The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), is gearing up for National Drug and Alcohol Facts Week 2023 to be held March 20-26.
81,230 drug overdose deaths occurred during the 12 months from May 2019 to May 2020, the largest number of drug overdoses for a 12-month interval ever recorded for the U.S.
Fentanyl is now the number one cause of overdose deaths in the country, surpassing heroin by a large margin.
http://mileswmathis.com/opioid.pdf
by Miles Mathis
First published December 12, 2022
Like the Covid and vaccine deaths, the Fentanyl genocide was/is not an accident. It is mass murder
once again by Big Pharma, and it wasn’t done just for profit since Pharma is only half the equation.
Behind Pharma is an even more evil entity: the Phoenicians who want you dead.
Yes, as usual, I will not beat around the bush here. The time for that is past. I am going to tell you how
it is and I am going to tell you in the opening paragraph. If you want political words and longwinded
proofs and pages of statistics, you can go to others for that. They exist all over the place and aren’t hard
to find. The evidence already stacks to the Moon that the middle class is being targeted, both
financially and physically. Some of that evidence is covert and some are overt. Meaning, some are right
out in the open while some are hiding under a shallow frosting of lies, but aren’t hard to find once you pull
the blinders off and start looking.
What started me writing was news today that Walgreens and CVS have agreed to pay $10.7 billion to
settle lawsuits against them for cooperating in and profiting from the opioid crisis. I knew something
like that was going on, but it hadn’t ever penetrated my skull until now, I guess. I don’t even take
aspirin, so stories about drug crises don’t really register with me. I have trouble comprehending the
whole event from either side, predator or victim. I still don’t really understand how these places could
be involved, because I had always assumed this was a street drug thing, with users being sold the drugs
by illegal pushers. Hence the big drug busts, where we see ICE or Interpol bagging ten tons of Meth or
Fentanyl pills or something. I assumed they weren’t finding those in the backrooms at CVS. So I
looked it up. The first thing that came up on a general search was this story from CBS in 2020 from
San Francisco, where a Walgreens pharmacist had been arrested for impersonating a pharmacist and
illegally filling 745,000 prescriptions over eleven years. Over 100,000 of those were for opioids.
But the story makes no sense on any level. We are told the pharmacist pled not guilty and has not yet
been convicted, so why did Walgreens agree to settle? You would expect them to wait for a verdict.
Also, how do you impersonate a pharmacist? According to the story, she was previously a licensed
pharmacy tech, but her license expired in 2008. This lady then used the license number of someone
else with the same name to keep working. That sounds very unlikely. It sounds like a cover for
something else to me. And, even if true, that doesn’t make the prescriptions illegal. As long as a
doctor prescribed them, they are legal. You could not promote an opioid crisis with such a paper
technicality, and I fail to see how Walgreens could have caught the fraud or be liable for it: which is
exactly the point of this article. That is what they want you to think.
The whole story is being spun to make Walgreens and the doctors involved look innocent, putting all the blame on this rogue pharmacist. But with or without a license, all this pharmacist did was fill a legal prescription—at least
according to the story. So how do you promote an opioid epidemic by filling valid prescriptions? That
question is never asked in the article, much less answered.
Also, the number doesn’t seem to work at a glance, does it? Eleven years times 365 days is 4015 days,
divided into 745,000 prescriptions, which is 185 per day. But she probably only worked five days a week,
which would give us 260 per day, or 37 per hour, or about one every two minutes. You have been to
Walgreens. Does it take about two minutes to get your order? And is there only one lady working
there at a time? No, they admit she was—at best—a pharmacy tech, which means she would be
supervised by a pharmacist. Which means she wouldn’t get credit for every prescription filled every
minute.
If Walgreens and CVS are admitting guilt here, it can’t just be for a few unlicensed pharmacy techs
filling real prescriptions. There must be a concerted effort by everyone involved—doctors, pharmacies,
big companies, governments, and regulators—to promote this genocide. It simply could not happen
otherwise. So why would government entities later prosecute these companies for fraud? I can only
guess: one party decided after the fact to turn on the other parties and shake them down for part of their
share. Like bank robbers after a job. In return for keeping the sums low and spinning the blame onto
minor players, as we saw in San Francisco, those parties agree to play ball. And the public is given the
impression something is being done, while almost nothing is.
Is paying a fine really the correct remedy to this? Hundreds of thousands of people have been
murdered for profit or worse things than profit, and that is supposed to be remedied by fining these
companies a few billions? No, when someone kills another person with a gun or knife, we don’t fine
him a few thousand and tell him to go home, do we? So why are the directors of these companies still
on the streets? Why are their chief medical officers still on the streets?
I also rewatched Tucker Carlson’s interview with Dr. Malhotra today, and there we are reminded that
Vioxx killed 60,000 Americans, more than Vietnam. In a settlement, Merck paid about $600 million*
to be released from civil liability in the US, a tiny fraction of profits. And after fees only $9,000 per
death. Your husband is dead? Here’s $9,000, beat it! It later came out that Merck knew the lethal side
effects of Vioxx and that data had been fabricated but went ahead with its sales anyway.
The Malhotra interview is very damning for Pharma and the medical profession, but he actually spends
a lot of the interview defusing this bomb (of the vaccines as well as Vioxx). Although he allegedly lost
his father to the vaccine, he doesn’t seem very angry about it. I find his sangfroid maddening, and also
suspicious. As usual, he is sure to tell us he took the vaccine, and we see he isn’t sick or dead, so that is
a defusing right there. I am not sure I believe it. I would assume he didn’t take it. He then tells us that
pre-Covid vaccines are one of the safest things ever, so he is again generally pro-vax: highly suspicious
since it isn’t true. These mRNA “vaccines” are the worst, but many (perhaps all) previous vaccines
have been oversold or dangerous, and not just for their mercury or other adjuvants. But his comment
that really jumped out at me came later in the interview at min. 38:30, where he says the problem is a
“pandemic of misinformed doctors and misinformed and unwittingly harmed patients”. Really?
Unwittingly? So it was all just another honest mistake, eh, Dr. Malhotra? These doctors didn’t know
any better? It wasn’t outrageous and malevolent fraud, promulgated at best for profit and at worst as an
abetting of mass murder? But Malhotra had already said that this huge vaccine crisis had come down
from some great “psychopathic entity”, which he had implied was at the corporate level if not higher.
So, again, do you stop a huge psychopathic entity by slapping it on the wrist? That can only encourage
further psychopathy and murder, which is exactly what we have seen: accelerating levels of raw
criminality. At this point, not convicting these mass murderers is the same as abetting them.
When Malhotra starts back peddling and soft selling this due to bias and conflicts of interest, he
seems to me to be framing this as far less than it is, for the benefit of his promoters. He was paid to
defuse this bomb by admitting what we already know but trying to talk us down from the obvious
solution. We see it again later when Tucker points out that the US seemed to encourage obesity during
the pandemic rather than discourage it, by closing gyms, etc., despite it being known obesity was the
leading co-morbidity. He says he doesn’t believe this was part of a planned population reduction but
asks Malhotra to explain it. Malhotra says it is due to “the corporate capture of public health” and
again tries to pass it off as conflict of interest. Conflicts of interest? He says Gates was also invested
in Mcdonalds’ and Coke so that somehow explains it. These people wanted to make money from
vaccines and junk food at the same time: genocide explained away. Malhotra literally says that and
then drops it, as if he has answered Tucker’s question, and they move on. But Tucker somehow fails to
notice that doesn’t refute the genocide theory, it confirms it. These people were invested in junk food
because they knew that promoting it was a plank of the genocide: keep everyone at home living on
Domino’s pizza and Coke. Mandate all the upper-end restaurants to close so that people would be
forced to drive thru Wendys’ or Taco Bell. Close all the Mom&Pop stores so people would be forced to
shop at Walmart: then you only have to poison Walmart.
From there the interview sort of unwinds, as both Malhotra and Tucker play dumb, pretending they
don’t understand how this worked, how it happened, or what can be done. Tucker continues to say that
people are basically good, which isn’t to the point, obviously. This isn’t about people in general, it is
about the psychopaths, so I don’t know why he and Malhotra can’t stay on target. Or, actually, I am
pretty sure I do know: it is more misdirection.
In the closing minutes, Malhotra actually says that if Trump knew what he knew, he would flip his
position on vaccines. Except that we are almost three years out on Covid, so it is kind of late for
Trump or anyone else to be claiming ignorance. If Trump doesn’t already know what Malhotra knows,
we can only call him grossly incompetent or senile. Nothing Malhotra is saying is new: it has been up
at places like Infowars and Zerohedge for a year and a half and could have been intuited by anyone
with a brain long before that. Nothing Malhotra is saying is new to me, though he passes it off as fresh
off the medical presses. Plus, this interview is a couple of weeks old and we know Trump watches
Tucker. There is no way he isn’t aware of it. Has Trump rushed to Twitter or Social to admit his
mistake? No, and he won’t, because he has been in on this genocide from the start.
But back to the opioid crisis. It is prong two of this attack on worldwide populations, dwarfed
somewhat by the vaccines, but still incredibly potent. The setting in San Francisco of the pharmacist
story reminded me of my research on Haight-Ashbury for my Manson/Tate paper, where I found
government agents had been planted there to disseminate many dangerous drugs through whatever
means possible: fake prescriptions, passing them out at parties, introducing them through Esalen and
other CIA fronts, the works. And not just LSD, but also PCP, STP, and everything else. It later came
out in leaks and department declassifications that this was a targeted attack, planned for years by a
consortium of government agencies, at the behest of. . . some great hidden psychopathic entity that was
at the reins of the CIA, FBI, DIA, Justice, and even local police. So this goes back many decades, and
San Francisco was an early hub. CIA has grown exponentially since the 1960s, and it has now taken
over everything. It can place people anywhere it likes. . . and that anywhere of course includes
pharmacies. So I think what we are seeing here is evidence government drug pushers have actually
inserted themselves into major pharmacy chains. What better way to achieve their goals directly?
