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How Washington’s failures exacerbated the fentanyl crisis · Apple News Today

• 0:00
  Shumita Basu, Narrating: Hey there. It's Shumita here. Before we get started today, I have a quick request. On an upcoming episode of "In Conversation," we're going to be talking about retirement. Now, there's so much focus on the financials of retirement, and of course that's important, but we wanna talk about the spiritual side. You know, how to plan for a big shift in identity, in purpose.
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  So we want to hear from retired folks out there. What have been some of the unexpected challenges of retirement? And what are some of the unexpected joys that you've found?
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  We want to hear about it! Just use your iPhone's voice memo app to record yourself. Tell us your name, where you're from, and little bit of your retirement story. And please, try to keep it to under a minute or so.
• 0:03
  And if you're not retired, but you know someone who is and has a good perspective to share, please help them send a voice memo our way.
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  You can send it to us at applenewstoday@apple.com. Again, that's applenewstoday@apple.com. We might include your story on the show. Thanks!
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  Good morning! It's Wednesday, December 14th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." On today's show, how Sandy Hook parents spent the past decade channeling their grief into action, the ways that pandemic-era hygiene changed kids' germ exposure, and we'll explain the holiday travel blob.
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  But first, imagine a Boeing 757 crashing and killing everyone on board every day. That's the number of people in America dying from fentanyl. A new "Washington Post" analysis finds the drug is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the age of 18 and 49. Scott Higham is one of "The Post" investigative reporters on the story.
• 0:09
  Scott Higham: It's the worst drug epidemic in U.S. history. And we have lost more than a half a million people to drug overdoses over the last 10 to 15 years. And they are increasing exponentially every year. And a lot of that is because of fentanyl.
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  According to "The Post's" reporting, years of failures by Democratic and Republican administrations made the problem worse.
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  Higham: The first misstep was the Bush administration's failure to reign in the drug companies that were pouring massive amounts of painkillers onto the streets of America. During the Obama administration, when they started cracking down on these companies, there were millions and millions of Americans who were addicted to opioids and no place to turn.
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  Drug dealers figured they could get those millions who were addicted to prescription opioids hooked on the synthetic opioid fentanyl. And it got worse just as Trump took office. His administration focused on building a border wall. But that didn't matter much to smugglers, who brought fentanyl in through official border crossings. And the problem has ramped up in recent years. Federal officials estimate they only capture 5 to 10% of the fentanyl coming from Mexico, maybe less.
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  Higham met a Homeland Security agent in San Diego who seemed haunted by seeing nearly 500 fatal overdoses.
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  Higham: And there are people who are overdosing every day, every night. The paramedics, the police departments, the federal agents who are down there trying to stop this are completely overwhelmed. You know, it feels like you're in this horror film where there are people who literally look like zombies kind of stumbling around the streets.
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  Many communities across the U.S. are feeling this impact of fentanyl overdoses. Throughout their reporting, "Post" reporters spoke to people who lost loved after this drug flooded the streets.
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  Higham: They wonder why, after so much death and destruction across the country, why this White House is not talking about this every single day. You have so many Americans dying. I mean, last year we lost more people to drug overdoses than we did to the Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars combined.
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  "The Post" has a multi-part series on the fentanyl crisis. This reporting gets into the details of these drug-smuggling operations from Mexico and why the federal government here failed to track the scope of the problem for so long. You can read the whole series in the Apple News App.
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  It's been exactly a decade since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut. Twenty children and six adults were killed. On grim anniversaries like this, you often see a lot of headlines along the lines of, "Ten Years On and Nothing's Changed About Guns in America." But families of Sandy Hook victims would disagree. Many of them turned to activism after the shooting. And on this day, they're counting their victories and working for more. Nicole Hockley's son, Dylan, was killed at Sandy Hook. She talked to "Reuters" recently about fighting for change.
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  Nicole Hockley: I have never lost hope in people and our ability to do the right thing. So I wish now that, having been 10 years later, that no more school shootings were happening and that gun violence was a thing of the past. And it's probably going to take more than another 10 years to get there. But as long as we have the will, we'll just keep moving forward.
