Kathryn Prescott || The Devastating Opioid Epidemic

delayed to have Prescott on the podcast. Catherine is an actor and photographer originally from London. Miss Prescott got our first big break when she was seventeen, playing Emily, a young lesbian with a homophobic twin sister, in the cult UK TV show Skins. A few years later, she moved to the US to play the lead role in the MTV teen drama Finding Carter, and has since appeared in various other projects, including To the Bone, Rain and twenty

four Legacy. Miss Prescott is currently shooting her second season of AMC's The Sun and has a movie coming out on Netflix in April called Dude. After joining up with the Big Issue Foundation and Center Point in the UK for a photography exhibition and raised money for both organizations. She wanted to do something similar in the US, so she got in touch with Homeless Healthcare Los Angeles, but

decided to do something a little different. Her film explores the cyclical nature of pain and isolation when it comes to addiction, while highlighting the devastating effect of the eipode that the opioid epidemic is having on America's youth. Miss Prescott has been surrounded by addiction throughout her life and people's reactions to it have always fascinated her. Thank you so much for being on the podcast today, you for having me Hi, Well, Kat, what first DREI to acting? Well,

I guess I've always wanted to do it. I've always been kind of fascinated by people, and I grew up watching films and I just remember always feeling really like, kind of comforted by them. And I was, you know, felt that there have been several films that I've watched that really changed my outlook on the world and of certain groups of people, And to this day still certain films continue to do that. And I just, you know, when I was younger, I thought that the actors were

the ones telling the stories. As the only people that I could see, but obviously there's a whole team doing it, and so acting was the first thing that I was like, Oh, I want to do that, Like how do I be a part of that? Yeah, And I guess I've always been interested in psychology as well, and I liked the way I sometimes overlapped, So yeah, that's great. So you know you did a photography exhibition with two organizations in the UK to raise awareness about the growing homeless population

in London. How did that come about and what was the idea behind it? So I had done it. I had done that show in England, and I had a few years after that where I was acting in London as well as I'd gotten really into portrait photography and I was assisting photographers and I really wanted to do an exhibition and I couldn't really decide what I wanted to do it on. But I was a big fan

of the Big Issue. So they basically it's a magazine that they homeless people or people who are insecurely housed by for I believe a pound and then they sell

it for two pounds fifty each copy. It's actually a really good magazine if you're ever in London or anywhere in the UK and you no, it's really good and they I think, and it's just basically like micro financing for yet homeless people are instculary house people so that they don't have to beg and the Big Issue Foundation also helps them with services and trying to get them into housing and stuff, and so I had always been

aware of the Big Issue. There's also the other organization was Centerpoint and they work with homeless youth in the UK. They house them for two years, I think up to two years, teach them various life skills and they you know, the idea is to like kind of stop the cycle like before it begins, kind of thing of homelessness. Anyway, So I at the time had this forum website and I got contacted by The Big Issue one day and they asked me to come meet with them because their

website was getting a lot of traffic from my forum website. Anyway, So I met with Stephen Robertson and we talked about ideas and so we ended up joining up with Centerpoint and yeah, the Big Issue and doing this photography exhibition to raise money for both organizations. That's wonderful and you know, how did this exhibition tie it all into the short film you just released? Is their connection there? Yeah, I mean kind of. So basically the exhibition was exploring the

role of like anonymity and homelessness. What happens when we like pass a homeless person on the street and are able to either you know what catches our attention on the street basically, and like stigmatized groups, I guess, and I think, just you know, like homelessness, often they suffer some stigma and get stigmatized a lot. So do people suffering from addiction. And I feel like the short kind

of explores a stigmatized group as well. So like after I'd done the exhibition in the UK with the Big Issue, I'd come to the US to do a TV show and I wanted to do a similar exhibition for an organization here and we ended up making I think we ended up making about twelve pounds for both organizations in

the UK. So I got in touch with Home Was Healthare Los Angeles to see if they wanted to do something similar, and they invited me to their downtown at Los Angeles Health and Wellness Center of a Needle Exchange, and they were showing me around, and I saw on the wall this map and it had all these pins stuck in it, and I was like, what is that? And they told me that every pin represented a life saved with the lock zone from an overdose, and I was like, wow, I'd never even heard of the oxone.