If doctors refuse to prescribe these deadly drugs or aren’t keeping up with orders in any way, the drugs
can be dispensed with forged signatures and any other fraudulent paperwork required. At that point, the
street pushers of the 1960s have moved indoors, with a Walgreens or CVS pharmacy sign over their
heads to lend legitimacy. Do the users care one way or the other? No. Once they have been
hooked, they no longer care about legal or illegal, street or pharmacy. All they care about is their fix.
But for those just getting snared, the apparent legitimacy of the pharmacy is a great convenience. For
the levels of genocide envisioned by the Great Psychopath, street pushing was not enough. It requires
the cooperation and infiltration of all non-governmental institutions, from schools and universities to
hospitals, pharmacies, groceries, malls, and cinemas. It requires a full-spectrum implementation.
This is what is happening and you would have to already be zonked on some drug cocktail not to see it.
And there is only one solution: prosecute these maniacs to the fullest extent of the law, either locking
them in some deep dark dungeon filled with rats or throwing them from the nearest cliffs in a vast
civic ceremony of cleansing. Anything short of that will just send the signal to the next round of
psychopaths to murder even more of us in the next wave. The plans are already in place for that, so
you better decide quickly.
Added last minute: Watching Tucker Carlson tonight I learned you can kill yourself with opioids
over-the-counter now, buying them at the grocery store or minimart under the name Za-Za or Tianaa,
aka gas station heroin. It is a 46 billion dollar industry killing people right and left, but our vaunted
FDA is doing. . . nothing, of course. There are existing laws against this, but no one at any level—
Justice, FBI, attorneys general, or DAs—are doing anything about it. Why? I just told you: they want
you dead.
Added December 15: In continuing to study this, I discovered something else shocking: at the very
same time Johnson&Johnson was pushing its Covid vaccine as safe and effective, it was part of a $26
billion-dollar fraud settlement nationwide, brought by state Attorneys General for its part in the opioid
crisis. McKinsey&Co, a management/consulting firm I have mentioned many times in these papers,
was also involved in this settlement, agreeing to pay over half a billion. McKinsey is one of those huge
firms like Burson-Marsteller that comes up like clockwork in my research since it is a Phoenician Navy
hub of skullduggery. The Enron scandal came out of McKinsey, and so did the 2007 financial crisis, as
even Wikipedia admits. Also involved in this opioid settlement are drug distributors McKesson,
Cardinal, and AmericSourceBergen. But my point is, it was always amazing to me that average people
were trusting these vaccine makers and Big Pharma in general, given their horrendous track record.
But it was even worse than we knew in the case of Johnson&Johnson, as you see. Somehow they
managed to push this vaccine genocide right on the heels of the Oxycontin/Fentanyl genocide,
murdering you WHILE they were being tried for murder and admitting guilt. How did they do that?
Mainly by being in control of the media. It isn’t that these stories were completely suppressed or
censored, because they weren’t. You could find this information online if you wanted to. But the
mainstream wasn’t reporting it, so most people missed it. When the mainstream mentioned it, it was
only as a passing story. They never gave it any context, warning you—as they should have—that the
same companies pushing the vaccines were—at that very moment—losing huge government lawsuits
for fraud.
What is even more uncanny is that people weren’t listening as I was trying to educate them on these
things back in 2020. I wasn’t aware of the J&J Oxycontin settlement, since I think it was still in the
future, but I was telling those around me not to trust Pfizer, Moderna, or J&J, since they had previously
been fined billions for massive fraud. Although that information was easily available from places like
Wikipedia, most people brushed me off as a conspiracy theorist. They simply didn’t want to hear it,
seeming to be in some hurry to kill themselves with a dangerous faux-vaccine. I can’t think of one
person locally who listened to me or followed my advice, much less thanked me for saving their lives.
But I do know many who ignored me and are now regretting it. The only way I can explain that is
prestige: in their eyes, those on TV had some unnamed prestige, just by being on TV or being promoted,
while I had none. And, perhaps even more importantly, they trusted “medical professionals” and their
own doctors, which we now know was a huge mistake. I wish I could say all that is over, and people
will never trust doctors or the government again. . . but I can’t say that. The government and medical
profession have been lying to us all our lives and getting caught at it, but no one ever seems to catch
on. No doubt your average citizen will find some way to bury all this as well and go on as before,
acting the gull to every passing fraudster.
And in other news, I have to ask: why is Alex Jones now doing big interviews with Kanye and Nick
Fuentes? It seems to me he is self-destructing on purpose since any sane man who wished to “restore
his reputation” after the Sandy Hook thing would avoid those two guys above any others. This is
especially obvious with Nick Fuentes, and Alex has absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose
by being seen with him. Fuentes has no real following and has made a career out of blackwashing
himself and everyone around him. He is clearly a Jewish agent sent in to make conservatives look like
KKK loonies. He couldn’t be a more obvious tarbaby if he covered himself in Karo syrup before every
public appearance. The same can be said for Kanye, who is way overacting his part. It is ludicrously
obvious that he is also an agent, being paid to say stupid things and create fires and diversions. My
first guess would be he is half-Jewish himself through his mother and is working for the ADL as a
make-work project. That doesn’t mean I think he should be censored or otherwise shut down, but it
does mean I think he should be avoided. I certainly wouldn’t make any alliances with him right now, so I
don’t know why Jones or Trump would.
Continue:
Researchers at the University of British Columbia and the B.C. Centre on Substance Use conducted over 5,000 interviews with 1,152 people who used heroin and other drugs and reported chronic pain at some point from June 2014 to June 2017.
The participants were largely from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and lead author M-J Milloy said the study aimed to discover “new interventions” that might “lower or address the risk of overdose” in heavy opioid users.
More than 12,800 apparent opioid-related deaths occurred in Canada between January 2016, when the federal government started tracking the data, and March 2019, according to the latest available statistics from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
Milloy said chronic pain is one of the “driving factors” of the opioid crisis, adding that many who can’t get effective pain relief can turn to the black market for opioids.
“This is the population that’s really suffering the worst burden of mortality in the crisis,” he said. “And there’s been some work suggesting that cannabis might be beneficial in the overdose crisis. So we’ve really tried to use our data to figure out if that is true.”
What they found was that daily cannabis use was associated with significantly lower odds of daily illicit opioid use, suggesting cannabis may serve as a substitute treatment in people with chronic pain.
The story went viral online this week and was picked up in publications in Canada and overseas, including the Daily Mail and The Sun in the U.K.
What the articles failed to mention, however, is that Milloy is also UBC’s inaugural Canopy Growth Professor of Cannabis Science.
While a spokesperson for the university says he receives no funding from any industry group, it is worth noting the cannabis company contributed $2.5 million to UBC and BCCSU for the professorship and research.
Milloy said the fact that his study looked at daily cannabis use raised a “valid concern” about the risk of addiction, but added it’s also linked to therapeutic benefits.
“A lot of people who are benefiting from cannabis are the people who are using it every day,” he said.
“We are very aware of the risk of harms. And I want to emphasize that none of us think that cannabis is a panacea or a silver bullet to knock out the overdose crisis. What we do think, though, is that it has tremendous potential.”
A day after the UBC study was published, researchers at McMaster University published a review of almost 30 years’ worth of data in the Canadian Medical Association Journal that examined the use of cannabis as a replacement drug for people with opioid addictions.
Researchers looked at six studies involving 3,676 participants dating back to 1991 in an effort to determine the effects of cannabis use on opioid addiction during methadone treatment.
What they found was starkly different than the UBC study — there is no consensus among studies that cannabis use is associated with reduced opioid use.
“There’s a lot of hype and interest and hope that this could be a replacement. Could this be helping people with chronic pain or with opioid addiction?” said senior author Dr. Zainab Samaan, associate professor of psychiatry and behavioural neurosciences at McMaster.
“The reality is that there are no good studies or good evidence to show us it’s beneficial.”
The research also found cannabis use did not result in patients with opioid addiction staying in methadone treatment longer.
Samaan concedes that studying the positive or negative effects of cannabis is difficult, especially when studying drug users with addictions to multiple drugs.
“When you’ve got a mix of drugs and a population who are already addicted to drugs, it’s really hard to decipher,” she said. “What is the benefit, what is the harm?”
The McMaster study also concludes the overall quality of evidence was “very low,” with “critical issues of inconsistency and imprecision to moderate risk of bias.”
China has already been named as the “largest supplier” of illicit fentanyl to the U.S. And at the end of August, a drug bust led by Virginia law enforcement reportedly captured enough illegal Chinese fentanyl to kill 14 million people. Thirty-nine people were arrested in relation to the drugs. This was not a small operation by any means. And if experts are right, the massive influx of fentanyl is all part of a covert attack on U.S. soil.
In an interview with The Epoch Times, Chinese and Russian strategy researcher Jeff Nyquist cations that the heavy flow of fentanyl into the United States is no accident. And according to Nyquist, China is using fentanyl as a “very effective tool.” The painkiller is as addictive as it is lethal — calling it a “weapon” might be more appropriate — and Nyquist seems to agree.
“You could call it a form of chemical warfare,” Nyquist says.
“It opens up a number of opportunities for the penetration of the country, both in terms of laundering money and in terms of blackmail against those who participate in the trade and become corrupt like law enforcement, intelligence, and government officials,” he explains further.
China also reportedly uses the money made from importing fentanyl to “influence political parties” here in the United States.
“It opens doors for Chinese influence operations, Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and intelligence services, so that they can get control of certain parts of the U.S.,” Nyquist explains.
