[Music] when it comes to america's water wars the west is as wild as it ever was and the mighty colorado river is one of the spoils i kind of thought nobody could really own water it's true in the western united states the rule has always been you don't own water you don't own the molecules of water you own the right to divert it and put it to beneficial use in 1922 seven states signed onto the colorado river compact a water sharing agreement that divvies up the river's annual flow water is a scarce commodity in arizona you start putting it up on the market and guess what it starts going for the highest price this week we investigate water wars for a century this little device in your car has measured just how many miles it's traveled i think everybody thinks i have a digital odometer it can't be rolled back is that true no no so it's pretty simple to do if you've got the right equipment this week a new look at the rise in rollbacks and why you might want to rethink the process of buying a used vehicle the cost of medicine is just too high for many americans like 32 million people report that they can't afford their medicine phil baker is a pharmacist who saw a need and created a solution these are all the chemo meds that we have that are ready to be dispensed to patients who won't be able to afford them this week we look at flip your script [Music] [Applause] welcome to full measure i'm sheryl atkinson from oil and natural gas to rare earth minerals in the deep sea we've looked at the competition for critical natural resources today we examine the battle over a natural resource that's even more fundamental water there's every chance that america's water wars may be overflowing into your neck of the woods soon when it comes to america's water wars the west is as wild as it ever was and the mighty colorado river is one of the spoils the colorado river cuts through the grand canyon and spans seven states providing water for about 40 million people and five and a half million acres of farmland to some the water is as valuable as oil early americans settling the west started moving water from the start for mining and farming establishing the very system that laid the foundation for who has the right to do what today few have conquered the wild colorado and many have been wrecked amid its rocks and rapids in 1922 seven states signed on to the colorado river compact a water sharing agreement that divvies up the river's annual flow the water must be shared equally between upper basin states wyoming colorado utah and new mexico and the lower basin california arizona and nevada there's been infighting ever since a recurring question who has the right to move and use the river water where i kind of thought nobody could really own water it's true in the western united states the rule has always been you don't own water you don't own the molecules of water you own the right to divert it and put it to beneficial use attorney michael pierce represents both buyer and seller in one of the most important water disputes involving the colorado river the owner of farmland in arizona's cibola valley wants to sell the right to transfer water 300 miles through the central arizona project canal to a town called queen creek we're talking probably less than one percent of the way less than one percent of the flow of the river this water you wouldn't even be able to notice it it will have no visible impact at all queen creek is a quickly expanding suburb of phoenix it's seeking the colorado river water not because its own supply is running dry there's plenty of that for the moment but paul gardner says importing surface water from the colorado river is cheaper than using the city's underground water he's queen creek's utility director and so part of the law here in arizona now is to if you pump out a gallon of water a gallon of water has to go back in to the ground and there's a district that we belong to it's called a replenishment district that does that it sometimes can be very costly and we decided as a is a town that we could do it more efficiently and that it would be more cost effective if we had the control of what those costs were by getting our own water supplies when you're paying someone to have it done like you've been doing how do they put a gallon of water back into the ground so throughout the the metropolitan area of phoenix there are what we call recharge sites and so there are areas that they take surface water and they put it basically in these basins and the water returns back into the aquifer and so that you're able to then replenish that area where you pumped out so that way the groundwater is not being used up that's right it's called sustainable queen creek argues the water it wants to bring in from the colorado river will go to much better use in their town than back on the farm it would support over five thousand homes two thousand seven hundred permanent jobs 115 million dollars in annual wages have you done any calculations that you can describe that show how much less expensive it is to ship it in versus have paying people to to return it yes this water supply in future ones this will end up saving our residents into the tens of millions of dollars as we go forward [Applause] so if the seller wants to sell and the buyer wants to buy what's the issue i would say it's commoditizing water and as picking winners and losers regina cobb is an arizona state representative she's fighting the water transfer in large part because of who owns the farmland that's selling the water rights a multi-national hedge fund this will be the first case that that water's been able to be transferred from the colorado river internally into urban arizona is it a hedge fund group that's involved in this particular transaction that you object to yeah it's called greenstone and they have bought up more than just this one piece of properties cobb says she worries that investors thirsty for profits will complicate the water wars turning h2o into a commodity where shareholders make money off droughts and water shortages water is a scarce commodity in arizona so yes it does become like oil here it's just like any product that scares it you start putting it up on the market and guess what it starts going for the highest price cobb isn't alone when the state collected written public comments for everyone that favored the queen creek deal there were 47 opposed it's almost a a religious fervor that this water cannot go to central arizona and that's a difficult argument to defeat with logic and if you look at this objectively under arizona water management principles queen creek needs this water they need it more than we need alfalfa growing in sabola valley despite strong opposition the arizona department of water resources last fall gave the thumbs up to the water transfer the final hurdle now