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Putin Says, Russia Does Not Want Any Confrontations; Biden Administration's New Drug Czar Speaks With Dr. Sanjay Gupta; Biden to Promote Bipartisan Infrastructure Law in Missouri. Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired December 08, 2021 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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JIM SCIUTTO, CNN NEWSROOM: Russian President Vladimir Putin says this morning Russia does not want any confrontations with the west, even as he's placed tens of thousands of forces along the border with Ukraine. Putin made those comments on Russian state media today, one day after having a two-hour and one-minute video call with Biden, a meeting that Putin described as open and constructive, often diplo speak for, but sometimes tense conversation.

President Biden sent a clear message warning Putin against a possible invasion, saying the U.S. is prepared to take action it did not take when Russia annexed Crimea seven years ago.

For more on all this, I'm joined by Julia Ioffe. She is the founding partner and Washington Correspondent of Puck News. Julia, good to have you on.

JULIA IOFFE, FOUNDING PARTNER AND WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT, PUCK NEWS: Thanks for having me.

SCIUTTO: Reading the tea leaves of the readouts of this and President Putin's comments here, is it your sense that the warnings from Biden and the threats of new sanctions, et cetera, move the needle here, moved the two sides back from the brink of anything?

IOFFE: I think there's that. And I think there's also the sense in Moscow that they were heard and the west is at least considering their red lines and that they're being taken seriously as opposed to being poo-pooed and brushed off. And I think that was also very important for Vladimir Putin to be heard by the Americans and to be taken seriously.

SCIUTTO: The red line you're talking about is any closer association between NATO and Ukraine with the possibility of eventual membership, which by the way, NATO officials, as you know, repeatedly say, if that's going to happen, it's many years off. But they will also say, as Biden said yesterday, that's up to NATO and Ukraine, not you, Russia. I mean, is there any worry here among Ukrainians that Biden and the U.S. will kind of hang him out to dry here and make that assurance that wink quietly while Ukraine actually wants greater cooperation? IOFFE: Yes, I think there is that danger. At the same time, I think Ukrainians or the Ukrainian government understands that NATO accession is just really not in the cards, in part because everything Putin has done since 2014.

[10:35:03]

I think NATO accession was a long way, often a long shot before then. But now, I think France and Germany, who have much closer economic ties with Russia and really don't feel like picking a fight a Russia over Ukraine, I think it's made it even more difficult for Ukraine.

That said, I think Putin has also hurt himself in that by doing all this, he has turned NATO's attention back from Russia from where it was in Afghanistan, right, before 2014. Now, Russia again is the focus of NATO and it's giving even more assistance, there's NATO advisers in Ukraine. So, that wasn't there before.

SCIUTTO: That's a phenomenon, right? Because we often tend to view -- and you'll hear, Putin is 12 feet tall, right?

IOFFE: He's quite short actually.

SCIUTTO: Exactly, theoretically speaking or figuratively speaking. Does this engender exactly the outcome he didn't want, right, which, for instance, is, say, more NATO forces deployed in more permanent positions? We're not talking about Ukraine but in the east, which is what Eastern European partners want and Putin definitely doesn't want. Is that the outcome he ends up with?

IOFFE: Yes. It's kind of hard to say, right? Like NATO -- again, NATO was not focused on Russia even though it was originally built as an alliance to counter Moscow's influence in Europe. Before 2014, the only time Article 5 of NATO was invoked was after 9/11 when NATO sent troops to Afghanistan, right? Russia was not on the radar at all until Putin invaded and put himself on the radar, like fulfilling his own paranoid fantasy about NATO's obsession with him.

But I think that also serves him well domestically and geopolitically. It makes him a focus of conversation. It makes us talk about him. It makes the president of the United States take two bilateral summits with him in six months, every time he pulls some troops towards the border with Ukraine.

SCIUTTO: And he could get that reaction. Just very briefly, is an invasion of Ukraine less likely today than it was prior to this conversation?

IOFFE: Probably, yes, but we'll see. And I think, again, I don't think Putin has decided. And I think we'll know when -- if there are troops in Ukraine, that's how we'll know if he's decided.

SCIUTTO: Julia Ioffe, thanks so much, as always.