The problem of fentanyl has gotten so bad that the Department of Homeland Security even considered labeling it a “weapon of mass destruction” this past spring. According to a leaked internal memo, DHS has “long regarded” fentanyl as a potential “chemical weapons threat.” According to reports, the memo also said that fentanyl would be considered a WMD “when certain conditions are met.”
Per the memo, federal authorities believe that the high toxicity and increased availability of the drug make it “attractive” to potential enemies who might be looking for an “unconventional” approach to war. Fentanyl is an incredibly powerful drug; it is 50 times more powerful than heroin and 100 times more powerful than morphine.
Officials say just two to three milligrams of the stuff is enough to induce respiratory depression, respiratory arrest or even death. In other words, this stuff is no joke.
President Trump has repeatedly criticized the Chinese government for not doing enough to stop fentanyl from flowing into the United States. Last year, the president signed bipartisan legislation intended to help combat the opioid epidemic. Unfortunately, it appears that fentanyl is still being sent to the United States from China through ordinary mail carriers such as the United States Post Office, FedEx and Amazon. The Trump administration is reportedly trying to keep fentanyl and its precursor chemicals from being circulated through the mail and is working to crack down on Chinese fentanyl.
Learn more about the dangers of opioids and more at Opioids.news.
Sources for this article include:
After President Trump’s recent disappointment at China’s lack of progress in stalling fentanyl exports to the US, increasingly outspoken anti-China activist Kyle Bass is highlighting the potential return of ‘Opium Wars’ as an intentional attack on Americans.
“The Opium Wars, beginning in the late 18th century, took China from the world’s largest economy to less than half afterwards. China is using [the same] asymmetric chemical warfare against the United States.
We lost 2,977 lives (net of the 19 hijackers who don’t matter) in the Sept 11th attacks. We now lose 50,000 people per year to opioid overdoses. That’s almost 7 deaths per hour every day every year. China is responsible for 90% of fentanyl coming into our country.
Chinese killing of US citizens through fentanyl exports is the functional equivalent of more than 10 Sept 11th attacks each year. When will our entire government realize that china’s communist party is our mortal enemy? When will we disengage with the murderous regime?“
And, as The Epoch Times’ Bowen Xiao details, behind the deadly opioid epidemic ravaging communities across the United States lies a carefully planned strategy by a hostile foreign power that experts describe as a “form of chemical warfare.”
It involves the production and trafficking of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that caused the deaths of more than 32,000 Americans in 2018 alone, and fentanyl-related substances.
China is the “largest source” of illicit fentanyl in the United States, a November 2018 report by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated. That same commission said that since its 2017 report, they found no “substantive curtailment” of fentanyl flows from China to the United States. They also noted that in “large part, these flows persist due to weak regulations governing pharmaceutical and chemical production in China.”
President Donald Trump has continued to increase his crackdown on fentanyl—he recently ordered all U.S. carriers to “search for and refuse” international mail deliveries of the synthetic opioid pain reliever. Trump specifically named FedEx, Amazon, UPS, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).
Jeff Nyquist, an author and researcher of Chinese and Russian strategy, said China is using fentanyl as a “very effective tool.”
“You could call it a form of chemical warfare,” Nyquist told The Epoch Times.
“It opens up a number of opportunities for the penetration of the country, both in terms of laundering money and in terms of blackmail against those who participate in the trade and become corrupt like law enforcement, intelligence, and government officials.”
China also uses the money generated by the importing of fentanyl to effectively “influence political parties,” according to Nyquist.
“It opens doors for Chinese influence operations, Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and intelligence services, so that they can get control of certain parts of the U.S.,” he said.
In August, Trump called out Chinese leader Xi Jinping, accusing him of not doing enough to stop the flow of fentanyl, which enters the United States mostly via international mail.
Liu Yuejin, vice commissioner of the China National Narcotics Control Commission, disputed Trump’s criticism, telling reporters on Sept. 3 that they had started going after illicit fentanyl production, according to state-controlled media. China also denies that most of the illicit fentanyl entering the United States originates in China.
“President Xi said this would stop—it didn’t,” Trump said on Twitter on Aug. 23.
Overdose deaths from synthetic opioids such as fentanyl surged from around 29,000 in 2017 to more than 32,000 in 2018, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Not all opioid-related deaths in the United States can be blamed on China’s fentanyl export policies, as some come from prescription overdoses, according to Dr. Robert J. Bunker, an adjunct research professor at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.
But Bunker told The Epoch Times that China is still “greatly contributing” to America’s opioid epidemic. Bunker described how Beijing is using the trafficking of dangerous drugs to achieve its greater Communist Party goals.
“Contributing to a major health crisis in the U.S., while simultaneously profiting from it would in my mind give long-term CCP plans to establish an authoritarian Chinese global system as a challenge to Western liberal democracy,” he said via email.
“[It’s] a win-win situation for the regime,” he continued. “In fact producing and sending fentanyl to the U.S., which could be considered a low-risk policy of ‘drug warfare,’ is very much in line with the means and methods advocated in the 1999 work ‘Unrestricted Warfare.’”
The book mentioned by Bunker is authored by two of China’s air force colonels, Qiao Liang, and Wang Xiangsui, and published by the People’s Liberation Army.
Local police, fire department, and deputy sheriffs help a man who is overdosing in the Drexel neighborhood of Dayton, Ohio, on Aug. 3, 2017. It’s unclear what he overdosed on. (Benjamin Chasteen/The Epoch Times)
Recent cases of fentanyl-related overdose and deaths are linked to “illegally made fentanyl,” the CDC has said. Fentanyl has been approved for treating severe pain for conditions such as late-stage cancer. Fentanyl is 50 times more potent than heroin and 100 times more potent than morphine. It is prescribed by doctors through transdermal patches or lozenges.
A USPS spokesman told The Epoch Times they are “aggressively working” to add in provisions from the STOP Act. The Synthetics Trafficking and Overdose Prevention legislation, signed in 2018 by Trump, aims to curb the flow of opioids sent through the mail while increasing coordination between USPS and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
USPS has notified China’s postal operations that if any of their shipments don’t contain Advance Electronic Data (AED), they “may be returned at any time,” the spokesman said via email. CBP is also notifying air and ocean carriers to confirm that 100 percent of their postal shipment containers have AED before loading them onto their conveyance.
In August, law enforcement seized 30 kilograms (around 66 pounds) of fentanyl, among other narcotics as part of a major arrest operation over the course of three days. As a result, officers arrested 35 suspects for “conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute large amounts of heroin, fentanyl, cocaine, and cocaine base.”
G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement that the amount of fentanyl seized was enough to “kill over 14 million people.” One of the suspects in Virginia had ordered the fentanyl from a vendor in Shanghai and was receiving it at his residence through USPS, according to the indictment.
“The last thing we want is for the U.S. Postal Service to become the nation’s largest drug dealer, and there are people way above my pay grade working on that, but absolutely, it’s about putting pressure on the Chinese,” Terwilliger said.
CBP Enforcement Statistics reveal that fiscal year seizures of illicit fentanyl spiked from about one kilogram (2.2 pounds) in 2013 to nearly 1,000 kilograms (2,200 pounds) in 2018. The number of law enforcement fentanyl seizures in the United States also vaulted from about 1,000 in 2013 to more than 59,000 in 2017.
Also, in August, the Mexican navy found 52,000 pounds of fentanyl powder in a container from a Danish ship that was coming from Shanghai. The navy intercepted the unloaded 40-foot container on Aug. 24, at the Port of Cardenas.
“There is clear evidence that fentanyl or fentanyl precursors, chemicals used to make fentanyl is coming from China,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, told The Epoch Times.
A fatal dose of fentanyl displayed next to a penny. (DEA)
Two commonly used fentanyl precursors are chemicals called NPP and 4-ANPP. In early 2017, journalist Ben Westhoff started researching the chemicals, finding many advertisements for them all over the internet from different companies. He later determined a majority of those companies were under a Chinese chemical company called Yuancheng, according to an excerpt from his upcoming book “Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic,” an excerpt of which was published in The Atlantic.
One of the concerns related to the production of illicit opioids is the creation of fentanyl analogs, products that are similar to fentanyl and also simple to make.
“You can very easily manipulate the molecule and create a new fentanyl-like product that hasn’t been banned, that’s not technically illegal,” Kolodny told The Epoch Times.
“Some of the manufacturers, the folks creating the drugs, are aware of that.”
“We saw this with other synthetic drugs that are abused in the U.S., when law enforcement make the drug illegal or when they ban the molecule,” he said. “In some cases, fentanyl analogs are even stronger than fentanyl. There’s an analog called carfentanil, which is even more potent than fentanyl.”
Carfentanil has a quantitative potency “approximately 10,000 times that of morphine and 100 times that of fentanyl,” according to the National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Just one microgram is needed for carfentanil to affect a human. The drug is “one of the most potent opioids known” and is marketed under the trade name Wildnil “as a general anesthetic agent for large animals.”
“Sometimes, it’s hard for law enforcement to keep up with the chemist,” Kolodny added.
A bill dubbed the SOFA Act or the “Stopping Overdoses of Fentanyl Analogues Act,” has yet to pass Congress. The act was introduced in May by Republican senators and would give law enforcement “enhanced tools to combat the opioid epidemic and close a loophole in current law that makes it difficult to prosecute crimes involving some synthetic opioids.”
Kolodny said pharmaceutical industries have been lobbying to stop any legislation meant to restrict fentanyl analogs “because these are products they are trying to bring to market.”
In August, an Oklahoma judge ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $572.1 million to the state for deceitfully marketing addictive opioids. The sum was less than what investors had expected, according to Reuters, which resulted in shares of the multinational corporation rising in value.
“We should be doing everything we can to keep fentanyl out of the country,” Kolodny said. “We should be doing everything we can to ban fentanyl analogs.”
