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The Heart of the Opioid Crisis in Ohio; Chicago Sues DOJ Over Threat to Block Grant Money; Male Google Employee Says Women Less Suited for Tech Jobs; Aired 10:30-11a ET
Aired August 07, 2017 - 10:30 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[10:30:00] BRUCE STOKESBURY, 20-YEAR-OLD DIED FROM OPIOIDS OVERDOSE: He was my only son.
HARLOW: He overdosed on a Sunday, just hours after he went to church with his parents, then to a friend's house, then he collapsed. Doctor Harshbarger found the opioid, fentanyl, more powerful than heroin in his system.
(On camera): Do you still wake up some mornings and think this didn't happened to us?
LISA STOKESBURY, 20-YEAR-OLD STEPSON DIED FROM OPIOID OVERDOSE: Oh, yes.
B. STOKESBURY: I wake up every morning like that.
HARLOW: How are you holding up?
EMILY STOKESBURY, BROTHER DIED FROM OPIOID OVERDOSE: Better than others. It makes me feel good to help others talk about it. Usually, I'm OK with it, not OK, but I'm better than most and, I don't know, it helps me to help others talk about it. And when they get it out, it helps me get it out.
HARLOW: What do you want everyone to remember about your big brother?
E. STOKESBURY: Just his smile. His laugh.
HARLOW (voice-over): The Ohio Department of Health says more than 3400 people across the state die from an opioid overdose just last year.
L. STOKESBURY: Talk to your kids.
B. STOKESBURY: Yes, talk to your kids.
HARLOW (on camera): You did that and you lost your son.
L. STOKESBURY: Yes. And that's why it's so important. We would have done it more probably.
HARLOW (voice-over): Doctor Hashbarger has had to perform autopsies on victims as young as 13 months, babies dying from exposure to their parents drugs. DR. KENT HARSHBARGER, CORONER, MONTGOMERY COUNTY, OHIO: What's most
challenging is seeing the story repeated over and over again. The death rate is so fast.
HARLOW: So fast and rising. Because even though the total number of opioid prescriptions has declined significantly, the street made opioids are only getting stronger and more deadly.
HARSHBARGER: There's much more powerful products on the streets. So it's the Fentanyl and Fentanyl analogs. Carfen, though, is designed as a large animal tranquillizer so you can deliver a very powerful product in a very small amount so that dart into the large human like an elephant and can paralyze them. And so that small amount on human is lethal.
HARLOW: Helen Jones Kelley runs addiction services here and has never seen anything like this.
HELEN JONES KELLEY, DRUG ADDICTION DIRECTOR, MONTGOMERY COUNTY, OHIO: If we don't do something, then we lose our great thinkers. This runs across all socioeconomic lines and we lose our future.
HARLOW (on camera): We lose our future?
KELLEY: We lose our future. We can't take position.
HARLOW (voice-over): Judge Anthony Capizzi is trying to save that future. He runs the Montgomery County Juvenile Court. But lately, he sees his job as much more than that.
JUDGE ANTHONY CAPIZZI, JUVENILE COURT, MONTGOMERY COUNTY, OHIO: I have jurisdiction over troubled kids until the age of 21. The challenge for me right now is to keep them alive that long. I run a treatment court. I have my people court on Thursdays. And there are days I don't sleep because I worry that by Monday they'll be dead. I have on my bench pictures of all these young people that passed away, in this courtroom, who sat here, in front of me and now they are dead.
HARLOW: But Judge Capizzi hasn't lost Rachel Chaffin, she's one of the lucky ones.
CAPIZZI: Rachel is one of the youngest girls I had because she was using heroin two or three years ago when it was really rare for a child to use it.
RACHEL CHAFFIN, ADDICTED TO HEROIN AT 15 YEARS OLD: When my counselor said, like, I want you to picture your mom coming to the morgue to identity your body, like that just -- it broke me. Like I can't picture putting my mom through so much.
HARLOW: Rachel was a high school cheerleader. She graduated with a 4.0. But under it all was a heroin addiction since the age of 15.
