Amber Capone had become afraid of her husband. The “laid-back, bigger than life and cooler than cool” man she’d married had become isolated, disconnected and despondent during his 13 years as a U.S. Navy SEAL. Typically, he was gone 300 days of the year, but when he was home, Amber and their two children walked on eggshells around him. “Everyone was just playing nice until he left again,” Amber says.

In 2013, Marcus retired from the military. But life as a civilian only made his depression, anger, headaches, anxiety, alcoholism, impulsivity and violent dreams worse. Sometimes he’d get upset by noon and binge-drink for 12 hours. Amber watched in horror as his cognitive functioning declined; Marcus was in his late 30s, but he would get lost driving his daughter to volleyball, and sometimes he couldn’t even recognize his friends. Psychologists had diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety, but antidepressants, Ambien and Adderall didn’t help. He visited a handful of brain clinics across the country, which diagnosed him with postconcussive syndrome after a childhood of football—then a career punctuated by grenades, explosives, rifles and shoulder-fired rockets. But all they offered were more pills, none of which helped either.

After a year-long investigation, which concluded just before the Coronavirus outbreak, 60 Minutes aired a 2-part episode, as part of their ongoing series, examining who is actually to blame for the opioid crisis. So, who IS actually to blame for the opioid crisis? In this compelling, June 21, 2020 episode, Correspondent Bill Whitaker and producer Sam Hornblower take a deeper look into one of the most devastating public health emergencies of the 21st century. In January 2020, for the first time ever, top drug company executives were sentenced to prison for their crimes associated with sales practices that contributed to the massive increase of opioid prescriptions being written and filled over the last two decades. A jury found five executives from Insys Therapeutics guilty for the reckless and illegal practices they used to boost profits from the opioid painkiller Subsys. Subsys is the brand name for Fentanyl, a fast-acting, powerfully addictive pharmaceutical opioid, which is 100 times stronger than morphine. A judge sentenced John Kapoor, the former CEO of Insys Therapeutics, a once billion-dollar company that is now bankrupt, to five and a half years in federal prison. A dozen doctors were also convicted of crimes connected with Insys Therapeutics.

In this 60 Minutes episode, Whitaker reported that in 2018 alone, 46,802 people in the U.S. died from an opioid overdose, with health care providers across the country writing prescriptions for opioids at a rate of over 50 prescriptions dispensed per 100 people.

The number of deaths has almost doubled since 2018’s numbers with now nearly 70,000 people in the U.S. dying each year from drug overdoses, mainly from opioids.

Justice Department officials announced on Wednesday, October 21, 2020 that Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, the powerful prescription opioid painkiller, will plead guilty to three federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion. As reported by CBS News, “The company will plead guilty to three counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal anti-kickback laws, the officials said. The resolution will be detailed in a bankruptcy court filing in federal court.”

While OxyContin was fueling the opioid epidemic over the past decade, the Sakler family was busy withdrawing an estimated $10.4 billion from Purdue Pharma and its affiliated businesses. After financial analysis, it has been found that those billions of dollars had all been withdrawn since 2008, just one year after Purdue pleaded guilty for misleading doctors and patients about the highly addictive properties of OxyContin.