As part of the Trump administration’s latest efforts to combat the opioid crisis, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on Sept. 4 announced nearly $2 billion in funding to states.
The funding would expand access to treatment and also support near-real-time data on the drug overdose crisis, according to a release.
In announcing the move, White House counsel Kellyanne Conway told reporters in a conference call that their administration is trying to interject the word “fentanyl” into the “everyday lexicon” as part of their efforts to increase awareness.
Data suggests that of the approximately 2 million Americans suffering from opioid use disorder, approximately 1.27 million of them are now receiving medication-assisted treatment, according to the HHS.
“Central to our effort to stop the flood of fentanyl and other illicit drugs is our unprecedented support for law enforcement and their interdiction efforts,” she said.
Conway then brought up the DHS seizures of fentanyl in 2018, which totaled an equivalent of 1.2 billion lethal doses.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that is enough to have killed every American four times,” she told reporters.
Just weeks ago, the White House released a series of private-sector advisories aimed to help businesses protect themselves and their supply chains from inadvertently trafficking fentanyl and synthetic opioids.
The four advisories aim to stem the production and sale of illicit fentanyl, fentanyl analogs, and other synthetic opioids. The advisories focus on the manufacturing, marketing, movement, and monetary aspects of illicit fentanyl.
In March 2018, the Interior Department created a task force aimed to specifically combat the crisis on tribal lands. Since then, the department has arrested more than 422 individuals and seized 4,000 pounds of illegal drugs worth $12 million on the street, including more than 35,000 fentanyl pills.
Conway, on the conference call, described the epidemic of pain relievers as an “opioid and fentanyl crisis.”
Where I live, BC, Canada, population under 4 million, we are losing approximately 120 per month because of creeps like this who chose profits over people.
“According to reports, the federal government has found the billionaire pharma executive, along with four of his co-defendants, guilty of illegally paying off doctors to prescribe opioid pharmaceuticals such as fentanyl, which directly contributed to the current opioid epidemic.”
by: Ethan Huff
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
According to reports, the federal government has found the billionaire pharma executive, along with four of his co-defendants, guilty of illegally paying off doctors to prescribe opioid pharmaceuticals such as fentanyl, which directly contributed to the current opioid epidemic.
In declaring Kapoor guilty of this crime, federal prosecutors sent a clear message that drug companies will no longer be getting away with conspiring to illicitly distribute dangerous and highly addictive opioids that are harming and killing Americans.
“Today’s convictions mark the first successful prosecution of top pharmaceutical executives for crimes related to the illicit marketing and prescribing of opioids,” indicated United States Attorney Andrew E. Lelling in a statement.
“Just as we would street-level drug dealers, we will hold pharmaceutical executives responsible for fueling the opioid epidemic by recklessly and illegally distributing these drugs, especially while conspiring to commit racketeering along the way.”
Because it’s rare for the federal government to pursue corporate executives like this using criminal charges, the case is said to set a new precedent for justice, particularly as it pertains to the activities of Big Pharma.
“This is a landmark decision that vindicated the public’s interest in staunching the flow of opioids into our homes and streets,” Lelling went on to say.
According to Brad Bailey, a criminal defense attorney from Boston and a former federal prosecutor who’s been following the case, the 10-week trial and the way it proceeded is incredibly rare.
“That’s always unusual. That’s always an attention grabber,” Bailey indicated about the decision by the Feds to go after Kapoor and his co-defendants with racketeering charges.
“The big issue is the use of racketeering charges, which had been originally designed to go after the Mafia,” he added, noting that the federal government has basically determined that what took place at Insys was organized crime.
And Insys certainly isn’t a lone target, as what was uncovered about the company during the trial mirrors what many other pharmaceutical companies are also doing to push the sale of opioids and many other drugs.
The court’s determination here was that Kapoor knowingly put the lives of patients at risk in order to increase his company’s bottom line, as well as his own personal bank account. According to the ruling, the scheme involved both bribing doctors and lying to insurance companies in order to extract maximum profits.
Insys under Kapoor reportedly targeted doctors “with a track record of liberally prescribing opioids,” and invited them “to participate in a ‘speakers program.’” Even if nobody showed up at these lectures, the doctors were paid “handsomely,” according to reports, just so long as they continued to prescribe as many opioids to their patients as possible.
Prosecutors say that many of these patients didn’t even need opioids, but that didn’t matter: As long as they were being prescribed, and Insys was making money, then nobody batted an eye.
Insys even went so far as to set up a call center where employees from the company pretended to work for doctors’ offices. These fake personas would make up diagnoses that they would then relay over the phone to insurance companies, ensuring that Insys was reimbursed for the cost of its prescribed opioids, which reports indicate “can cost tens of thousands of dollars a month.”
“We need to think much more deeply about how we regulate the pharmaceutical industry and how we prevent these kinds of practices from occurring in the first place,” contends Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University.
Sources for this article include:
A week rarely passes without the publication of a major study documenting the misery unleashed on Americans by the US pharmaceutical industry and its rapacious drive for profits.
Source: US studies: More misery brought to you by Big Pharma – World Socialist Web Site
A week rarely passes without the publication of a major study documenting the misery unleashed on Americans by the US pharmaceutical industry and its rapacious drive for profits.
Earlier this month a study analyzing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data found that more than 150,000 Americans died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicide in 2017, the highest number ever recorded.
The biggest factor in this shocking number of “deaths of despair” were drug overdoses, in particular from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. While illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related drugs are now responsible for increasing numbers of deadly overdoses, blame for the rising rates of opioid addiction lies with Big Pharma, which has flooded neighborhoods across the country with prescription opioids, fully aware of their addictive and potentially deadly properties.
A Boston trial beginning in January heard testimony of how Insys Therapeutics executives pushed prescription narcotics through bribing doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl nasal spray.
Also in January, portions made public of a lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts allege that one of the founders of Purdue Pharma, who developed OxyContin, said in 1996 on the debut of the opioid painkiller that it would “be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.” Dr. Richard Sackler, whose family developed OxyContin, wrote at the time that they would push the drug by vilifying its addicted victims. “They are the culprits and the problem,” the email read. “They are reckless criminals.”
A study released Thursday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) provided more grim detail on overdose deaths from fentanyl. In 2011–2012, fentanyl was involved in roughly 1,600 overdose deaths in the US in both years. From 2012 through 2014, fentanyl-related deaths more than doubled each year. By 2016, deaths attributed to fentanyl had skyrocketed to more than 18,335, a tenfold increase over 2011–2012 .
While researchers found exponential increases in fatal fentanyl overdoses among all age groups, the largest average annual percent change occurred among young adults aged 25–34 and 15–24. Men are dying from opioid overdoses at nearly three times the rate of women. Overdose deaths are also increasing faster among blacks and Latinos.
Fentanyl can be 50 times more powerful than heroin. It can shut down breathing in less than a minute. It is more likely to cause an overdose than heroin due to its potency and also because the high fades more quickly than with heroin, which means drug users may inject it more frequently, increasing the risk of overdose.
The New England states—Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont—saw the largest increase in fentanyl overdose deaths, with a 1 02.2 percent increase per year from 2011 to 2016. This compares to the region comprising Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada, which saw a very small annual increase. Although researchers had no firm explanation for these geographical disparities, one theory is that it is easier to mix a few white fentanyl crystals into the powdered form of heroin that is more popular in the eastern part of the country.
Published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine was a study that found that certain medications used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in teens and young adults may be more likely to cause psychosis, including symptoms such as paranoia, hallucinations, delusions and hearing voices.
Researchers found that patients ages 13 to 25 who had been newly prescribed amphetamines, such as Adderall and Vyvanse were more likely to develop psychosis than those prescribed methylphenidates, such as Ritalin and Concerta.
The rate of psychosis with either class of medications is relatively rare, occurring in one in 660, according to researchers. However, the CDC estimates that 11 percent of US children ages 4 to 17 are diagnosed with ADHD, making the potential pool of patients very large. While the study’s findings only showed the relationship between newly prescribed medications and psychosis, with over 3.5 million children currently taking an ADHD drug, this still amounts to tens of thousands of patients at risk each year.
According to data from IMS Health, US prescriptions to treat ADHD rose from 67.4 million in 2010 to 87.5 million in 2015. Sales of ADHD medications rose from $7.9 billion to $11.2 billion during this same period, a more than 40 percent increase.
Doctors are also prescribing these medications off-label for those who don’t have an ADHD diagnosis. Nonmedical use of ADHD medications on college campuses is exploding, with students obtaining the drugs from friends or family with a prescription, by obtaining a prescription by claiming to have ADHD, or from classmates selling their own prescriptions.
In these cases, the companies selling the drugs—including Shire and Teva—are profiting off of the use of “study drugs” on campuses across the country. Students dealing with the scramble for grades under the pressure of student debt, working in addition to studying, and competing for dwindling job opportunities upon graduation, are using the drugs to help them pull all-nighters to ace exams.
The drug companies are always striving to increase the appeal of their products, through consumer targeted advertising and other means. In 2016, the FDA approved Adzenys, a fruity-flavored film from Neos Therapeutics that dissolves in the mouth. The portability, convenience and tasty delivery increase the risk of abuse of the potentially addictive drug, not to mention the danger of psychosis documented in the study published in NEJM.
An NCHC Data Brief published in the center’s March 2019 edition examined the strategies used by adults aged 18-64 to reduce the costs of prescription medications. In 2017, those who were uninsured were far more likely to take measures to cut costs than those with either private insurance or Medicaid.
To reduce the burden of skyrocketing drug prices, the uninsured asked their doctors to prescribe a cheaper medication, used “alternative therapies” to manage their conditions, or did not take their medication as prescribed. More than 33 percent of uninsured adults did not take their medications as prescribed by their doctor, by either leaving their prescription unfilled, dividing doses or spreading them out.
