFICER VAN HESE: These are steel pipes, er,

the sense of the drugs is on the pipes,

we train the dogs with these kind of pipes,

we put it everything, and the dogs, the dog will find.

NARRATOR: Despite the border police's best efforts,

340 tons of heroin made it onto the world's streets last year.

But that's only one part of a vast supply.

Perhaps to ensure prices remain high,

traffickers have stockpiled 12,000 tons of opium.

It's enough to keep the world's heroin addicts fixed

for two years.

The UN speculates that funding from this store of drugs may be

used to finance terrorist attacks.

This man, known by the alias JJ, is a heroin dealer.

He's the bottom rung of the heroin retail trade--

a dealer who sells heroin to support his own habit.

Heroin is up to 70 percent pure when it leaves the producer.

But by the time it reaches JJ, it's been cut

down several times.

JJ cuts his heroin with sleeping pills to increase its volume so

JJ cuts his heroin with sleeping pills to increase its volume so

JJ cuts his heroin with sleeping pills to increase its volume so

he can make more money.

Other dealers will often mix in anything at hand: including

harmful brick dust, chalk, even rat poison.

Each bag weighs around a tenth of a gram.

He'll sell them as $10 hits on the street.

JJ gets paid $50 a day.

His habit demands a relentless schedule.

JJ is part of a crew that operates in Chicago's Westside

JJ is part of a crew that operates in Chicago's Westside

a part of the city 600,000 people call home.

Poverty and crime blight the area.

Rates of heroin addiction are high.

JJ: Hey how you doing ...?

NARRATOR: JJ's boss, Stretch, has been on the streets since

he was a kid.

His father was a crack addict, so Stretch had to fend for

himself from an early age.

ADDICT: Thanks baby.

NARRATOR: Stretch employs 42 people like JJ,

divided into 7 crews around Chicago's Westside.

He lives in constant fear of the police.

More than 10,000 people are serving jail time for drug

offenses in Illinois- totalling nearly a quarter of the state's

overall prison population.

Stretch's crews work together to sell heroin...

and watch out for the cops.

In a week, Stretch's dealers each sell about 7 grams,

worth $700.

But if the cops stop them, they won't find any drugs.

Once a customer makes a buy, Stretch sends one of his crew

members to fetch the drugs from a nearby hiding place.

A different member takes the payment.

Then the handover's made and the deal is done.

With so much money changing hands,

there's always a threat of violence from rival crews.

But for Stretch, the money from a good week makes

it worth the risk.

$17,000 a week is a fortune to Stretch.

But for the big shots, it's chump change.

Stretch buys from a mysterious Mr Big,

whose connections bring heroin into the city.

EUGENE: I'm pretty much a broker, okay?

Money comes, money goes, I don't count it.

NARRATOR: A man using the alias 'Eugene' is one of a handful of

Chicago's heroin brokers; he buys directly from the

traffickers and sells to dealers on the street.

EUGENE: Well when drugs come into the,

to the city by infrastructures that we all know,

I mean just like, just like anything ...

... import or domestic, gets to stores and things like that,

that's the way drugs come into the city,

they're just housed discreetly.

Nothing special, nothing secret to it.

The only thing that would be secret is who has it

and who's moving it.

NARRATOR: Eugene doesn't get his hands dirty--

unless it's to deliver punishment.

For him, violence is a tool of the business.

EUGENE: There has been times where It's been handled

violently when I have to regulate a situation ...

where I'm not so diplomatic. Where I have to threaten or act.

A lot of times I don't do it myself.

A lot of times ... ... I do it myself.

Each makes a statement.

When I do it myself, it makes a statement that

I can or that I will.

When I have someone else do it, it shows the extension of power.

NARRATOR: Eugene likens his philosophy of drug-dealing to an

almost religious experience.

EUGENE: I'm, I'm pretty much the, the peacemaker, the, um

the keeper of flocks.

Kind of like a minister does in a church.