is approval from the federal government is there anything that would prevent private investors from moving where this has been for a long time how water rights are handled into water as more of a commodity an investment and a profit center for investors i've been doing water transfers for under 30 years now and they're very difficult to do it's a very regulatory process there are a lot of hurdles to overcome and it's not always even possible so the idea that you're going to just roll into town and buy up water rights turn around next year and sell them for a fabulous process profit is just a myth whatever the final decision on queen creek it could help determine whether more international investors choose to dip their toes into america's water wars and forever change how our most critical natural resource is divvied up what do you think happens if this land grant or the grant of the water to be moved is approved it's going to commoditize the water i think the price of water is going to become sky high it's going to be just like as if you were buying gold or silver or copper and so that's going to make it difficult in the future an area of agreement is the idea that in one form or another skirmishes over water will be spilling into more u.s cities and towns are these sorts of issues coming to them in the next 50 years do you think you know other parts of the country yes even in the what you would think would be the water-rich states of georgia and alabama and florida there's a dispute over the chattahoochee apalachicola rivers so those kind of disputes i think are going to grow and become more common in the eastern states than they ever have been in the past so maybe they will learn a few lessons from the west i don't know maybe they'll come up with something better than we did regina cobb the arizona legislator is pushing for a law to ban the sort of water transfer proposed for queen creek coming up on full measure a new take on an old fraud dialing back the age of a car [Music] a lot of a car's worth is measured by miles traveled and there's long been a market for illegally dialing back the reality rolling back the odometer can add thousands of dollars to the value of a used vehicle and lisa fletcher finds digital technology hasn't made the scam obsolete odometers perform a simple enough task counting the miles which helps measure a vehicle's age and wear crucial when it comes to determining the value of a used car or truck it can have a big impact on the sales price take for example these two 2012 chevy silverado pickups with the same options the one on the left has 175 000 miles and has a used value up to around twelve and a half thousand dollars but take the same vehicle and roll the mileage back to sixty thousand miles and the value shoots up to more than twenty two thousand a difference of more than ten thousand dollars to find out just how easy it is to roll back the miles we went to see josh ingle owner of atlanta speedometer in georgia i think everybody thinks i have a digital odometer it can't be rolled back that happened in the old days with the old-fashioned ones is that true no no so it's a depending on manufacturer it's pretty simple to do if you've got the right equipment um in recent years the equipment used to be five to ten thousand dollars and some of these things are 300 now so you don't have to disassemble anything you can plug it into the car change your number unplug it and outside of finding some written records somewhere there's no trace that's exactly what happened to cheryl mansfield in virginia she bought a used 2010 mustang convertible her dream car that turned into a nightmare when she found its odometer had been rolled back 90 thousand miles her 14 thousand dollar car actually worth little more than a thousand dollars according to the national highway transportation safety administration nitsa more than 450 000 vehicles a year are sold with odometers that have been rolled back costing americans a billion dollars this tool is one of the ones i was telling you you know purchased this i believe off the ebay was a little bit less than three hundred dollars and all you'd simply do is go down choose your manufacturer general motors and this is a gmc envoy all you have to do to change it is you know we can let's give it let's give it a thousand kilometers wow there you go simple very simple and and you can alter that and do that as many times you want to that that single chip can be written i believe it's something close to a million times before it doesn't want to do it anymore according to carfax the vehicle history report service the problem has been steadily getting worse with the crime equally distributed among every state in the country but some manufacturers are better than others the germans are doing a much better job at trying to defeat it you know for instance a mercedes 10 years ago will have the mileage stored essentially in three separate places it's not truly a mileage but it'll have a separate piece of code that has to check with another module to say hey i'm the correct part of the car that was originally installed you can still you know change that information it is more difficult but others like uh for instance this vehicle here on uh this uh gmc envoy from i believe about 2006 the mileage is stored in the instrument cluster and there's no other record of it another key problem different states have different rules about tracking mileage for used vehicles and anything 10 years or older is exempt from written odometer disclosure when the title is transferred beyond the loss of value high mileage vehicles can also pose safety risks because owners assume the vehicle is in better condition than it actually is the federal government says it is prosecuting major cases especially those involving criminal groups working on a large scale in victim cheryl mansfield's case the perpetrator of her fraud got prison time and a fine and she's receiving compensation in small checks each month this is model s the world's first premium all-electric sedan as for the future odometer expert josh believes the solution to the problem could come in the form of connected vehicles if you look at somebody like tesla they know what their cars are doing every single day that car is reporting mileage back to tesla and it is you know that's a constant thing that's happening because the car is networked but for now with most vehicles not networked or connected there's always the chance somebody's rolled back the numbers for full measure i'm lisa fletcher in atlanta georgia and when we return an update to our reporting on some misinformation put out by cdc [Music] a follow-up to our investigation that revealed cdc distributed false information claiming studies proved coveted vaccines are effective in people who've already had coronavirus when that's not