Those living under 400 percent of the poverty line—about $65,000 for a two-person household—are much more likely to be uninsured. With 12 percent of adults aged 18-64 uninsured, millions of Americans are forgoing prescription drugs due to cost, endangering their health and, potentially, their lives. This is but another demonstration of the incompatibility of the for-profit health system in the US, which places the cash hoards of Big Pharma executives over the well-being of the population, particularly its most vulnerable.
Source: Chinese Fetanyl Kingpins Laundered Over $5BN Through Vancouver Homes Since 2012 | Zero Hedge
A new “secret” police study has found that Chinese crime networks could have laundered over $1B through Vancouver homes in 2016 alone, and that a surge in the city’s home prices are simultaneously tied to a surge in opioid deaths.
The report examined over 1,200 luxury real estate purchases in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland during that year, and concluded that over 10% were tied to buyers with criminal records. Crucially 95% of those transactions could be definitively traced by police intelligence back to Chinese crime networks.
While the study only looked at property purchases in 2016, an analysis by Global News suggests the same extended crime network may have laundered about $5-billion in Vancouver-area homes since 2012. — Fentanyl: Making a Killing
Since 2016 we’ve chronicled the “dark side” behind the Vancouver real estate bubble, which it turns out has long been a bubbling melange of criminal Chinese oligarch “hot money”, desperate to get parked offshore in any piece of real estate, but mostly in British Columbia regardless of price.
A number of investigations have since uncovered extensive links – including money laundering and underground banking – between China’s criminal underworld and British Columbia drug and casino cash and VIPs, as well as their connections to China, Macau and the notorious triads. These investigations have found much of the B.C. real estate bubble can be explained as nothing more than the “layering” and “integration” aspect of a giant money laundering scheme involving billions of dollars of Chinese hot money and the criminals behind it.
On Monday the new bombshell study revealed just how extensive and growing this Chinese underworld racket remains and how it continues to impact average citizens and regular home buyers, as well as fueling the continuing opioid crisis across the US and Canada, which has claimed tens of thousands of lives across North America, including nearly 4,000 Canadians in 2017 alone. The figures are so stunning that what is “known” years after the story first came to light could merely be the tip of the iceberg.
The study published by Canada’s Global News begins by painting a disturbing scenario that suggests some of Vancouver’s priciest homes are nothing more than a new “Swiss bank account” of sorts providing the promise of an anonymous store of value and retaining the cash equivalent value of the original capital outflow from initial criminal transactions overseen for Chinese crime syndicates — all the while fueling Metro Vancouver’s housing affordability crisis.
The ultimate end result of the sophisticated and massive money laundering scheme is that middle-class families have been priced out of the city, per the report:
The stately $17-million mansion owned by a suspected fentanyl importer is at the end of a gated driveway on one of the priciest streets in Shaughnessy, Vancouver’s most exclusive neighbourhood.
A block away is a $22-million gabled manor that police have linked to a high-stakes gambler and property developer with suspected ties to the Chinese police services.
Both mansions appear on a list of more than $1-billion worth of Vancouver-area property transactions in 2016 that a confidential police intelligence study has linked to Chinese organized crime.
Better to bring the troops home on our terms than wait for a debt crisis to do it for us…
Previous investigations had quoted concerned residents describing that: “Vancouver seems to be evolving from a residential city into almost like a lockbox for money… but I have to live among the empty houses. I’m a resident, not just an investor.”
The snapshot that the new police study provides is based on analysis of a sample of about 1,200 high-end sales in 2016. Investigators cross-referenced databases of criminal records and confidential police intelligence with those high-end property records, which revealed the shocking 10% organized crime ties figure.
But the implications for prior years going all the way back to the early 2000’s and even into the 1990’s, when Canadian police believe the current kingpins of fentanyl — which is the powerful and extremely addictive narcotic added to heroin to increase its potency (said to be 100 times more potent than morphine) — began to dominate Canada’s heroin markets, are equally as startling.
For starters, the report finds, fentanyl-related money laundering which funnels illicit funds through the luxury housing market has been so pervasive that researchers “didn’t have the time or resources to study the over 20,000 transactions”. During the course of these some 20,000 transactions home prices in Vancouver have tripled since 2005.
From the new “Fentanyl: Making a Killing” extensive report
And further illustrating just how extensive the whole scheme remains, there is this bombshell section from the report:
While the study only looked at property purchases in 2016, an analysis by Global News suggests the same extended crime network may have laundered about $5-billion in Vancouver-area homes since 2012.
At the centre of the money laundering ring is a powerful China-based gang called the Big Circle Boys. Its top level “kingpins” are the international drug traffickers who are profiting most from Canada’s deadly fentanyl crisis.
The crime network, according to police intelligence sources, is a fluid coalition of hundreds of wealthy criminals in Metro Vancouver, including gangsters, industrialists, financial fugitives and corrupt officials from China.
The report is so full of specific examples of multi-tens of million dollar homes that are actually money laundering conduits for fentanyl drug kingpins that it puts President Trump’s recent accusations against China for fueling the opioid crisis into fresh perspective.
https://globalnews.ca/video/embed/4696563/
At that time Trump attempted to lay out the case that Chinese suppliers had been fueling America’s opioid crisis, saying in part “It is outrageous that Poisonous Synthetic Heroin Fentanyl comes pouring into the U.S. Postal System from China.”
However judging by breadth and depth of figures merely from one major North American city (some American cities have been named in other investigations), it appears that Trump’s words actually understated the role of China and Chinese organized crime, of which it appears Beijing authorities have long been only too happy to look the other way while it takes deep roots on the American continent.
After all we can’t imagine China’s all-pervasive advanced surveillance systems and powerful domestic intelligence apparatus could miss this: “Police say that almost every drug seizure they now make in Vancouver turns up some form of synthetic opioid produced at factories in China,” according to the report.
A burly man wearing a clown mask walks into a pharmacy. Brandishing a large knife, he heads straight for the dispensing counter and hands the pharmacist a note.
The pharmacist, Waseem Shaheen, opens the narcotics safe and fills a white garbage bag with fentanyl patches while the impatient robber waves his knife threateningly.
Jan 18, 2018
The Drug Enforcement Administration has just recently approved Syndros, a cannabis based medication developed by Insys Therapeutics, a pharmaceutical company.
Syndros is a synthetic formulation of THC. It is used to treat nausea and vomiting, two of the most common symptoms of chemotherapy. The drug was pre-approved by the FDA last summer as a treatment for nausea, vomiting, and weightloss in cancer and AIDS patients. The DEA approval places Syndros and its generic formulations in Schedule II of the Controlled Substance Act, indicating a “high potential for abuse”. Other Schedule II drugs include cocaine, morphine, and many prescription painkillers.
Insys donated $500,000 last September to help defeat Arizona’s cannabis legalization campaign. Yet now the company has received DEA approval for its own cannabis based drug. During the campaign, the company claimed to oppose the legalization measure because it would fail to protect the safety of Arizona’s citizens and children. Now, non-medical cannabis users in Arizona must still face felony charges for possessing even small amounts of the plant.
While Insys may insist that safety is their biggest concern, their aggressive marketing strategies for Subsys, a medication containing fentanyl, a dangerously powerful and addictive opiate that can be 50-100 times more powerful than Morphine, say otherwise.
It seems like the company is actually attempting to kill a non-pharmaceutical market for marijuana in order to fill their own pockets. Not actually considering the health and wellbeing of humankind.
It seems clear that in a world where everyone could cultivate and use their own medicine, giant pharma companies such as Insys would inevitably lose a lot of revenue.
With more and more Americans succumbing to prescription opiate overdoses each year, there remains to be zero recorded deaths contributed to other-consumption of cannabis.
Ariana Marisol is a contributing staff writer for REALfarmacy.com. She is an avid nature enthusiast, gardener, photographer, writer, hiker, dreamer, and lover of all things sustainable, wild, and free. Ariana strives to bring people closer to their true source, Mother Nature. She graduated The Evergreen State College with an undergraduate degree focusing on Sustainable Design and Environmental Science.
By Robyn Urback
Posted: Nov 24, 2017
The majestically dumb comments Conservative MP Peter Kent made about marijuana earlier this week suggest that the Tories’ re-branding efforts are not going particularly smoothly. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
In many ways, it’s much more fun to serve as Official Opposition than in cabinet. You can feign outrage over omnibus bills, since you are no longer in the position of writing them.
You can scold ministers for resorting to pre-programmed talking points in question period, having finally been freed from the obligation of reciting your own. And you can attack the government’s lack of transparency, having emerged from the protective fortress that insulated you from all sorts of opposition attacks for the better part of a decade.
Sure, you might spend your evenings crying into a bottle of scotch, wondering when exactly you became everything you once despised, but when the sun comes up that shame disappears — replaced with a roughly two-year-old sense of righteousness.
It’s not all fun, though. At some point, you need to move beyond being a party defined simply by being in opposition. This is particularly important when you’re in that post-electoral-defeat soul-searching period, when you’re trying to figure out how this “new” party distinguishes itself from the old.
The majestically dumb comments Conservative MP Peter Kent made about marijuana earlier this week, however, suggest that the Tories’ re-branding efforts are not going particularly smoothly.
During debate over Bill C-45, the Liberals’ pot legislation, Kent suggested that growing marijuana at a home where children could ostensibly get at it is “virtually the same as putting fentanyl on a shelf within reach of kids.”
“Having plants in the home, it’s just as wacky, it’s just as unacceptable, it’s just as dangerous for Canadian society,” he added.
That is wrong, obviously: fentanyl is 10 times more potent than morphine, and opioid-related deaths have exploded in Canada. Marijuana, on the other hand, makes you feel funny.
It is true that some people do weird things under the influence, but most just end up eating too much and creating depressions in their couch cushions.
