Kate Bolduan Reveals the Whole Story Behind 2-Year Fentanyl Investigation

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.”

“My singular goal with this report was to look at fentanyl in a way that it hasn’t been looked at or talked about,” Bolduan adds. “It’s not because we wanted to shy away from [the Sacklers], but it was more about [emphasizing] the fentanyl piece of the crisis.”

One of Bolduan’s key takeaways from her two years observing the fallout of fentanyl’s destructive rise is that there are no easy solutions to the current stage of the opioid crisis. Even as deaths decline and supply chains are cut off, medically-assisted treatments—aided by medications like narcan and buprenorphine—require extensive commitments of time and money.

“It has evolved into a crisis of recovery,” Bolduan notes. “Most addicts can’t just kick this, and that means access, that means education—and that means money. It’s not what they want, it’s what they need.”

Interestingly, the recovery crisis is an area where the Donald Trump administration could choose to have a positive impact. Since taking office, President Trump and other officials in his orbit have focused on the supply side of the fentanyl question through controversial means, such as levying tariffs against countries like Canada and Mexico and pursuing widespread deportations by invoking centuries-old laws.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, though, Trump had a memorable interview with podcaster Theo Von where he discussed how addiction impacted his own family. (Trump’s brother, Fred Trump Jr., battled alcoholism, which contributed to his death in 1981.) Based on her experience with her mother, Bolduan remembers being struck by those interviews at the time.

“That really resonated,” she says. “If you have seen addiction personally, you are inherently more invested in trying to find a solution, because the person you love is in there and you want to help them be them again.”

“Supply is part of the problem, but the other side of it that we really explore in the report is the demand problem,” Bolduan adds. “They have to work in tandem for a long-term solution. Tackling a piece of [the opioid crisis] can be a good thing—but it’s not the whole story.”