You know, how a minister, er, can have thousands of people

following him, er ...

... not because he's paying them,

just from the reverence alone.

My reign is from reverence alone.

NARRATOR: Eugene reigns over his drug dealing family.

He shows his love by keeping them supplied

with high-grade heroin.

EUGENE: I can't save the world.

If an addict wants to be an addict,

they're gonna be an addict, and they're gonna get the drugs,

whether it's through you or around you.

So let me ask you a question, if you had a brother,

and your brother was an addict, you don't want them to get drugs

at all, we know this.

But if he must get drugs ... ... get that drug from me.

Because I'm gonna make sure that you're safe,

I have an interest in you that you nobody else has.

That is my role in the environment.

NARRATOR: Newark, New Jersey.

6am.

100 of Newark's finest are gathering for Operation

Four Seasons.

The target: a major heroin market in a run- down housing

project in North Newark.

CHILL: We'll set up somewhere over here.

NARRATOR: The aim: to take out the boss and all his dealers

simultaneously, and to hit the stash house where

the drugs are kept.

Undercover officer, code name Chill, is leading the operation.

CHILL: It's like, it's like a pharmacy.

A lot of guns.

This is really a bad spot.

NARRATOR: The raid is part of Police Director Garry McCarthy's

War on Drugs.

DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY: The war on drugs absolutely can be won.

Simply measuring arrests and seizures is not going to be an

effective measure.

Um, on a national level we should be looking at taking out

large organizations that eliminate supply but by taking

it from top to bottom.

Taking it all the way down to a street level,

which is obviously something that's difficult to do.

NARRATOR: In 2007 more than 1.8 million drug-related arrests

were made in the US.

COP: Got nothing on you at all?

NARRATOR: And America's prisons hold half a million drug

offenders -- more than any other country in the world.

Drug abuse costs the US economy more than $180 billion a year.

COP: Put your hands up!

NARRATOR: Across America, entire neighborhoods are abandoned to

dealers and drug users.

In Newark, McCarthy's strategy is to flood the streets with

police and take control of the drug dealing neighborhoods to

reduce crime for the residents of Newark.

DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY: Narcotics users,

people who are addicted to narcotics,

will commit burglaries, they will do robberies to obtain

money ... ... to buy drugs.

When they're under arrest for narcotics,

they're not committing a burglary or a robbery.

NARRATOR: After months of undercover police work,

the trap is finally set.

VINNIE: I wanna thank everyone for coming out this morning.

My name's Vinnie. I'm with DEA ...

The north end approach with be vehicle 9 and go down North

Cedar Lane and try and squeeze everybody towards the south.

If you see runners, those are the people you wanna grab.

CHILL: Hitting this area just the way we been hitting it, we,

we wasn't, really wasn't putting a dent.

But being that we got multiple agencies involved,

this operation is getting the bottom, the middle and the top.

The main thing that the Director of the Newark Police Department

is trying to do is that once we establish it and we get it,

we keep it.

NARRATOR: The police will work with other professionals to help

rebuild the community.

But Chill's job is to first take down the bad guys.

CHILL: Oh, we're gonna great satisfaction here because we're

going to accomplish our task.

NARRATOR: Chill calls in the SWAT team to raid the kingpin's

stash house.

LIEUTENANT RUBEL: Anywhere there's usually drug activity

there's a possibility of weapons.

They go hand in hand in the, er, in the US.

NARRATOR: The SWAT team locks and loads.

They're armed with military style guns and body armor.

Chill leads the team to the stash house.

CHILL: The whole, the whole crew gonna be behind us,

we're taking the lead. We're the generals.

COP: I'm hoping to find Chill.

CHILL: Tell him we're in a black truck.

LIEUTENANT: We're in a black, er, black truck.

All Perimeter teams, er, just standby

NARRATOR: The perimeter teams wait for the signal.

LIEUTENANT: Airwolf 1 coming into the, er, the area.