I didn't know that there was an opioid epidemic, you know, even though I have had like personal experience with it in my family, I had no idea at the scale of it at all. And the more we kind of spoke about it, the more we kind of came to the conclusion that we wanted to do something that targeted young people and that spoke about the opioid epidemic in a way that maybe hasn't been done before. And so that's kind of how the short came about. Yeah, and

why the opioid epidemic? Do you have any personal connections to that world? And sorry if that's too personal of a question, you know. So, my brother actually suffered with opioid addiction for a really long time. He's very open about it and thinks that people should speak more about it. But he was fifteen when he started getting back pain, and I think he had his first spinal fusion surgery at sixteen, you know, was being prescribed opioid left, right,

and center. And he says not once, he says, you know, I should have been prescribed them. I was in pain. I don't you know, nothing against the people that prescribed them to me, except the fact that not once did anyone say to me, you know what, like these are going to be amazing, and you're going to like really want to keep taking them, and they're very addictive, so just be careful and we'll keep checking in with you.

He said he was getting I think he'd got one hundred pills a month, and if he didn't take them, he would stop pile them. And then you know, he got addicted to the painkillers. He had his back operation, it didn't the bones didn't use, but for years they didn't know that the bones hadn't used. They thought he was supposed to get better. But yeah, he was fully addicted. Yeah, so he had a really terrible time with it. He was,

you know, really like low. He was suicidal. He had to have two different surgeries they which ended up making him infertile from painkillers. He said he thought every night he was passing me out. Thought he was going to diet, and eventually he you know, wasn't sure what was he was taking for the pain, what he was because he was addicted, and he just I mean yeah, and he I mean, this was all before he was twenty, and so eventually he's you know, his back paying, you know,

the surgery work in his back is better. But then coming off the opioids was like a whole other thing, the kind of classic story that I kept hearing about when I was looking into this and kind of doing some research before I did this film, and it's like,

it's shocking how prevalent it is. Yeah, that must have been really difficult for you to personally watch and then kind of rehashing it again when he did the research for it and kind of seeing all these other cases, and I imagined for your research, you met with a

lot of people who were addicted. Is that right? I travel a lot for work, and the year that I was writing the short, I got to travel a lot to a load of different states, and in every state that I went to, I met up with people in the or I tried to meet up with people in the harm reduction community. I met with, you know, people who had been through opiod addiction and saved by the

lock zown. I actually met a boy who I became very good friends with, whose mum had saved him twice with Nolocson and was now clean, living in California and was doing really well, who ended up working on the film with us, as did my brother. That boy has since passed away since we shook the film because of

complications from his years of addiction. But yeah, so I managed to meet a lot of people and talk to a lot of people, and I just continue to be shocked by the risk which is happening, and that no one, like so many people don't know about it, even though

like lots of people know about it. So many people don't know about it, even like I didn't know about it, even though I had, you know, my brother had been through it, and a lot of the people who'd worked on the film they had someone you know, that had been through it, but still didn't know that it was an epidemic or that there was an overdose reversal drug. It's strange. It's like, you know, the shame and stigma around it, I think is kind of one of the

things that's keeping it in the dark. Relatively, and you know, everyone's kind of hiding a tree in a forest, not realizing that they're standing in a forest, and there are all these people that are going through the same thing, but no one really knows where it is or what. You know. Yeah, well, so tell me some of the fruits of your research, Like, tell me some you can you rattle some statistics off about Yes, well, okay, so there is a you mean statistics generally or specific states?

