In 2018 America was experiencing record levels of deaths from opioid addiction. Everyday Americans was a project for the BBC World Service — a series of one-hour radio documentaries produced in partnership with the Courier Journal newspaper in Louisville, Kentucky, one of the cities at the centre of the crisis.
The series went beyond the statistics. We met the people caught in the epidemic — the campaigners, the ER doctors, the families. Louisville's hospitals were overwhelmed. The pharmaceutical companies that had flooded rural America with prescription painkillers were beginning to face legal action. The communities were trying to find their way through.
"The pills were legal. The doctors prescribed them. And then one day they weren't available any more — and people turned to heroin instead."
Emily Walden became one of the most prominent voices in the campaign against the pharmaceutical companies whose aggressive marketing of opioid painkillers contributed to the epidemic. Her testimony — and the testimony of others like her — was part of the legal cases that eventually led to billion-dollar settlements.
The series was produced working directly with journalists at the Courier Journal, one of America's great regional papers, which had been covering the crisis from the ground up for years before it became a national story. Their knowledge of Louisville and the surrounding counties shaped the reporting.