SWAT OFFICER: About 30 seconds away alright?

LIEUTENANT: Channel 1. All units converge please!

NARRATOR: The SWAT team goes in hard and fast.

SWAT COP: Police! Search Warrant.

NARRATOR: The idea is to surprise the suspects

before they can get rid of the drugs.

LIEUTENANT RUBEL: As we got to the second floor, the, er,

lady that was in there was in the bathroom.

Er, it appeared she had something in her mouth but we

couldn't prove that that was drugs at the moment.

And right now they're still ... ... searching for any illegal

substances or weapons in the house right now.

NARRATOR: Now it's time to take down the project's dealers.

DEALER: They wanna get little change bro!

DEALER: They wanna get little change bro!

NARRATOR: But back at the stash house, there's a problem.

The dog hasn't found any drugs.

CHILL: I've been doing this so long till I used to be very

discouraged, cos sometimes you'll come here,

you may get the big motherload.

And then sometimes you'll come here with a big fat zero.

NARRATOR: Chill does get one vital piece of information --

before the raid, the police only knew this dealer's street alias

-- now they have his real name.

CHILL: As long as we get the one that actually doing the selling

out of there, that will give us a more better positive result,

whether or not we got the drugs or not.

At least we got him and take him out of the complex.

NARRATOR: In Newark, property values are 30 percent below the

state average.

School dropout is double.

For Garry McCarthy, rehabilitation begins with

isolating dealers and offering hope beyond drugs.

DIRECTOR GARRY MCCARTHY: Narcotics is not the crime,

you know.

Shootings,robberies,burglaries, those are the crimes.

Narcotics is the problem.

It's a social condition that needs to be corrected on a

separate level.

NARRATOR: Block by block, project by project,

McCarthy is closing down the city's drug markets,

trying to lift the shadow of drug- related crime in Newark.

COP: My guys just saw you do a purchase, okay?

So right now you're under arrest.

ADDICT: What did you see me purchasing? Nothing.

NARRATOR: Heroin addiction is the dark underbelly

of American life.

Addicts are targeted by cops...

and dismissed as criminal junkies by mainstream society.

In Newark, addicts are locked up so they won't fund their

habit through crime.

But one man in Chicago is taking a different approach.

Greg Scott, Research Director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance,

sees the 50,000 addicts in his city not as criminals,

but victims in need of medical treatment.

GREG SCOTT: I specialize in going into homeless encampments,

shooting galleries, crack houses, um,

other areas where people are in their natural

setting using their drugs.

NARRATOR: Greg's day begins on the wrong side of the tracks.

He heads to some of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods

to help homeless addicts.

GREG SCOTT: Joseph!

NARRATOR: Opiates, like heroin, kill more people

than any other narcotic

around 100,000 a year worldwide.

Its victims die primarily from infection from

dirty needles or overdose.

GREG SCOTT: Yo!

NARRATOR: Greg is trying to fight both.

MIKE: I think all the kids is over here.

GREG SCOTT: Popeye! How you doing, man?

I will retrieve, I'll pick up dirty syringes,

whatever they may have to give me ... ... and I distribute to

them sterile syringes, clean paraphernalia.

How you doing ...?

ADDICT: Very good ...

NARRATOR: Greg's not just handing out clean needles.

He's also armed with a weapon that can combat overdose

the heroin antidote.

GREG SCOTT:I also distribute to them Narcan or Naloxone,

the generic name, which is the opiate antidote.

It's an antagonist that reverses the effects of an opiate

overdose which for these folks is heroin.

So we've got a 10 shot vial, 10mm,

10 shots and then here's some muscle syringes so you don't

have to go in the tongue.

NARRATOR: Distributing naloxone like this isn't legal

everywhere; Greg's group was the first to offer

it free to addicts.

STEVE KAMENICKY: I've been doing heroin 36 years.

Prior to Narcan we used to wrestle with the people you know

trying to keep them awake.