ERICA HILL, CNN NEWSROOM: Just ahead, a CNN exclusive, President Biden's new drug czar speaks to Dr. Sanjay Gupta about the record number of overdoses during the pandemic. More than 100,000 lives lost. You'll hear him explain the non-traditional approach the administration is now embracing.

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HILL: During the pandemic, the U.S. recorded a record 100,000 fatal drug overdoses. That is the most in a 12-month period, and it is a challenge the Biden administration's new drug czar is facing head on, announcing $30 million to create syringe exchanges and boost the supply of Naloxone, among other measures.

SCIUTTO: In an exclusive interview, CNN's Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta spoke with the director of the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy on what appears to be a uniquely American phenomenon.

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DR. RAHUL GUPTA, DIRECTOR, WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF NATIONAL DRUG CONTROL POLICY: We have to look at this as an unacceptable number. It's unprecedented. We must have a response that matches that historic number in terms of saving lives.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN CHIEF MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: You went to the border. Why was that important to do early on?

R. GUPTA: A lot of the fentanyl now is easily transportable. It's deadly in nature and it's across in all communities. That's what becomes the challenge. But let me make it very clear, this problem doesn't start or end at the border. It starts in the cocoa fields as well as those fentanyl and meth factories that are elicit and it ends, unfortunately, in the emergency room.

S. GUPTA: There's almost nothing you can disentangle from politics nowadays, even things like masks and vaccines. What about with this epidemic of drug overdoses? How political is this?

R. GUPTA: When somebody is suffering from SUD, substance use disorder, or going through an overdose, they're not Republicans, they're not Democrats, they're not living in a red state or blue states or geography, or rich or poor or black or white. They're human beings that we need to help support. And that's exactly the way I look at it, looking at addiction as a chronic relapsing brain disease rather than a choice.

S. GUPTA: If you compare the United States to similar other countries, the overdose death rates are three to four times higher. If it's a brain disease that's driving this, why does is it so disparately affect this country?

R. GUPTA: So, if you recall, we've had first what we call the prescription opioid epidemic. And we saw an incline in deaths as well addiction because of that. And I was right there in the trenches where I was seeing the marketing happening to me about why these are such great things.

And from there, we went and saw -- it turned into the heroin injection drug use epidemic. And we saw it as the fentanyl being cut with heroin. And now we're seeing fentanyl and stimulants like meth.

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So, this is not something that has happened overnight. We need to make sure that we're looking at prevention as an important tool, especially youth prevention. We have to make sure that people have the ability to have Naloxone, which is an opioid reversal drug, same thing goes for other aspects, like programs and fentanyl test strips.

S. GUPTA: These are referred to broadly as harm reduction strategies. It's something that is still controversial in some places, fentanyl test strips, you can buy for $1.00 a strip on Amazon. And yet in some states in the country, they're still considered drug paraphernalia.

R. GUPTA: We are seeing a crisis for which harm reduction is going to have to be one of the very important tools in our toolbox. It is for that very reason that this administration has made harm reduction for the first time part of its federal policy.

S. GUPTA: People will say, look, you're enabling drug use. That's the provocation.

R. GUPTA: As a physician that has spent his career dealing with science and moving data around, we just do not have that evidence.

S. GUPTA: New York just opened up their first sanctioned safe injection site, places where people can go to use safely. Is that something you would support and do you think we would see that more widely in the United States?

R. GUPTA: I would be interested in looking at the science and data behind any and all of the emerging harm reduction practices. We want to learn and we want to make sure that every possible door that we can open up to help people and connect them to treatment is available to us.

S. GUPTA: This seems to signal a shift.

R. GUPTA: If you're looking to save lives and you've reached a historic precedent levels of deaths, then you cannot looking at any and every option in order to save those lives.

S. GUPTA: I've got to tell you, I've been getting all these messages asking me if I took the drug czar job. I mean, I think people think there's only one Dr. Gupta in the whole country.

R. GUPTA: That's so interesting.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

S. GUPTA: There are many Dr. Guptas, as it turns out. But I've got to tell you, he's very serious about this issue. Even before the pandemic, I don't know if you realized, but life expectancy in the United States was already going down in part because of these drug overdoses, and then the pandemic has just worsened things a lot.

Two things that I really took away from it, one is that this administration is very committed to harm reduction, which is controversial, the idea of trying to make drug use safer. And some people say it enables it. And the other thing is this idea that fentanyl -- even though there's overdoses from cocaine and meth, fentanyl is far and away the biggest contributor. It's cut into everything, even in the non-opioid drugs.

