Kate Bolduan has seen—and covered—a lot during her nearly two decade tenure at CNN. But the anchor and host still finds herself doing some things for the first time. Bolduan experienced two notable firsts during the two-year process of making Fentanyl in America: A Way Out, a one-hour Whole Story report from the front lines of America’s opioid crisis.
Premiering Sunday night at 8 p.m., the episode features the voices of addicts and their families, as well as the doctors and first responders that treat them. Bolduan watches and listens to their frequently-wrenching stories, allowing them to shape the story’s narrative rather than the other way around.
“It’s the first time I’ve done something in true documentary style,” she tells TVNewser. “I did not have a thesis statement going in—it only came to us at the end. That was a spectacular learning experience as a journalist and as a person.”
Bolduan also made the difficult decision to get personal in the midst of reporting out the episode, speaking on-camera for the first time about her mother’s longtime struggle with alcoholism. “I did not intend to do that, and I’m still not comfortable or ready to talk about it too much,” she says now. “But as the episode evolved, it felt very natural for me to talk about it in the way that I do.”
Certainly, having seen addiction firsthand put Bolduan on common ground with many of her subjects. And she believes that the process of interviewing other family members of addicts over the course of two years helped her better understand her mother, who passed away in 2023.
“I would have loved for her to have seen this,” Bolduan says wistfully. “I’ve gained new insight and understanding into some of what she fought through so courageously for a very long time.”
Watch an exclusive clip from Fentanyl in America:
One family you won’t hear mentioned in Fentanyl in America are the Sacklers, the former owners of Purdue Pharma. That company created and marketed OxyContin, the painkiller that’s frequently identified as one of the contributing factors to the ongoing opioid crisis. The Sackler family has been at the center of numerous lawsuits over the years. In January, they reached a $7.4 billion settlement with 15 states that prevents them from selling opioids and ends their control of Purdue.
Bolduan says that the decision to leave the Sacklers out of the narrative was rooted in her desire to look at the present and future rather than back to the past. “For most of the people we spoke with, their path towards addiction began with some sort of accident or injury and then being prescribed opioids,” she explains. “When they became addicted, they sought out heroin and then fentanyl started flooding the supply because it was cheaper.”
