Dr. David A. Kessler was interviewed by Jim Axelrod of CBS News about the opioid crisis. Specifically, Axelrod asked Kessler about the increased use of opioids over the past twenty years, and how we might get the opioid epidemic “back in the bottle.”

Always controversial, since the days between 1990 and 1997 when he served as the Commissioner of the FDA, Kessler calls the handling of opioids “one of the greatest mistakes of modern medicine.”

He blames the opioid epidemic on his former agency, the FDA; pharmaceutical companies; and physicians. “They didn’t see these drugs for what they truly are,” Kessler asserts.