Some people just about literally,

almost beat them black and blue just so they wouldn't fall

deeper into their, into their nod, you know.

Cos once you get too far into it, you're dead.

NARRATOR: Going 'on the nod' means losing consciousness,

but an overdose can take the nod too far and the brain forgets to

keep the body breathing.

Thousands of people in the US die from the effects

of heroin every year.

PAMELA: No,I think it's clotted. No not yet.

NARRATOR : Later in the day, Greg joins up with his mobile

clinic to hand out clean needles and give free Hepatitis

vaccinations to addicts.

Greg is part of the larger 'harm reduction movement' that

includes thousands of volunteers around the country.

GREG SCOTT: Every year we directly reach

12,000 thousand injection drug users.

And we reach .. ... another close to

30,000 through secondary exchange.

ADDICT: It feel good!

NARRATOR: The methods of 'harm reduction' are controversial.

Greg's primary objective isn't to get users into

addiction treatment.

It's simply to teach them safer injection practices.

GREG SCOTT: They're sort of surprised usually when they come

on for the first time that we're not gonna preach to them,

and tell them: You gotta stop using.

You know, we're not going to say: This is bad for you.

They know It's bad for them.

GREG: We're going to do two tests

Hepatitis C and syphilis.

NARRATOR: Greg's work is close to his heart.

GREG SCOTT: I have a good deal of personal experience with drug

abuse, drug addiction.

And I have lost some of my dearest friends and some of my

relatives to overdose.

NARRATOR: The US government spends less than a quarter of

its drug control budget on treatment.

And the ban on federal funding for needle exchanges has only

recently been lifted.

Most money is spent on law enforcement.

Greg works late into the night.

GREG SCOTT: I'm heading off to the Westside of Chicago.

There's a house there, you might call it a crack house,

a shooting gallery.

About 10 people live there on any given day.

The number varies.

And they've had probably 3 overdoses in the last 3 weeks.

One of which was fatal.

CAT: This is not real hard to understand.

You're going to be in this house and you're gonna shoot dope,

you're all going to come in here and learn about this.

It takes, what, 10 or 15 minutes of your time to save your

goddamn lives?

NARRATOR: Greg is fighting an uphill battle.

Despite Naloxone's life saving benefits,

addicts are reluctant to take anything that might rob them of

their high.

GREG SCOTT: Now this bottle is 10 doses... 10 lives.

Now this bottle cost the needle exchange 2 dollars and 67 cents.

To you it's free. Now think about this.

Is your life worth 27 cents? I think it is.

CAT:Why do I worry about these guys so much? Why?

NARRATOR: Crack cocaine addict 'Cat' is in charge of the house.

With so many drugs around, she doesn't want to risk the cops

turning up to investigate an overdose death.

CAT: Sometimes it is a shooting gallery...

... and lately it has been.

We have hookers, we have drug addicts, we have dope fiends,

we have family.

Kind of like the United Nations.

But people have been dying around me too much.

They don't care about themselves when they're doing the heroin.

NARRATOR: Because of Greg's outreach group,

Naloxone has saved 1,000 Chicago addicts from overdose.

GREG: You all right?

CAT: No, she's not all right.

GREG: Well you're not really breathing ...

NARRATOR: Greg's work soon takes an urgent turn.

A prostitute from the crack house is overdosing.

CAT: Just do it.

GREG SCOTT: Laura, I'm gonna have to ...

CAT: Just do it:

GREG SCOTT: I'm gonna have to do it, Laura.

CAT: Just give it to her! LAURA:Don't ...don't put it ...

CAT: Greg, she's been up for 3 days.

GREG SCOTT: Laura, you're falling out.

CAT: She's been up for 3 days, she ...

GREG SCOTT: Laura, I'm only gonna give you a half cc.

CAT: Just give it to her!

NARRATOR: Greg hits her with the heroin antidote.

GREG SCOTT:We had a little Narcan.