Kent clarified that he understands the chemical distinction between marijuana and fentanyl in a subsequent interview with Vice News, saying, “I’m quite aware that cannabis is not the equivalent in terms of its deadly opioid content.”
Then he added: “THC, if kids consumed one way or the other, deliberately or accidentally or as a joke, and became intoxicated, they’re just as at risk at home or on the street as they would be — the outcome could be just as deadly.”
If I’m following correctly, Kent is saying that it is just as deadly to be dead from a marijuana-related accident than it is to be dead by a fentanyl overdose. Which I suppose is true.
Kent, I am certain, must know how ridiculous this sounds. After all, the last Conservative MP to make such outlandish rhetorical flourishes about marijuana — Julian Fantino, who compared weed to murder — went on to head a medical marijuana company.
The best-case scenario here is that Kent is clumsily trying to appeal to the roughly one-third of Canadians who have reservations about legalized marijuana (and the worst-case scenario is that he truly thinks this all sounds reasonable).
The Conservatives have long taken very weird, hyperbolic positions when it comes to marijuana.
In 2015, when the Supreme Court ruled that medical marijuana users could consume pot in ways other than smoking it — thus allowing for oils, teas, consumables, etc. — Health Minister Rona Ambrose said she was “outraged” by the ruling.
Previous federal regulations only allowed for medical marijuana to be sold dried, meaning that lung cancer sufferers and children with epilepsy, for example, basically had to smoke weed if they wanted medical marijuana relief. The Supreme Court, sensibly, recognized that six-year-olds who depended on cannabis to control their seizures should not be smoking joints. The health minister, apparently, did not (or at least, she did not publicly).
In 2015, the Supreme Court struck down the regulation that medical marijuana be sold dried. (CBC)
The Tories, it would seem, have progressed roughly not at all since then.
Which, on the one hand, is fine: if the Conservatives want to double down on social conservatism — at least as it relates to marijuana — all the power to them.
The problem is that, with his comments, Kent has presented them as socially conservative without a clue.
Ah, well. Where’s that scotch?
theconversation.com
Research Associate at the BC Centre on Substance Use and Doctoral Candidate in Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia
Nov 19, 2017
In the United States, President Donald Trump has formally declared the opioid overdose crisis to be a national public health emergency. The numbers he cited speak for themselves: More than 64,000 Americans died from opioid overdose last year, which translates to more than 175 per day, or almost seven every hour.
The situation in Canada is just as devastating, with opioid overdoses estimated to cause at least 16 hospitalizations and eight deaths each day.
This did not happen overnight. The number of opioid overdose deaths has risen at an alarming rate since the early 2000s. Now, more than a decade later, communities, health professionals and some politicians such as NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, are still pushing for a national health emergency to be declared here in Canada as well.
By declaring a national public welfare emergency, the federal government could both acknowledge the scale of the opioid overdose crisis and unlock funds critical to a successful response.
Such a move would not be without precedent.
We should have learned by now, from past health crises that have affected our entire nation.
When 44 deaths were caused by SARS in Canada in 2003, the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health urged the Government of Canada to “consider incorporating in legislation a mechanism for dealing with health emergencies” — one that “would be activated in lockstep with provincial emergency acts in the event of a pan-Canadian health emergency.”
Read more: Solutions to Canada’s opioid crisis
In 2009, when 428 deaths were caused by the H1N1 flu virus in Canada, an Emergency Operations Centre was mobilized 24 hours a day, seven days a week for several weeks. This provided more than 6,000 person-days of manpower to help coordinate emergency responses across the country.
In comparison, only 113 person-days of assistance for the opioid crisis have been reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada — to help write reports in two jurisdictions last year — despite more than 2,800 deaths from opioid overdoses in 2016 alone.
The federal government has already implemented important measures, such as improving access to life-saving treatments and approving supervised injection sites across the country.
However, there is still much more that can be done.
For instance, Statistics Canada is mandated to produce statistics on the health of Canadians. Unfortunately, the latest available data on painkiller misuse was released in 2012 (via the Canadian Community Health Survey – Mental Health) and no updated version has been collected since. Scientists across the country are eager to help, but may not have the resources to do so.
Providing national public data repositories would allow researchers across the country to help determine overdose trends, high-risk sub-populations and other important information that could inform national policy decisions and target health responses where they are most urgently needed.
The federal government also has the power to determine which areas of research should be given priority in funding. New initiatives such as the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse are an important step forward for guiding evidence-based treatments for substance-use disorders.
Priority funding pools could also be set aside to encourage research, education and clinical care targeted toward finding safer pain management approaches — a serious problem that exists for much of the opioid-using population. Currently, there is a concerning lack of evidence-based alternative treatments for chronic pain patients whose opioid prescriptions are being cut off.
Finally, empowering the health-care workforce to help address the opioid epidemic is essential.
In the United States, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) play an important role. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act signed by President Obama on July 22, 2016, authorizes qualified NPs and PAs to prescribe medications for patients with Opioid Use Disorder. This provides more than 86,000 extra people who could be eligible to help prescribe life-saving addiction treatments, in addition to physicians.
In Canada, there is not enough recognition of the potential role for nurses and other allied health professionals to help. Allocating funding for more training and staffing for these skilled professionals would promote an “all hands on deck” approach to assessing and treating pain and addiction, administering overdose-reversing interventions, assisting with urgent clinical research and educating and supporting affected communities.
If Canada were to declare a public welfare emergency, more health centres with skilled staff performing these essential roles could be immediately mobilized to help curb the opioid epidemic.
It’s time to recognize the opioid overdose crisis as the national public health emergency that it is.
Insite in Vancouver was the first city in North America to open a supervised injection site nearly 15 years ago. Now there are 22 sites approved in Canada. (Darryl Dyck/CP file photo)
In the space of two years, the number of supervised consumption sites approved to operate in Canada has gone from one to 22, plus three interim sites.
In November 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s new Liberal government was sworn in, there was only Vancouver’s Insite.
Health Canada has now granted approval to two dozen new sites in 11 cities. There are permanent or mobile facilities approved for Victoria, Surrey, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Another five applications are pending.
That simple count alone might suggest that the debate over supervised consumption sites, or at least the most pitched and divisive version of that debate, is rapidly receding into the past.
There also appears to be a difference of tone in the partisan discussion.
Interviewed by CBC News in British Columbia earlier this year, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer ranged from being somewhat critical to unenthusiastic about such facilities. And while his comments this week to the Globe and Mail fall short of a full endorsement for such facilities, there does seem to be something like openness.
“My message to people in British Columbia and Vancouver is a sincere desire to find policy that works, balancing the legitimate and proper concerns of families and individuals who have real concerns about [supervised consumption] in their community with the need to save lives, the recognition that addicts are in a type of place where they will do what they can to get their hands on narcotics and take them,” Scheer said.
Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer might not be enthusiastic about supervised consumption sites, but his criticism this week was not strident. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)
Liberals still jumped on Scheer’s other comments about dealing with drug addiction — he suggested prosecution for drug use can move people towards rehabilitation — and Conservatives responded by alleging the Liberals are somehow planning to decriminalize all narcotics.
But perhaps there is some measure of progress here anyway.
Compare Scheer in 2017 with Tony Clement’s declaration in 2008, when he was the ruling Conservative Party’s health minister, that Vancouver’s Insite was an “abomination.”
A Supreme Court ruling kept Insite operating. But when the Conservative government tabled legislation to establish new tests and requirements for establishing a similar site, the Tories sent a note to supporters entitled, “Keep heroin out of our backyards.”
“Do you want a supervised drug consumption site in your community?” wrote Jenni Byrne, the party’s campaign manager. “I don’t want one anywhere near my home.”
In the midst of the 2015 election campaign, a Conservative note warned supporters that a Liberal or NDP government would “actually expand these injection houses to neighbourhoods like yours, all across Canada.”
Back in December 2016, Scheer was warning supporters of his leadership campaign that the Liberal government “wants to impose heroin injection facilities on neighbourhoods.”
That emphasis on public consultation is still there, outright opposition may still exist in the Conservative ranks and the party might yet return to its previous tone, but Scheer’s comments this week lacked a certain stridency.
And that lack of objection may extend beyond the Conservative Party.
“Whereas it took many, many years of advocacy and civil disobedience to establish a supervised injecting site in Vancouver, it’s become a lot less politicized, a lot less controversial and I think there are no really sane actors who are sitting around questioning whether there is a role for these initiatives anymore,” says Dr. Thomas Kerr, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who has studied Insite, noting that temporary facilities have been allowed to set up in Toronto and Ottawa.
The deadly opioid epidemic and the emergence of fentanyl have no doubt changed the context. At least 2,458 deaths in 2016 have been linked to opioid-related overdoses. And, unfortunately, it sometimes takes a widespread crisis to make change.
As such, it is possible a re-elected Conservative government would have also ended up expanding the number of supervised drug consumption sites. But the Liberal government, while rewriting Conservative legislation around such sites, has at least not hesitated.
The rapid increase in approvals may, in fact, result in Canada being a world leader in the use of supervised sites. According to a count from earlier this year, the Netherlands had 30 of the world’s 92 consumption sites, followed by Germany with 24.
In her previous role as health minister, Liberal Jane Philpott reversed a ban on the medical use of pharmaceutical grade heroin to treat some people with addictions (Conservatives loudly touted that ban in 2013, but were quiet when Philpott reversed it).. Another drug, hydromorphone, is being used in Ottawa.
Kerr says new approaches are being tested as the number of sites increases, including checking drugs for unknown contaminants.
It is tempting to wonder whether such a significant expansion of sites, which exist to save lives, reduce the spread of disease, improve public safety and encourage treatment, could invite a backlash: if improvements aren’t apparent, or surrounding neighbourhoods somehow seem to suffer.