Oh wow, I mean whatever, whatever you have memorized, you give. So there is a nine eleven scale loss of lives every two point five or three weeks because of this. I thought it was one hundred and fifteen. I think it's one hundred and fifteen people die a day of overdoses from opioids, and one hundred and seventy five people are dying of like opioid and overdoses drug obdoses in general every day. America consumes eighty five percent of the world's opioids, but it only makes up for four percent

of the world's population. So apparently one I found recent so overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty, so above car crashes and gun crime. Combined, And what was the other one? I thought, Oh, I think in twenty sixteen alone, there were more deaths from overdoses. I hope I'm getting this right than all American casualties in the Iraq and Vietnam Wars combined. Some crazy stetific

like it's absolutely like astronomic wife. I can't believe that it's now the number one killer of Americans under fifty. That was the one that always good. That is incredible. And are we talking mostly males? I don't know that, actually I think that, Yeah, I don't know. I think there is. I think there is. Trying to remember I think it's more male than female, but I don't. I mean it's females as well. So you said that a lot of people involved in the film had a connection.

It's not all abulid epidemic, right. So my brother and the way who I met, whose mum had saved him twice from overdoses. Both of them helped me develop the script and worked on set, so I knew that they had previous experience. But pretty much everyone else that I you know, knew of on set who had you know, because I met with everyone first before we started shoot, And so many of them would go, oh, is that what's in blah blah blah, Like is that what's in percocet?

Or is that what's in Like if I was in England, is that what's in neurofm plus? Because my husband takes a lot of that and I'm like worried about him. Oh yeah, my steps and so takes a lot of that. Oh you know, like people people know like that. You know, people get hooked on pills, but it's just still shrouded in kind of you know, the people that I was speaking to one that were working on the film, they

didn't know it was. It was still new, even though they had such you know, close personal ties to it. One of the boys who worked on it, he said, he's one of his family members, and you know, he had personal experience with this, and he didn't even know that and the lock one existed. I mean, that could be a really dangerous situation. What is a lockxone? So looxone is the overdose reversal drug. Okay, tell me more about that, Okay. So looxone is an overdose reversal drug.

I think that it's an opioid antagonist and it basically like blocks opioids from your receptor. It like replaces the opioid. Correct me if I'm getting this wrong. I'm not like a doctor. But that blocks the opioid receptors in your brain. So if someone's having an overdose, you give them the loxone and they go into their the opioids are just as if they're not in their system anymore. So they're

immediately in like cold turkey withdrawal. It saves their life, but they're you know, immediately, it's like a harrowing experience to be saved by it. You can get it. I think it comes in three different forms. You can get it as a nasal spray, intramuscular injection, or an autel injector, which is like a little thing kind of it's really strange but kind of cool. You open it and it talks. There's like a robot voice that tells you what you need to do next and how long you need to

hold the needle in the person's leg and stuff. And yeah, it's completely safe, it's non addictive. You can use it on I think it's FDA approved. You can use it on people even if then even if you just suspect them of having an overdose. It's safe to use on them because if they aren't having an overdose, it won't do anything. Right, the fact that it's meeting resistance is

kind of crazy. Can using this if you're addicted have psychological ramifications that are negative, like to just go called turkey all of a sudden when you're addicted to something like you said as a harrowing experience. So basically it will make you as if you have no opiens in

your system. Where I believe each dose is about oh, I think it's half an hour, and then basically you have to get someone you know to a place where they can get either more on a lockton, or they're you know, in a hospital or something, or you keep giving it to them. Yeah, it's bad, but it doesn't do like damage as far as I'm aware, stinging psychological damage. Okay, So is that the film that I watched? Can you describe a little bit without you know, giving away the

whole thing? But you know, for people who are listening to this that want to then watch the video on the show notes, can you talk a little bit about what they see in this video without giving it away? I mean you can give it away. Well, this isn't I guess this is not like a like a blockbuster movie with like a twist, right, I mean, you know what, you kind of know the ending is yeah. So basically, the film follows a young boy who we hint is you know, into sports or you know, this relatively clean

cup young guy living in this relatively upscale house. He's narrating in voice so we watch him go through the kind of motions of his day and he's narrating in voice over the whole time as if he's addressing a past lover, and he's talking about, you know, he's heartbroken, he doesn't know who he is without this person, how much he misses them, and he feels lost, et cetera.