So it'll wake you up just enough to breathe.

NARRATOR: But Laura's had too much dope and the antidote

doesn't seem to be working.

CAT: Sit down right here. Sit.

NARRATOR: Greg gives her another shot.

The Naloxone courses through her bloodstream and blocks the

heroin's path to her brain, rendering it entirely harmless.

GREG SCOTT: This is the 24th time that I've used Narcan

on somebody.

Addiction is a disease ... ... and this is a manifestation of

that disease.

LAURA: I've never overdosed in 20 years.

CAT: Really? You just had 2 shots of narcan.

LAURA: Well, I'm saying I would have slept for a while but I

would have felt well but I wouldn't have died.

I'm not going to come up with an excuse for using.

CAT: Because you like doing it. Okay.

And that's okay, it doesn't make you a bad person.

Just don't involve me in yourself killing yourself.

When that last thing goes psstt, they don't know if they're going

to live or die.

Greg's work is very good. That's all I've got to say.

GREG SCOTT: Yeah, well Laura's alive.

And it cost 27 cents.

NARRATOR: Heroin is a destructive force,

ripping apart the fabric of society.

In Vancouver, hundreds of addicts are dying from HIV.

In Chicago, drug related murders happen nearly every day.

The US government treats heroin addiction

as a law enforcement problem

but around the world, other governments treat

it as a medical condition.

Switzerland is one of the richest and most conservative

countries in Europe.

But during the '80s and '90s Switzerland was in the grips of

a heroin plague.

In the capital Bern,drug-related crime was through the roof.

Heroin was a national disgrace.

DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI:I used to live right next to

the needle park.

It was horrible. People died there.

There was petty crime all around in the city.

It was just totally out of hand. It was a terrible situation.

NARRATOR: In response to public outcry,

the government comes up with a solution beyond clean needles

and drug counselling: A revolutionary program that

offers free heroin to addicts who meet certain criteria and

have a doctor's prescription.

And it's all courtesy of the Swiss taxpayers.

Dr Christoph Bьrki is part of the radical experiment.

His clinic in Bern is one of 23 centers around the country that

dispense heroin like medicine.

DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: So this is where we keep the heroin.

It comes in those 10 grams ampoules that will later on be

dissolved with sterile water.

NARRATOR: Every patient in this clinic receives a controlled

dose of pharmaceutical grade heroin.

DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: And as you can see it's a transparent,

clear fluid.

It's nothing compared to that soup like consistency of the

street heroin in a syringe.

Here it's 100 percent pure heroin.

NARRATOR: Before Burki's clinic, heroin addiction forced his

patients into a life of crime, prostitution and homelessness.

They were disconnected from medical services

and addiction treatment.

DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: The type of patient we have in this clinic

is a different one.

It's a ... it's a patient that we normally don't

get in touch with.

They were out in the street but we didn't really

get in touch with.

We couldn't really integrate them into a treatment.

Now here it's possible. They do come every day.

NARRATOR: Karen has turned her life around,

thanks to her commitment to this radical program.

Dr Burki has no illusions about why his patients come to him.

DR CHRISTOPH BUERKI: They come to me because I or my team

provides them with heroin.

But through that contact we can start making

other things an issue.

We can start working really on mental health issues as well as

other issues in their life.

And that's the core value of heroin prescription.

It's incredible and I like it every day.

You get in touch with people through this type of treatment

that you, that before that in the professional field,

we did not get in touch with.

So this is absolutely fascinating.

NARRATOR: The free heroin program may be controversial,

but there's been a 60 percent drop in felonies committed by

its patients since it began.

And the overall societal cost per addict has been cut in half.

The program doesn't solve every problem,

but it does reduce the impact of some of Switzerland's most

troubled addicts.

The heroin trade funds terrorism, international crime,

and domestic gangsters....

...while destroying millions of lives.

Still, there are more than 11 million heroin users worldwide.

And society foots the bill for the destruction left behind.