(On camera): How does a 15-year-old cheerleader from Ohio start doing heroin? CHAFFIN: Like it started my freshman year. And I was doing good. I
was cheer leading. I ended up not going to school as much and I ended up getting kicked off the cheer leading team.
HARLOW: So your heroin addiction landed you in jail and rehab. Did you think you could end up in the morgue?
CHAFFIN: I did. I overdosed twice, like officially, like when I was 15, before I had stopped.
HARLOW: You overdosed twice at 15 years old?
For people watching across America who think this can't happen to my kids and this can't happen in my neighborhood and this can't happen in my family, what do you say to them?
CHAFFIN: It can. It did. I never thought that I would be on drugs, ever. I never -- like, I thought I was happy, had it all, and then all of a sudden, it was taken from me.
HARLOW: So what's this?
CHAFFIN: This is one of our basketball cheerleading pictures.
HARLOW: That's you in the front.
CHAFFIN: Yes.
HARLOW (voice-over): Just two months ago, Rachel relapsed. Only once, she says, succumbing to her addiction.
[10:35:02] CHAFFIN: I tell myself like the average person, like, relapse as a part of recovery. I had to keep moving, get up.
HARLOW: Every morning, Rachel gets up, she knows how lucky she is to have survived.
(On camera): Who are these inmates that in here for opioids?
SHERIFF ROBERT S. LEAHY, CLERMONT COUNTY, OHIO: This is the cross section of our community. You know, you have 20-year-olds.
HARLOW (voice-over): Clermont County Sheriff Robert Leahy knows the havoc heroin can inflict all too well. His then wife became addicted. First it was prescription pain killers as she recovered from a severe fall. But that ballooned into a heroin addiction while they had a 3- year-old son at home. Now after treatment, she's been sober for three years.
LEAHY: While she was in treatment, she had caught on to another, you know, another group of people who brought her up to the next level, which was heroin. It will take a family and turn it upside down.
HARLOW (on camera): It did that to you?
LEAHY: Absolutely. HARLOW: It broke your family apart?
LEAHY: Yes.
HARLOW (voice-over): Clermont County has seen opioid overdoses increase 2,000 percent in just the last decade.
LEAHY: Have compassion. You know, and my job is to enforce the law, but you can also do that with some compassion. We just can't throw everybody's ass to jail.
HARLOW: He runs this jail, but knows jail alone doesn't heal addiction. It takes more. That's why they started the CASC program here.
LEAHY: It's like a rehabilitation therapy in a jail setting.
HARLOW (on camera): Rehab in jail?
LEAHY: Rehab in jail.
HARLOW: Is it working?
LEAHY: Yes. I think the numbers right now are showing that it's promising.
HARLOW (voice-over): Kenneth Morris and Brent Moore, both fathers, and both now inmates because of their addiction, are in the CASC program.
KENNETH MORRIS, INMATE AT CASC PROGRAM: When I was 18 years old, someone talked me into using heroin. They said, it's a lot stronger. They said you don't get sick from it like everyone tells you, which is obviously a lie. And I started doing it and very quickly, I was doing it every day.
HARLOW (on camera): And you are clean now?
MORRIS: Yes. I actually feel great now. And what I think this program did for me is, in the jail, you know, you go to jail, you don't really learn anything. I think this program gave me the ability to take a mess, turn it into a message.
HARLOW (voice-over): A message of hope for his 4-year-old daughter.
MORRIS: I just want her to be able to look up to me and say, that's my dad, and be able to follow me, you know, and be a good thing.
HARLOW: Brent is 36, a father of three and says he's been addicted to opioids half his life.
(On camera): When you were 18 and you took that first pill, what were your dreams then? What did you want to be?
BRENT MOORE, CASC PROGRAM INMATE: I wanted to fight for my country. I wanted to join the Marines. I'm lucky that I had an opportunity to come here instead of committing more felonies. Because that's probably where the drug would have taken me.
HARLOW: You feel lucky to be in jail?
MOORE: Yes. I mean, I -- with the epidemic that's going on right now with heroin or Fentanyl or whatever they are putting in the dope now, I could be dead.