And then slowly, as the day goes on, you watch him like struggling with whether or not to pick up the phone and call this person, and you think like, maybe this person's died, maybe this is a past love, like you're not really sure. And then eventually, as the day goes on, he gets to the kind of a word like a lower and lower place and is struggling more and more with the memories and ruminating and stuff.

And then eventually he says, you know, like I just wanted to see you again or something, and he picks up the phone and starts texting, and then you see his friends arrive, and I'm just gonna I'm just gonna say. You see his friends arrive, you know a past lover. Clearly from the way they interact, they're not who he

was talking about. And then you eventually see him using He says that he just wanted to see them again, and you end up seeing him using heroin, and then he says, you know, and it was everything I'd hoped, And then we realized that the whole time, or the ideas, you realize the whole time that he has been talking to Caroline rather than a past love, And the whole time, rather than watching a young boys struggling with heartbreak, we've been watching a young man kind of out of rehab,

desperately trying not to relapse. Actually eventually he kind of an Eventually he does. So people who are highly addicted to heroin and watch that it might remind them of just how great it feels. Right, could a skeptical person like raise that question? I mean, skeptical people have definitely said,

I mean, I see that point. I was an incredibly powerful video for me to watch as someone who's not addicted to heroin, but you can kind of relate to It's relatable even if you're not addicted to heroin, because there are things in all of our lives that I think even at the level of like a good juicy cheeseburger, you know, like I'm saying, like, there's a common humanity in this video that I feel like I wanted to

talk to you about. Like it was just you know some of feedback you've gone about that, because you really really emotionally capture that moment at the end. It's so powerful. It's so powerful. Yeah, thank you. I mean, it's based on these letters that I was reading online. It was like an exercise that some people do while they're in rehab that I was reading. They write a letter to heroin as if it's like their past lover or friend. And also, you know, a couple of people that I

know who've personally experienced it. Two of them separately said to me, you know, when I was like asking them to like describe it, they said, it's just the most intimate relationship I have ever had with anything in my whole life. And I get where the criticism is coming from.

I will say that the film was written with people who have previous experience, and everyone I've shown it to, I mean maybe I say this now on here and everyone's like no, But everyone I show it to who has personal experience with this says like no, I don't find that triggering. It actually takes me, you know, It's like it's like being on a level and like it speaks to some things that I've wanted to put in

words for a while but haven't been able to. But then other people, I mean, yeah, it's it's it's open to interpretation, I guess, and I do get where people are coming from that what you said about shared humanity. The reason we painted it like this past love was because, you know, just say no campaigns. I feel like this

is not just say no campaign. It's supposed to, you know, shop with the reality of what is now a public health emergency, but it's still shrouded by stigma and shame, and we wanted to do something that shows like the real pain of addiction from the perspective of the person that's actually going through it, to try and kind of you know, we live in a society where there's a lot of like blame and shame to do with addiction.

You know, it's like sometimes seen as a moral failing or a lack of will power or you know, like there's these connotations with it, and you know, we just wanted to do something that showed a human story behind this, behind all the like numbers, and especially with some of the pushback we were getting when we were talking about this film, when I was just kind of you know, developing it. When we were talking about in a lock Zone, is some people say that they think that heroin addicts

access to a lock zone is enabling. I mean the alternative that that suggests is people like this boy in this film, you know, don't get a seance, and we not pump someone's stomach if they you know, it's just anyway. So yeah, I get where they're coming from. But it is more about kind of showing the shared humanity and

trying to show it just in a different, different light. Well, the sort of twist, so to speak, is brilliant because you've brought the watch the viewer along the journey thinking really connecting with it, because I mean, there is research showing that when you look in the brain, people who are newly in love. Their brain looks indistinguishable from someone

who is addicted to cocaine. So we're actually talking about potentially indistinguishable brain physiological reactions when you're love, you can be addicted to love. You know, it's interesting to think, you know about this sort of all the different ways in our life that we these deep primal drives can latch on to that Maya soliv It's was on the podcast talking about addiction, and I'll send you that podcast chat after this. You can think you'd find it really interesting.