But both Philpott and Kerr point to a different risk: that communities will think a consumption site is a solution in and of itself.
“What I might be concerned about is that I worry that people will get the message somehow that this is a panacea or a silver bullet, that it’s going to somehow magically address the really complex circumstances that we’re facing as a country in terms of the rising rates of overdose deaths,” Philpott said in an interview earlier this year. “This is one of a really broad range of tools that fall into the classic four pillar response to drug policy.”
(Those pillars being harm reduction, prevention, treatment and enforcement.)
In terms of what else can be done, Kerr is among those who believe a different system of regulation and decriminalization is best for those dealing with addictions to drugs like heroin.
“It’s really, really hard to engage people in care when society treats them like a criminal and when they have to endure all the stigma, including in health-care settings, that arises from criminalization,” Kerr says.
The Liberal government has repeatedly ruled out decriminalization of hard drugs.
If the Canadian experience is any lesson, it might be deeply controversial and loudly opposed until, all of a sudden, it isn’t.
The Deep State trafficking killer Opioids
Raw notes on my Coast to Coast AM Noory interview
November 3, 2017
For those who doubt that Big Pharma is part of the destructive Deep State, consider the following:
Since July 26, 2000, when a landmark review was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), pharmaceutical companies, their FDA partner, many members of Congress, medical schools, and doctors have been aware that approved medical drugs have been killing and maiming Americans at a disastrous rate.
These drugs, brought to you by Pharma, kill 106,000 Americans a year like clockwork. That extrapolates to over a MILLION deaths per decade.
The 2000 JAMA review was written by the late Dr. Barbara Starfield, who was a revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.
I interviewed Dr. Starfield in 2009, a year or so before her death. She confirmed several key points: the figure of 106,000 deaths was a conservative estimate; there was NO comprehensive effort by the federal government to reverse this trend; no one from the federal government had ever approached her to consult on “the situation.”
At the top of the food chain, Big Pharma executives and financiers are completely aware of what their drugs are doing.
You could call this reckless endangerment, or negligent homicide. I call it what it is: murder.
The effort to kill, maim, debilitate, and disable large sectors of the population makes that population easier to control. That IS a Deep State operation. In one way or another, it has been so since the dawn of organized society.
Now we have the opioid crisis. These medical drugs are wiping out people at an alarming rate. As I’ve written in recent articles, one of the two major pipelines for the trafficked drugs starts with the pharmaceutical manufacturers, who are intentionally distributing opioids far beyond any legitimate need.
Here are my raw notes I prepared for the Coast to Coast AM interview I did two days ago with George Noory. They tell the story in telegraphic fashion:
PURDUE PHARMA push their opioid far beyond any ethical boundary—Sackler family—$35 billion in profits from OXYCONTIN. Paid $600 million in fine. Several individuals sentenced to, wait for it, 400 hours of community service.
PURDUE guilty of lying to doctors about dangers, falsely claiming patients could stay on drug long term. Paid doctors and researchers to say the dangers of addiction were overblown. Promoted that the drug could be used for a wide range of (off-label) conditions.
INSYS PHARMA: DOJ JUST ARRESTED THE FOUNDER JOHN KAPOOR ON CHARGE OF RICO RACKETEERING—USING BRIBERY AND FRAUD TO ILLEGALLY DISTRIBUTE FENTANYL TYPE OPIOID.
EXAMPLES OF OPIODS: MORPHINE, FENTANYL, OXYCONTIN, NALAXONE, DEMEROL, HEROIN, DILAUDID, VICODIN, CODEINE, PERCODAN, PERCOSET. THESE ARE GATEWAY DRUGS INTO HEROIN WHEN A PERSON’S PILLS ARE CUT OFF.
FENTANYL 50 TIMES STRONGER THAN MORPHINE.
OVER 100 MEDICAL OPIOIDS. UNCONSCIONABLE. ONLY NEED MORPHINE AND A FEW OTHERS. PROLIFERATION OF THE DRUGS FUELED EPIDEMIC AND ADDICTION. THESE ARE THE PILLS ON THE STREETS.
KILLER STATS: 2 MILLION OPIOID ADDICTS IN THE US.
300,000 DEATHS SINCE THE YEAR 2000 IN THE US.
ROUGHLY 33 THOUSAND DEATHS PER YEAR FROM OPIOIDS.
CBS: IN 2015, 90 MILLION ADULTS IN THE US TOOK A LEGIT PRESCRIBED OPIOID. Doesn’t count illegal trafficking.
EFFECTS: DEATH FROM RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION, OVERDOSE.
Common side effects of opioid administration include sedation, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, constipation, physical dependence, tolerance, and respiratory depression. Physical dependence and addiction are clinical concerns that may prevent proper prescribing and in turn inadequate pain management.
MY INSIDER SOURCE AND WASHINGTON POST: A 2016 LAW SIGNED BY OBAMA SHACKLED DEA IN ITS EFFORTS TO CRACK DOWN ON BIG PHARMA TRAFFICKERS (That law is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, signed by President Obama on 4/9/16.)
THE OTHER MAJOR TRAFFICKING PIPELINE—FOX NEWS—CHINA UNDERGROUND LABS/DEA: “A homemade designer version of fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid which is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent, has been the center of drug busts across the country this month—with law enforcement pinpointing its origin from underground labs in China. The DEA says the China-U.S. supply is further fueling the country’s drug epidemic.”
“’This [Chinese] stuff is unbelievably potent. It is so powerful that even a tiny amount can kill you,’ DEA spokesman Rusty Payne tells FOX Business. ‘China is by far the most significant manufacturer of illicit designer synthetic drugs. There is so much manufacturing of new drugs, [it’s] amazing what is coming out of China. Hundreds of [versions], including synthetic fentanyl and fentanyl-based compounds’.”
“Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced this week details on a mail-order furanyl fentanyl smuggling ring bust. The operation had been bringing the drug — which has been dubbed ‘White China’ — into the U.S from Asia. NYPD Chief of Detective Bob Boyce said that this was the first time investigators have seen this type of fentanyl in New York City.”
“Also this week, Cincinnati Customs and Border Protection agents said they seized 83 shipments of illegal synthetic drugs, including 36 pounds of furanyl fentanyl, from China.”
The Boston Globe: “An extremely powerful drug used as an elephant tranquilizer has quickly become a new killer in the nation’s opioid epidemic, and New England authorities and health workers are bracing for its arrival.”
“The drug, carfentanil, is a synthetic opioid that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, another deadly synthetic opioid.”
“The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a nationwide alert about the drug, which its acting chief called ‘crazy dangerous.’ In Massachusetts, State Police have warned their crime lab staff about how to handle carfentanil during analysis. Even inhaling the drug or absorbing it through a cut can be fatal.”
“Law enforcement and health officials believe most users do not know they are ingesting carfentanil, which apparently is often mistakenly thought to be heroin or a mixture of heroin and fentanyl, a weaker but still lethal synthetic opioid.”
“If carfentanil’s trade route is similar to that of fentanyl, the path stretches from Chinese manufacturers to Mexican processors to smugglers who supply dealers in the United States, law enforcement officials said.”
—end of my notes—
People don’t want to admit Big Pharma trafficking operations are conscious and intentional. “Oh, they made a mistake.” “Oh, they didn’t know.” “Oh, it’s only about the money.”
When you make the drugs and sell the drugs and traffic the drugs and see the catastrophic effects, it’s not a mistake.
It’s not only about money.
At the highest levels, you want to be doing what you’re doing.
Just consult the two great British Opium Wars against China. The 19th century wars were fought to ensure a clear path for the exporting of opium into China, where millions of dead-end addicts were created. On purpose.
The idea that we now live in a kinder gentler society where the pharma barons would never intentionally do harm…that is a nothing more than a convenient fiction.
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.
Source: Why Should Taxpayers Pay for the Opioid Crisis When Pharma Caused It? | Alternet
Photo Credit: Lightspring / Shutterstock
As everyone today knows, opioid narcotics like fentanyl, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, morphine and oxycodone have created a toxic epidemic in the United States with at least 100 daily overdose deaths. This happened because Pharma paid off doctors, medical associations and federal lawmakers to loosen opioid regulations.
There was a reason narcotics were traditionally limited to severe pain cases, not “everyday” pain—they are addicting and can kill, as we are now seeing. But Pharma—especially the Sackler family’s Purdue which makes OxyContin—banked on the fact that younger doctors and patients did not remember why narcotics were so heavily restricted. They were right.
As new Pharma-driven prescribing guidelines were drafted and the industry-appeasing FDA waved new pills and patches through despite daily deaths, brazen “pill mills” and “Oxy docs” popped up, as did legions of addicts. Soon “opioid addiction” treatment clinics popped up to play the other side of the street—the addictions caused by the pill mills—further enriching Pharma.
Not only can narcotics like the popular OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and the fentanyl patch lead to coma, respiratory depression, shock, pulmonary edema and death, but studies suggest they can increase a body’s sensitivity to pain and make pain worse—a phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The drugs also cause constipation, hormonal derangement and negative mental changes.
The label on Purdue’s OxyContin says “WARNING: ADDICTION, ABUSE AND MISUSE; LIFE-THREATENING RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION; ACCIDENTAL INGESTION; NEONATAL OPIOID WITHDRAWAL SYNDROME; CYTOCHROME P450 3A4 INTERACTION; and RISKS FROM CONCOMITANT USE WITH BENZODIAZEPINES OR OTHER CNS DEPRESSANTS.”
Many opioid addicts began their downward spiral with opioid prescriptions they should never have been given for chronic pain. Unlike acute pain, chronic pain should seldom if ever be treated with opioids, but thanks to the short-term pill approach of our health care system, it usually is. The cost to society of the opioid epidemic in crime, disability, treatment of addiction and overdoses, lost wages and of course deaths has yet to be fully calculated.