HARLOW (voice-over): He was arrested for driving high while his 5- year-old son was in the backseat.
MOORE: There's no real excuse for what I did, except for, you know, that's the length you go because you try to live your life, but when you're addicted to a drug like that, you have to use that drug to keep yourself going.
HARLOW (on camera): For people watching across America that say, that's them, that's not me.
MOORE: It's everybody. I mean, I don't know how many times I have been sitting there waiting on my dealer and I've seen people in Lexus, Mercedes, getting out in business suits going to the same dope dealer I was going to. It can happen to anybody.
HARLOW: Does it ever come to the back of your mind, show up that you think, it could have been my son?
LEAHY: Yes. Scared to death. Scared to death.
HARLOW (voice-over): Scared to death and coping with more and more death.
Preliminary data in Ohio show 86 percent of drug overdoses last year involved an opioid.
(On camera): I think that there is still a feeling across the country thinking that is so tragic, but, that can't happen to me. That's not in my neighborhood. That's not in my house. That's not in my family.
B. STOKESBURY: Yes. It is.
L. STOKESBURY: You are naive if you think that. Because it's everywhere.
HARLOW (voice-over): These are the families living heroin's hell and watching their dreams and their children's dreams slip away.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
[10:40:06] HARLOW: So I want to thank all the families that talked to us and shared their deeply personal stories in Ohio for doing that. They want to help anyone in this country affected by this and that's why they shared their story.
I also want to thank our team of producers because, as you know, you don't see them on camera but they are the ones who make this possible. Hailey Draznin, Jeff Simon and Zach Wasser, my thanks. You can see a lot more of our reporting. We have a lot of more pieces
of our special report at CNN.com/heroin. We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HARLOW: We will not be blackmailed. That is the message from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Justice Department this morning. His city suing the DOJ for threatening to withhold federal grant money from sanctuary cities.
I spoke with Mayor Emanuel just a short time ago. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MAYOR RAHM EMANUEL (D), CHICAGO: And I think the Justice Department is trying to coerce people into making a choice between who they are and their values and what you want to see in every neighborhood across the city of Chicago.
[10:45:06] That's why we're going to file a case against the Justice Department.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
HARLOW: All right. Ryan Young joins us in Chicago.
And Ryan, I know you've been covering this. Chicago is the first city to actually go ahead and do this, and take the DOJ on head on.
RYAN YOUNG, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Yes, Poppy. You saw some of this coming. Look, Trump has definitely used Chicago as a punching bag throughout the campaign. You knew Rahm wasn't going to stand for that too much longer.
Look, just down the street, Trump had his name honorary on the street at some point. They took that down here after the city commission just decided to remove that. But when you're talking about sanctuary cities, Rahm Emanuel has made it clear for everyone that he was going to fight back against the Justice Department.
There are three things that sort of stand out here. The Justice Department wants that 48 hours heads up about someone who's been taken into custody and maybe giving ICE access to those people once they've been arrested. But when you talk to the police department, you talk to people around the city, you talk to the mayor, he believes that will scare people in immigrant neighborhoods, that they will not report crimes. They will not comport.
And what you know about the city of Chicago, they are trying to turn a corner when it comes to not only reporting crime but try to stop crime. And they believe this would make certain people in neighborhoods a little worried about calling 911 because their immigration status might be called into question.
And of course this is a whole bedrock of a conversation that goes back and forth between people who support sanctuary cities and those who don't.
We'll put up this statement from the DOJ. They hit back just as well. You can see this right here. In 2016, more Chicagoans were murdered than in New York City and Los Angeles combined. So it's especially tragic that the mayor is less concerned with that staggering figure than he is spending time and taxpayer money protecting criminal aliens and putting Chicago law enforcement at greater risk.
When you talk to the police department, they say the greater risk is that if citizens don't feel comfortable calling 911, so you see this battle playing out.
The big question here, Poppy, will other cities join in with the city of Chicago and take up this coalition against the president? But I can tell you, again, this back and forth with the city, you knew eventually someone was going to throw the first punch.