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  Hockley is one of the founders of Sandy Hook Promise. One of the group's programs trains students and teachers to look for signs of violence before it happens. The group says it's trained more than 14 million people, who helped prevent 11 planned school shootings.
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  Sandy Hook parents have also been strong voices on Capitol Hill and in state legislatures. "NBC News" sums up some of the changes in recent years. This summer, President Biden signed the first major gun safety law in nearly 30 years. It tightens background checks and encourages states to implement red flag laws, which help keep guns away from potentially dangerous people. On the state level, a new report by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, says 525 "significant gun safety laws" were adopted in the decade since Sandy Hook.
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  As Hockley said, the work isn't done. Sandy Hook families grieved along with Uvalde parents this year, who have launched gun-reform campaigns of their own. But ten years on, they're remembering the children they lost, and marking the progress they've made in their names.
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  Kids are germ magnets. Whether it's at the playground, school, or daycare, they come into contact with all sorts of germs and bacteria that help them build up their immunity to fight disease, digest food, and strengthen cognitive function. That combination of invisible stuff is called the microbiome, and it's different for each of us. But during the early days of the pandemic, things changed. A lot of parents kept their kids at home and went heavy on hygiene. Katherine Wu recently wrote in "The Atlantic" about how science is trying to figure out what this temporary change meant for kids.
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  Katherine Wu: It's possible that some of the different behaviors we adopted during the pandemic might have slightly changed the composition of certain kids' microbiomes. The huge, huge, huge asterisk on this is we don't know that different is necessarily bad, right? Like, that doesn't necessarily mean we've doomed a generation of kids, just that this is worthy of further study.
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  Wu talked to a number of researchers for this piece. Some said they're worried that the changes to kids' microbiomes during the pandemic could mean they are more susceptible to long-term health conditions like asthma and diabetes. Some were more hopeful.
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  Wu: There are other researchers that think that there are changes that people made during the pandemic that could have actually helped things and made kids microbiomes more diverse. If families got outside more, if they adopted a pandemic puppy.
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  Science hasn't fully figured out what the impact of lockdowns is on kids' microbiomes. Wu says parents shouldn't worry too much about how they handled an unusual time in history.
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  Wu: I don't think anybody should regret trying to protect their family during this pandemic. This was a difficult time for everyone, and a lot of people did what was really necessary to reduce the spread of COVID. And, you know, if there were changes that worry parents to some extent, I don't want anyone to think they have doomed their kids. There's always time to introduce some good microbes into kids' bodies.
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  If anything, scientists are standing by to see the results of this accidental experiment in hyper-hygiene. It may lead us to learn some interesting new things about how our microbiomes develop in unusual circumstances.
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  Okay, I promised that I would tell you what the holiday travel blob is, so let's do that before we go. This comes from "WIRED" reporting looking at data and talking with travel industry experts. It shows that as people are traveling more, a new pattern is emerging. The traditional American holiday travel spike has expanded out into a sort of holiday travel blob.
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  Now, maybe this is easier to explain with an example. Take Thanksgiving. Usually, the big travel days are the day before and the Sunday after, right? Well, this year, the Friday before Turkey Day was nearly as busy as the day before the holiday. That's almost a week out. It's pretty surprising!
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  Airlines and industry experts say this is becoming more of a thing. People are now choosing different dates, either to save money, avoid crowds, or just have more time at their destination. A Deloitte survey found that Americans are adding an average of six days to seasonal trips, largely because they can work remotely. And forecasters are predicting similar blobby travel patterns through the December holidays.
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  Now, not everyone is glomming onto the blob. Families with kids are still tied to school schedules. And many jobs don't offer remote work. But with more people choosing to travel at different times, that might lead to broader options for flights, less congestion at airports, and possibly, maybe, slightly smoother holiday travel overall.
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  You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app, including coverage of today's World Cup match. And if you're already listening in the News app right now, stick around.
• 0:44
  We've got another angle on Sandy Hook from "People." It's a first-person story from a survivor who was in second grade at the time. These days, she's an outspoken advocate for gun safety laws.
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  That'll start in just a moment. I'll be back here with the news tomorrow.
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