“The problem is, patients are started, develop tolerance, need a higher dose, get tolerant to the higher dose, use more than prescribed, ask for early refills, get switched to a ‘pain management specialist,’ who if they violate the pain contracts, get fired, discharged, and then they go to the street for the opioids,” says James O’Donnell, a pharmacology professor at Rush University in Chicago.
The following medical case from a pharmaceutical textbook shows just how dangerous opioid drugs can be, whether derived naturally from poppies or created synthetically by chemists:
“A 35-year-old divorced male school teacher and wrestling coach in a southwestern state was seen by a sports medicine specialist. He had complained of chronic low back pain, and he had been taking hydrocodone/acetaminophen for the pain. The sports specialist was concerned about acetaminophen toxicity, and prescribed ‘low dose’ methadone, 10mg twice daily, and discontinued the hydrocodone/acetaminophen. The next day, he stayed at his parent’s home. He was very drowsy, sleeping on and off most of the day, and went to bed early. In the late morning of the third day, his mother was unable to awaken him. He was declared dead by EMS.”
Trump has announced a national public health emergency over opioids for a scourge created by Pharma. When the extent of damage from cigarettes was revealed, Big Tobacco agreed to cease advertising and to pay, in perpetuity, various states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. Like Pharma, Big Tobacco said cigarettes “weren’t addictive.”
NaturalNews.com
by: Isabelle Z.
Thursday, September 28, 2017
(Natural News) We’ve heard a lot about the crime and deaths caused by the opioid crisis, but what about the financial impact of it? Many small towns are struggling to cover the costs associated with the epidemic, whether it’s emergency calls, coroner bills, courtrooms, or overcrowded prisons.
Reuters recently examined the case of Ross County, Ohio, which has seen its budget for child services doubling from $1.3 million to $2.4 million in just five years. Three fourths of the children placed into protection there come from parents with opioid addictions; that proportion stood at just 40 percent five years ago. The county’s general fund is only $23 million to begin with, so now they are considering places they can make cuts to foot the bill, and it appears that economic development schemes and youth programs could be axed as a result.
Meanwhile, the toxicology and autopsy costs in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, have gone from $89,000 in 2010 to $165,0000 in 2016, and prosecuting crimes related to opioids and providing public defenders to the accused is sending court costs through the roof. Mercer County, West Virginia, meanwhile, expects its county jail expenses to rise by $100,000 this year, with 90 percent of the extra costs said to be related to opioids. West Virginia led the nation in the number of drug overdoses for the third year in a row in 2015.
According to a 2011 study published in Pain Medicine, healthcare costs associated with prescription opioid abuse were $25 billion, while criminal justice system expenses were $5.1 billion. Workplaces, however, had the biggest cost, with lost earnings and employment amounting to $25.6 billion. The total cost of the crisis to the economy was estimated at the time to be $55.7 billion, and it’s only growing.
Opioids – which include prescription painkillers as well as heroin and fentanyl – are 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, and they’re highly addictive. Many of those who find themselves caught up in their web started out with prescription painkillers and then moved on to drugs like heroin, and some pharmaceutical companies have been spending a lot of money encouraging doctors to prescribe these drugs through kickbacks and other incentives to create new addicts.
Their encouragements are clearly working; the National Survey of Drug Use and Health indicates that 97.5 million Americas took prescription painkillers in 2015. Opioid abuse is responsible for the deaths of more than 100 Americans each day, and drug overdose deaths have tripled since 2000.
The city of Everett, Washington is one of many launching lawsuits against the makers of opioids. Everett is suing the makers of OxyContin for their role in the epidemic after experiencing unusually high numbers of overdose deaths. They are suing Purdue for negligence, saying they placed profits over the welfare of people and caused substantial damages to the city. The company already pleaded guilty in 2007 to charges it misled patients and doctors about the drug’s addictive properties.
Meanwhile, the attorneys general from 41 states are widening their investigation into the sales and marketing practices of the opioid industry. Five Big Pharma firms have been served subpoenas requesting information as investigators seek to find out if their actions exacerbated the epidemic. It’s about time they are held accountable for their contribution to this crisis, which is bankrupting our nation city by city and state by state, prompting fears that if nothing is done, American could collapse into a narco-pharma state.
Sources include:
The City of Vancouver says more people have died from drug overdoses so far in 2017 than all of last year.
Aug 21, 2017
Two men hold up a sign at a June 8, 2016 rally in Vancouver calling for more supervised injection services to deal with a growing crisis of opioid-related overdose deaths. (Denis Dossmann/CBC)
After the Vancouver Police Department reported three deaths during the week of Aug. 7, the city says the total number of overdose deaths in the city is now estimated at 232.
Last year, the B.C. Coroners Service reported 231 fatalities for Vancouver, many involving the opioid painkiller fentanyl.
“The rising number of overdose deaths this year is horrendous and absolutely heartbreaking,” said Mayor Gregor Robertson in a press release.
“We will continue to work with the new provincial government and pour City resources into tackling this crisis. We can’t be complacent and let the number of deaths from this public health crisis be the new normal.”
First responders have handled an average of 135 overdose calls a week this year, he said.
Robertson said the decriminalization of illicit drugs and expansion of injectable treatment options — such as medical-grade heroin — must be explored, echoing a report issued last week by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
Minister of Mental Health and Addictions Judy Darcy spent Monday checking front-line addiction services in Victoria and, in a release, said the Vancouver numbers show “there are gaps in services and there is more we need to do.”
“The feedback I am getting from people working on the front lines, people who are living with addiction and important partners like the City of Vancouver is guiding actions we are taking now and will take going forward,” she is quoted as having said.
“Mayor Robertson and I met earlier this month. The city is doing remarkable work and we are committed to working closely with them and other partners to save lives and improve access to treatment and recovery.”
According to the B.C. Coroner’s Service, a total of 780 people died of a drug overdose between Jan. 1 and June 30 this year, an 88 per cent increase from the same period in 2016.
With files from The Canadian Press
NaturalNews.com
by: Rhonda Johansson
July 25, 2017
An opioid that is 50 times stronger than pure heroin (and 100 times more potent than morphine) is being over-prescribed by physicians nationwide as the delineation between medical ethics and personal gain fades even further. Fentanyl, a powerful prescription pain medication, is an entirely synthetic opioid initially meant to ease cancer patients to death. Even with its intended purpose, health regulation groups repeatedly warn of the drug’s deadly side effects and caution doctors to only prescribe it as a last resort. That being said, recent data reveals that more doctors are prescribing fentanyl to their patients, even for cases such as tonsillitis.
An explosive report on NJ.com showed that the number of fentanyl dispensed in the state since late 2011 is enough to allow every person who has died of cancer in New Jersey to fill a prescription for the drug eight times. Similarly, between 2013 and 2015, the number of fentanyl-related deaths in New Jersey rose from 42 to 417.
Nationwide awareness on the dangers of this prescription drug began last year, when pop music icon, Prince, died of a fentanyl overdose. Unlike other opioids listed under the same category (such as oxycodone, morphine, and hydrocodonne), fentanyl is highly-addictive and easier to source (the drug is supposedly a favorite in the black market trade other than it being readily available as a prescription). This has led to a worrisome trend of fentanyl-related deaths increasing nationwide. The latest Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data showed that from 2014 to 2015, fentanyl-related death shot up by around 73 percent. In the same period, deaths related to other legal prescription drugs rose by only four percent.
While controlling the illegal sale of fentanyl could prove to be challenging, what is more troubling is that licensed doctors are freely distributing the drug to their patients — seemingly without care or concern of the health risks involved. (Related: Toxic Pharma: Fentanyl overdose deaths doubled in just one year.)
In the same NJ.com expose, it was suggested that doctors are colluding with pharmaceutical companies to increase fentanyl sales. Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University has been quoted as saying, “There’s enough money going around that if you saw this in the abstract, you’d think there was a drug cartel happening.”
Reporters at the news site claim to have looked at financial records of major drug maker, INSYS Therapeutics and their fentanyl drug, Subsys (a lingual spray marketed to cancer patients to treat intense pain). It was revealed that INSYS had made numerous payments to doctors under the vague reason of “speaker programs.” These speaking engagements, according to a lawsuit filed against an employee of the company, were a ruse to influence physicians to start prescribing the drug. It had been alleged that these repeated payments to medical practitioners (which, incidentally, the doctors would bill as “educational events”) was directly linked to the number of prescriptions filled for Subsys in New Jersey, which jumped from 400 in 2012 to around 1,800 in 2013, and 3,000 in 2014. The lawsuit further claimed that if a doctor appeared hesitant to participate, they would receive bullying emails.
Apart from receiving single payments of $1,000 for each “speech” given, doctors were treated to fancy dinners in high-end restaurants. All that was asked in return was to keep prescriptions for Subsys running, according to the plaintiff.
INSYS is not the only pharmaceutical company being implicated in this disturbing phenomenon. NJ Advanced Media found in acquired pharmaceutical payout data between 2013 to 2015 that marketing companies of fentanyl released at least $1.67 million to state doctors. Broken down, it appears that dozens of New Jersey doctors each received more than $10,000 from pharmaceutical companies to prescribe fentanyl.
The Executive Director of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing, Dr. Andrew Kolodny said that pharmaceutical companies would pay off even legitimate doctors looking for advice on specific medicine with the “understanding” that such a consultation should raise prescription numbers. “It’s an indirect way of incentivizing them to prescribe the drug,” he said.
Dr. Iqbal Jafi, who used to lead the pain management program at JKF Medical Center has stated, “I’m really very much concerned. I need to see more response from the medical community, more vigilance. We are losing people. Families are losing loved ones. So I’m concerned, not for me, but for the entire United States.”
You can read more stories like this on BigPharmaNews.com.
Sources include:
Tales from the Conspiratum 