HARLOW: Yes. And you think it's going to go pretty high up in the court system. We'll be watching.
Ryan Young, thank you very much for that, live in Chicago.
A northwestern professor accused in the gruesome death of a Chicago hair stylist will be arraigned today. Wyndham Lathem along with Andrew Warren from the University of Oxford arrested on Friday. They turned themselves in after leading police on a national manhunt. Authorities say both men savagely mutilated 26-year-old Trenton Cornell-Duranleau. Police were able to recover a broken blade from the murder scene. Lathem and Warren are currently in California. They are awaiting extradition to Illinois.
Ahead, the tech industry has been battling allegations of discrimination and sexual harassment for a long time. And now there's a stunning, disturbing story about what a male engineer at Google wrote about jobs that he apparently thinks women are not suited to do. Why? Biology. Wait until you hear this.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:52:31] HARLOW: A manifesto written by one of Google's male engineers is sparking outrage. He claims that women are less suited for certain tech jobs than men. Why? Biology. Seriously. Now Google is responding.
And our senior technology correspondent Laurie Segall is here with us.
You have done so much to cover the fight for equality especially in Silicon Valley.
LAURIE SEGALL, CNN SENIOR TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Right.
HARLOW: And the sexual harassment that goes on and now this.
SEGALL: I think that's why there's so much outrage and there's a lot of frustration from women who are beginning to speak up and who are saying, you know, there is a lot of issues here. This manifesto said that Google is committed to hiring. Women would
make it less competitive. Basically gender pay gap was a myth. Men have a higher drive for status so that's why there are less engineers. Also talked about diversity programs like teaching young girls how to code, how those are highly politicized.
And he did say that Google is left leaning and it pushes out the conversation for a more conservative conversation. So there's a lot in this memo. And I think there's a reason it leaked. And there's a reason women are completely outraged.
Google had --
HARLOW: And men.
SEGALL: And men. By the way, and men, you know. And by the way, talking to folks inside Google, not everyone feels this way. This is a very specific thing. But, you know, the author of this post is getting a lot of private messages saying, you know, thank you for putting this out there.
HARLOW: Really?
SEGALL: Google's head of diversity did respond. We -- I can say to you that statement. She said, "Like many of you, I found the document advanced incorrect assumptions about gender. It's not a viewpoint that I or this company endorses or promotes."
You know, but what we are seeing, as I have come on with you quite a bit to talk about these issues.
HARLOW: Right.
SEGALL: All of this stuff has been systematic in the tech industry. All of this stuff has been happening behind the scenes and people have felt this way, and some people have felt this way. And we're seeing that conversation come out in the open.
HARLOW: So check me if I'm wrong, but all of the data that I read over and over again show, not only do you needy diversity.
SEGALL: Right.
HARLOW: Because, hello, equality, it's 2017, but also because more diverse teams equal higher profits and better products.
SEGALL: Absolutely. I mean, 100 percent. And I think that's what we're kind of getting to. And look at what happened, by the way, with Uber. You have Susan Fowler, this engineer, putting out a post talking about sexism at the company. And it wasn't until kind of you saw this huge wave of people talking about this and you saw that there could be actual ramifications for Uber going public that you saw a lot of things happening.
And you needy diversity of mind set when it comes to engineers for building great products. You know, to have -- when you're looking at code, you have engineers who are coding future product that will change the world.
[10:55:06] Of course you're going to need different types of people. You need empathy, you need humanity. And that's all, you know, the conversation that's happening now. That you see with this manifesto coming out.
HARLOW: That's the only good thing that comes with something like this, is that we talk about it.
SEGALL: Yes.
HARLOW: And it gets more attention.
Laurie Segall, thank you for being on it, as always.
SEGALL: Thank you.
HARLOW: Ahead, talk about a working vacation, President Trump marks day 200 in office with a string of messages on Twitter, slamming the media polls and touting jobs and his strong base. Much more ahead.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Hello, everyone. I'm Kate Bolduan. 200 days on the job but out of the office today.