the case congressman thomas massey discovered the error and recorded cdc officials acknowledging it so you're correct that that sentence is wrong and that we need to make a correction of it yet cdc scientists continued giving the false information even after they admitted it was wrong data from both clinical trials suggests that people with prior infection are still likely to benefit from vaccination massey says cdc's disinformation is critical because it prompted those who'd have the virus and didn't need the vaccine to cut in line ahead of elderly who need the vaccine but couldn't get it i recently caught up with congressman massey to see what's happened since our report there's so many important questions that haven't been answered and as far as i know there was no accountability and nobody has been taken to task over disseminating incorrect information and then refusing to fix it one other note the cdc recently was forced to clarify their director who had falsely stated that people who are vaccinated against covid19 do not carry the virus and don't get sick head on full measure a creative solution that could provide life-saving drugs to those who can't afford them [Music] coming up next week on full measure in the wake of the u.s capitol riots the fbi moved quickly to identify and arrest hundreds of people but far less was publicly said about the one and only person shot and killed that day an unarmed protester named ashley babbitt one of the most secretive and unusual police shootings ever next week on full measure the cost of medicine is just too high for many americans what creative solutions are out there in tennessee we found one pharmacist making a difference in an idea he calls flip your script near downtown memphis is a pharmacy like you've probably never seen before these guys are filling the orders pharmacist phil baker is the founder and ceo of good shepherd pharmacy people who can't afford prescriptions can join for a low monthly fee and get connected to free or low-cost medicine like 32 million people report that they can't afford their medicine i worked at a community store and i saw people leave their medicine at the counter all the time i saw i was the director of pharmacy for a small hospital i saw people coming into the hospital being admitted to the hospital because they weren't able to get their blood pressure medicine and they'd had a stroke and it's just a mess that it's it's tragic that the average person can't afford their medicine and so with good shepherd health what we're really trying to do is kind of reinvent the community pharmacy she'll run an order through there after just a few weeks of running his small pharmacy he says he encountered an unusual problem people who'd lost a loved one were showing up with bags of perfectly good unused medications to donate to someone who needs the help but in tennessee it was against the law for pharmacies to accept donated meds i had to tell these folks there's nothing wrong with that medicine but there's nothing you can do with it but flush it down the toilet or throw it away it has to be destroyed every day we get two three four of these donated meds that are coming in with more and more people looking to donate reaching out baker started looking for a solution and so i worked with legislators for a couple of years in tennessee to get a bill amended so that we could create a reclamation program that allows us to accept donations medication donations from any individual anywhere in the country the medications have to be unopened and unexpired and original packaging they literally have to be in pristine condition but if they are then we can accept them we can expect them inspect those make sure that they're safe and then redispense those to patients who would not otherwise be able to afford them these are unused they should be unopened yeah and these just came in so i'm an inspector they could have been open but these are good to go with the law on his side now baker has started a new separate program to expand the idea it's called flip your script so far it's been collecting and distributing chemotherapy drugs for cancer patients for us it means you'll reuse that prescription but also like flip your script is change your story you know make a new story flip the script on somebody so as that doubly applies and so i thought you know i'm all about memphis i love this city lived here my whole life and um i liked that it was that a person from memphis would would wink at that and we started exclusively with oral chemotherapy medications oral chemotherapies are the most expensive meds on the market and they're also some of the most wasted meds on the market because so many patients pass away with cancer while they're still on this medicine and so we focused on those exclusively this is the inventory these are all the chemo meds that we have that are ready to be dispensed to patients who won't be able to afford them as part of flip your script good shepherd pharmacy has brought in over 5 million dollars worth of donated oral chemotherapies more than 550 individual donations matching 34 uninsured patients who say they wouldn't have gotten their chemotherapy in any other way one of the donors is brad trotter who recently lost his wife terry to breast cancer when my wife passed away she left behind as you can imagine a uh a cabinet full of drugs um and i didn't know what to do with them um a lot of it was you know narcotics and things that are dangerous and you want to dispose them properly you certainly don't want them you know flush down the toilet and in the drinking water right so um i connected with phil that was something he was able to repurpose and that it found a home and and and was able to have an impact yeah she would have she would have been very happy about that we're shooting to get it there about five days early baker continues to see growth in his program and says his goal to rebuild and reinvent the community pharmacy is having an impact from who it serves to how it serves the people in need they consistently tell us that they would not have been able to get their medicine any other way which is heartbreaking i can't imagine what it'd feel like to have cancer and know that there's a treatment but not be able to get the treatment i'm surprised at how we've been able to really affect people's lives people don't realize how important it is and i'm proud to say that yeah we've been successful and believe that this is something that could be repeated all over the country anybody in tennessee can donate medicine to flip your script whether they can send donated medicine to you depends on your state's laws you can visit goodsheprx.com for more information that's all for this week thanks for watching until next time we'll be searching for more stories that hold powers accountable
2021-08-21