So, those are going to be two areas where they're going to be spending some of those millions of dollars that have now been allocated towards addressing the overdose crisis.

SCIUTTO: It is a national tragedy. Dr. Sanjay Gupta, thanks for shining a light on it.

S. GUPTA: You got it. Thank you.

HILL: Minutes from now, President Biden will leave the White House for Missouri where he plans to go to sell his bipartisan infrastructure law. The Kansas City Star has a message for him. Take a page from Bob Dole's legacy. I'll speak with a member of the editorial board just ahead.

But, first, here is a look at some of the other events we're watching today.

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HILL: Any moment now, President Biden is set to leave the White House. He is heading to Kansas City, Missouri, where the president will promote the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law signed last month.

Ahead of his arrival, the editorial board of the Kansas City Star published a piece titled, Mr. President, take a lesson from your friend, Bob Dole, as you visit Kansas City.

Joining me now to discuss is Dave Helling. He is an Editorial Writer and Columnist for the paper. Dave, it's good to have you with us this morning.

In this piece you encourage President Biden to be inspired by Bob Dole, noting that real accomplishment is the hard work and that should be the measure for public figures. I noticed there that you called out your senators as well from Missouri. Do you think that maybe this piece should have been addressed to them?

DAVE HELLING, EDITORIAL WRITER AND COLUMNIST, THE KANSAS CITY STAR: Well, we've written about Josh Hawley and Roger Marshall a lot, the senators from Kansas and Missouri. And we wanted to send a message, Erica, to the president who suggested Bob Dole's example is important because he believed in hard work -- I've never seen a harder worker in my life in Washington in the early '80s when he was in the Senate. But he also believed in accomplishment.

Nobody ever accused Bob Dole of rhetorical excess. They applauded him and supported him because he got things done.

[10:55:01]

And there are a lot of things left for Joe Biden to do, as you know, the Build Back Better program, for example. COVID remains a challenge in our region and across the country. So, he'll need to work hard and look for accomplishments rather than rhetoric to sort of carry the day if he's to be successful, and that's what we wrote.

HILL: So, as he arrives today, I believe there's some $7 billion or so that set aside that you'll see over the next five years. Give us a sense specifically where are you going to see the impact of that money and how are folks in Kansas City feeling about it?

HELLING: Some of it is still to be decided, of course. The president today will visit the bus depot, if you will, Erica, a place where Kansas City's buses are repaired. Kansas City was one of the first major cities in the nation to promote and institute free fares on their buses. It doesn't cost you anything to ride the bus in Kansas City or our straight car system. And there is some thought that that approach could be used in other cities. So, I'm sure the president today will talk about mass transit, electric buses, other ways to sort of involve the public in getting from point A to point B. Roads, bridges, all that will be included as well.

But I think the challenge for the president and one of the things we try to talk about in the editorial is people here who supported him in 2020 want to see real accomplishment in their lives. Sometimes it's hard to see that when it's a bridge or a new road. They're more worried about the cost of milk or the cost of a loaf of bread at the grocery store. And so we hope and expect the president to sort of bring that issue up as well and, again, focus on that in 2022 and going forward.

HILL: How much focus do you think there needs to be on bipartisanship? That's something he ran on. Yes, this is a bipartisan infrastructure bill. But even looking at Build Back Better, I mean, there's a long slog ahead in Washington at this point. And your state went from bipartisan representation to a fairly red state pretty quickly. Is there a chance for a bipartisanship?

HELLING: Well, that's the million dollar question, of course. There's always some chance for it. The defense bill, as you know, in the House passed with bipartisan support yesterday, but it's a very polarized time. No one doubts that in Washington or in Missouri or in Kansas, and there are certainly different approaches to things like COVID and other programs for the president. But there is a need to work together. There is a tradition of that. Bob Dole was the exemplar of that approach and we hope the president and the people in Congress pay attention to that as they honor the late senator.

Dave Helling, I appreciate your time today, thank you.

SCIUTTO: And thanks so much to all of you for joining us today. I'm Jim Sciutto.

HILL: I'm Erica Hill.

At This Hour with Kate Bolduan comes your way after a quick break.

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