And she talked about how addiction is not like a one on one relationship with the stimulus, Like it's not like the first time you do it, you're addicted, boom.

There's a psychological learning aspect here where you start to you know, the dopamine makes you really anticipate that you're going to receive a strong reward from doing this activity and then eventually builds these neural pathways that where you become you know, addiction doesn't mean you can't say no. It means that it just becomes harder and harder to say no, like like she said, if you put a gun.

She was addicted at one point, but she's like, you put a gun in my head and said, don't take that. I could not take it. Yeah, you know, so it's really there's this really strong psychological aspect to it. And yeah, anyway, that's my kind of tangent saying that, I think that your connection there was really clever. Yeah, and we were really trying to highlight this like cyclical nature of like

pain and isolation and when it comes to addiction. So like this boy is just I mean, the idea is he's out of rehab, but you know he's maybe he hasn't I don't know, maybe he doesn't have that support network that is there. Everyone's just happy that he's off the drug whatever whatever reason. He's lowly and he's going through this thing on his own. And do you know

about the rat Park experiments? No, please illustate me. So I might be miss stating this, but rat Park basically the thing that you talked about, how you know, this idea that certain drugs are just so addictive that anyone who takes them is going to get addicted, you know,

they take them enough kind of thing. They were based on this experiment with rats in which rats were given water with I think it's cocaine or heroin or like want of either, and put in a cage and given the option of like water with no drugs in it, or water with those drugs in it, or one of those two drugs in it, and the rats that had the option of taking the water with the drugs in it would keep going back to the drugs, keep going back to the drugs until they eventually died of malnutrition.

And so that apparently formed the basis of this idea that you know, certain substances are just so addictive that if you try them, you just better not try them because you know you're going to get addicted kind of thing. Not that I'm saying you should try, you should try them, But then I forget who this guy did these experiments

later called rat park. He didn't really understand why no one was taking into account the fact that the rats they did that original experiment on were in a cage on their own with nothing, no exercise wheel, no other rats. And so he designed this experiment called rat park, and the rats had access to exercise wheels, other rats like it was bigger it was, and the rats they didn't they did not go to the heroin water again they

chose not to, and then he did it. There was another aspect of that experiment where I think he actually got rats purposefully addicted for like a lot of days. I forget how many. I think it was like fifty, oh fifty or something. He got these rats like very addicted to each drug, and then he put in a

small cage with no other rats or whatever. Then he put them in rat park with all the exercise and the friends, and they slowly kind of tape it off their addiction and then stopped and then didn't use again. I just did air quotations. But so his conclusion was Johann Hari has a talk about a ted talk about this, but you know his conclusion is like, it's not your it's not necessarily the drug, it's you know, it's your cage. Well,

that's really interesting. That's a cool metaphor. Thanks for explaining that to me. I was aware, of course, of the initial studies and sort of they helped confirm the difference between the wanting and liking system in their brain and how a lot of addiction is wanting it not but you don't even enjoy it necessarily at a certain points, you know, it's just like your body has learned this association.

Something else that I found was interesting that Maya talked about on when she was on the show is how a lot of people when they're given pay medication the hospital, after they leave the hospital, you know, they actually are addicted, but they don't know it. And a lot of it is a psychological thing. If you and if you just tell them, okay, just go through these steps, you know, you might feel little bit uncomfortable. You don't see what

it's about. You know, if you have to interpret that as addiction, you know, you might just have a feeling of like, oh I feel unsettled or I feel yeah. So there is just this in humans. There's this really interesting sort of thing that happens where we identify ourselves addicted and then shame and like you said, all this stuff comes along with it, which seems so unecessary, so unhelpful.

