"America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks." 2017 Commission on Combatting Drug Addiction.
"They attack us, but they also attack their own people, that's crazy." White Americans at the dinner table when talking about Muslim terrorists killing Muslims
"They attack us, but they also attack their own people, that's crazy." White Americans at the dinner table when talking about Muslim terrorists killing Muslims
Opiates are the new opiates of the masses? Compare how many Americans were killed due to religious (Christian, Muslim, etc) violence last year (19 in 2015, the last year I could find data) to the 62,000 killed from opioids (more than car accidents or homicides). Realize that one family-owned corporation is behind this and has been to court before for criminal misbranding and exploiting doctor's ignorance about the strength of oxycodone (2007 trial, guilty plea), and is now (Jan 2017) being sued by an entire town for allowing their drugs to enter the underground market by ignoring suspicions going back to 2009 reported by lower-level employees (Everett, Washington). Entire states have done this as well: Kentucky sued them in 2015 for $1 billion. And as I began writing this article, the states of New Jersey and Alaska just sued them for fueling its opioid crisis as well, for "deception." New Hampshire also claims this corporation refused to share information with them or heed their calls for investigation.
The Sackler family's Purdue Pharma is a terrorist organization whose destruction is just as devastating as overtly violent extremists; the Sacklers wipe out entire towns, and use legislation to kill DEA regulations (2016 Amendment to the "Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act" (find the link to it on this article) gives drug companies more *freedom* to police themselves from ending up supplying the underground market, like the gun companies; just like the above case where Purdue ignored suspicions its drugs were being smuggled. But piracy and capitalism have a long partnership). All in the name of liberty, this country's god (to quote Jefferson who said this); more to the point, freedom to increase profits without accountability, which in this country is our *real* god.
In order to be omnipotent, Purdue cornered the market by making Valium compete with Librium, a drug which was basically the same. To do this, they created a term for "stress" called "psychic tension" and linked it to everything from sleep problems to indigestion to depression. It became the first $100,000 drug by being marketed for virtually everything.Then they discovered oxycontin, which was at first solely for cancer patients. Their gold rush was about to run dry when the patent ran out, so they had to regenerate and reinvent themselves: they created a time-release oxycodone. Instead of marketing it just to cancer patients, they did it for back pain, menstruation, for toothaches. The terror began: more and more people would feel insecure that they would not be protected from pain if they did not have that painkiller their neighbor did, and more and more doctors would feel insecure if they were not thinking they were treating their chronic pain patients the best they could. No one knew the true strength of the drug they were getting. They weren't supposed to, leading directly to the guilty plea mentioned above.
In America, we fall. A lot. It's the leading cause of emergency room visits. But because medical knowledge is as inaccessible to us (especially if one corporation created the drug and has trade secret privilege) as the divine was to the non-priest/scholar, the Sacklers were empowered to name and define our reality, to take on the religious role of healer for us, we get over-prescribed (but don't think WebMD is the new Reformation).
We also fall into the Western idealist trap of thinking that our bodies don't matter, that we should just consume tasty foods, drinks, and electronics, with bad posture and lack of moving around. Society reinforces this by placing demands on us that tell us we don't have time to care for our bodies. ** These are all religious standpoints, and we're buying into it.** Lower-back pain and other issues related to sitting and doing repetitive motions are on the rise, common sources of opioid prescriptions, according to doctors and workplace safety organization OSHA. Our postures and motions are as determined for us as Catholic kneeling-and-standing and Muslim salat rituals- it's the corporate ritualization of America.
So we are being killed by a terrorist organization that is trying to brainwash us, to do all of our thinking for us. We all claim to follow the same religion, the American Creed of "give me liberty with as few restrictions as possible." Purdue Pharma is a part of ALEC, a lobbying group that goes so far as to write draft legislation for politicians, and uses the word "liberty" all over their website, claiming to be in the heritage of Patrick Henry, who once said, "Give me liberty or give me death!" This is the use of ideology, of religious conviction, of jihad; and what religious extremists always do is hide their lust for money and power under seemingly innocent religious terms.
Terrorism involves the intent of inciting fear, people tell me. Maybe both the drug companies and ISIS have the goal of inspiring a mindset of insecurity. One is the insecurity of terrorized Americans not feeling protected from outsiders, the other is insecurity of not feeling protected from pain and stress. Both end up killing people in the process. Is this not terrorism, then?
Remember, the number one victim of Islamic terrorism are other Muslims, it not seem that way because they happened outside of our borders. We Americans are likewise our own greatest victims. We are the greatest sacrifice to America's Moloch and Mammon- control of resources (including human resources) and greed-driven profits.
For a country that values freedom, addiction should be the antithesis to this. But we'll never cure opioid addiction until we cure our addiction to the rhetoric of "liberty" when used by corporations. Purdue Pharma is just one of many corporations who exploit that rhetoric to kill fellow Americans and say they're doing it to save us, but it's really just to regenerate themselves through profit bonanzas. Our bodies are their frontier for their gold rush, and they won't stop until they've tamed us. Our bodies are means to a religious end - a heaven on earth of stored treasured - they won't stop until they've emptied our pockets and killed us. It's parasitic.
And why didn't Trump declare opioids a "national emergency" like he said he would, and like NJ governor Chris Christie called for him to do? He only now declared it a mere "public health emergency" which will not fund the response as much as a national emergency would. A 9/11 every three weeks and Trump isn't being tough on opioids, but he's only tough on religious extremists since it doesn't fuck with corporate profits. In fact, Trump nominated Rep. Tom Marino, Big Pharma's advocate, to the position of drug czar, which is like letting the fox guard the henhouse.
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JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s out of control. What they want to do is do what they want to do and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die. … This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.
BILL WHITAKER: Who are these distributors?
JOE RANNAZZISI: The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream.
BILL WHITAKER: You know the implication of what you’re saying, that these big companies knew that they were pumping drugs into American communities that were killing people.
JOE RANNAZZISI: That’s not an implication, that’s a fact. That’s exactly what they did.
[But an investigative journalist who did a piece for Esquire called "The Secretive Family Making Billions From the Opioid Crisis" responded to this interview.]
AMY GOODMAN: So, that is Joe Rannazzisi, who ran the Drug Enforcement Administration, the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, which regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry, speaking with CBS correspondent Bill Whitaker. Of course, he became a whistleblower. Christopher Glazek, talk about the significance of what this man said.
CHRISTOPHER GLAZEK: Well, you know, the opioid epidemic has many different actors in different parts of the chain. And this investigation focused on the distributors, who are basically the people who carry the opioid pills from the manufacturer and give it to specific pharmacies. And there’s been a lot of litigation focused on them. Some thought that, you know, they knew, that they had had reason to know, that certain pharmacies maybe were involved in diversion. And they have this ongoing struggle with the DEA about what’s appropriate to seize and under what circumstances.
In my view, what you want to do when you look at the opioid crisis is look at where the real profits are. And it’s actually not with the distributors. It’s really with the manufacturers. And, you know, people kind of think they’re following the money. And McKesson and Cardinal are these huge, giant companies. But you really want to follow the margin, because that’s going to tell you who’s controlling a market and who’s kind of like a minor toll taker. And the fact is that the manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, which really created this market, created all this business for Cardinal and McKesson, etc., they had much more detailed information about where pills were going. They knew down to the prescription level, you know, what doctors were prescribing what. The distributors didn’t know that. The distributors—all distributors knew was about pharmacies. So they really are just one part of this giant chain. But Purdue had the aerial vision of the entire thing."