M hm, yeah was that, yeah. Youngan Harry talks about this as well about there are human examples of people taking these really strong drugs and not immediately getting addicted to them. You know, they come out of hospital, like you said, and they go back to their loving family and they're not addicted. To morphine after that because they've had an operation. Yeah right, even though you know, like they are technically yeah, yeah, morphine is stronger than heroin,

isn't it. I don't know, but I remember when I broke my arm, they put me on morphine and it was delightful. Yeah. Yeah, So what do you like? Hope people will take away most from this film? And you know, how does this film differ from other awareness projects about the opioid epidemic? How's this unique? So the film is kind of an alternative to I guess just say just say no type campaigns. I don't know if you saw when Trump declared the opioid epidemic A now, I think

he said national Health emergency. I think I know what you're talking about. Yeah, he was talking about it and he said, you know, he has a He's never had a drink in his life. Apparently he never had a cigarette, and he said he had a it's because he had a brother who was an alcoholic. And he was saying, you know, he used to tell me again and again and again, don't have a drink, don't drink, don't drink,

don't drink, and so I never drank. And I think we need to really focus on telling kids just not to do drugs, because once you don't do them, it's really easy not to do them. Basically was the gist, and that idea is the just say no aspect of it. Is like, for one, it's like, well, what happens about the people who were taking you know, legal medication that their doctors told them to take. How does that play

into it? And I guess it's just more like did you see the Heroin campaign the twenty sixteen It came out during the Super Bowl. It was called thesth American Girl, and it basically showed the girl Yeah, and it just kind of you can tell someone just say no till you're blue in the face. But it doesn't really address addiction. Is it's not always like the cause. It becomes the cause of problems, but it's like the result of something else.

But we've come to see it as like, right, you have all these problems because you're addicted to something, rather than well, why are you wanting to do those and those kind of drugs and what led you to this place where that was even kind of an option, and like figure that out before we just you know, condemn you for doing it full stop. Period. I really like that. I mean, look, Trump has other addictions. Come on, let's be honest. Well, it was not like he's addiction free.

You said this thing, great thing about narcissism, about how I think you said you think it's like addiction to esteem. Yeah, I mean, they're right, he's addicted to esteem exactly. Yeah, he's fine stigmatizing the things he's not addicted with. But he's not fine anyway stumatizing things he is of the highest order. But anyways, moving it past that for a second, Okay, good. So you want this film to start discussions discussion events to our listeners. Maybe some of them want to participate

in some of these discussion events. Yeah, so we had this idea we want to We're we're talking with a couple of organizations and local community groups about using the video because the video is called is you know, either you have one reaction to it or you have the other reaction to it. And we think it's kind of interesting that those two that difference of perception is how and we think that kind of speaks to a greater, a great, sort of bigger issue that's surrounding opiated addiction.

So we wanted to do a couple of forum or discussion type events where we use the video as a tool to open up a discussion about opioids and addiction and the nature of opiod addiction between potentially people that maybe see the film one way see it the other way and hope. I mean, we were thinking we would love to be able to have at these events some a young person with previous experience to come talk. And we'd also love to have a Locke's Own training session,

especially if it's on campus. So we're trying to organize some of those really great. So again, give me as much information as you want to put up on the show notes. So what are you working on right now besides this? Do you have any plans to write a directing? There anything else you want to plug? I've never done that before on the Psychology podcast. I don't know what

kind of Plus, Oh, I guess I'm doing. I'm filming a show right now called The Sun to Beyond AMC at some point I think in June, I'm not sure. And then yeah, I have that movie coming out but you already know about that. Yeah, And then but you also have something called tell Me about Dude. Oh, dude,

is it. Let's not forget dude. It's a coming of age drama about three young women, one of who loses her brother and the other one was secretly dating, slash in love with, And so it's about how the two girls, one of them deals with grieving her you know, someone she was in love with but is unable to tell her best friend really about it for a while, and

her and her friend is mourning her brother. And it's just about how those kind of that a kind of comes out, and that plays out between two best friends. That sounds interesting. I'm an avid Netflix watcher. I'm going to look out for that one for sure. April sometime April. Hey, look, I just want to thank you so much for coming on here on the Psychology Podcast. We're honored that you're a fan of the podcast, and you know, the podcast is a fan of yours and the work, the really

important work that you're doing. So thank you, Oh, thanks so much for having me. Thanks for listening to the Psychology Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you like to react in some way to something you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology Podcast dot com. That's the Psychology podcast dot com. Also please add a rating and review of the Psychology

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