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.
by: Kevin Hughes
https://www.naturalnews.com/2022-12-29-canada-spends-113m-covid-vaccine-campaigns.html
Thursday, December 29, 2022
Rebel News Canada chief reporter Sheila Gunn Reid slammed the Canadian government for spending over a hundred million on Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccine campaigns while allocating just over a million on opioid awareness ads.
“The federal government locked down this country and then opioid deaths spiked. And the government what did they do? They gave bad advice and then spent millions on COVID vaccine campaigns instead of opioid awareness campaigns that would have saved lives,” said Reid, the Alberta Bureau Chief for Rebel News and host of “The Gunn Show with Sheila Gunn Reid.”
Reid said opioid poisoning has become a public health catastrophe in Canada.
“And based on federal government awareness spending, I don’t think the government cares all that much. Because, frankly, they are the ones that made the opioid crisis as bad as it is, and they knew it from the very beginning of the lockdowns,” Reid pointed out. (Related: Federal government announces new plan to tackle American opioid epidemic that kills 44 people a day… yet won’t stop the FDA from approving such opioids.)
Documents acquired through a ministry inquiry indicated that $113 million was spent by Health Canada agencies on COVID and/or COVID vaccination advertising compared to just $1.5 million spent informing the public of the dangers of opioids.
Reid mentioned that Canada’s chief public health officer Theresa Tam acknowledged the rise of opioid-related deaths in a seven-tweet thread in May 2020.
The host noted that those who died of COVID-19 were already dying due to comorbidities. Opioids, on the other hand, can kill healthy and strong individuals. Government data showed that there were a total of 32,632 opioid toxicity deaths between January 2016 and June 2022 in Canada.
She added that between January and June of 2022, there were 3,556 deaths for an average of 20 deaths per day.
“In 2016, the number of opioid deaths per day was just eight. In 2018, the number of deaths per day was 12. The pandemic lockdown sent that number skyrocketing up to 20. Loneliness, despair, job loss, lockdowns, isolation, all driving people to opioids and killing them,” Reid stressed.
The Rebel News Canada chief reporter cited that males accounted for the majority of opioid deaths at 76 percent. She said that these are the very same people who take their lives because of financial strife.
“Opioids are claiming the young in the productive years of their lives. The majority of opioid poisonings are among people aged 20 to 59 and it’s mostly fentanyl killing them, which is so often trafficked into the United States and into Canada from China,” Reid said. “It has become a crisis that is killing the young, productive men in Canada and the government lockdowns have made it worse.”
The majority of fentanyl deaths in Canada were in British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario. These provinces accounted for 90 percent of all opioid deaths in the country annually.
Reid said the billions spent on the COVID vaccines that did not work and the millions spent on awareness campaigns for the jabs could have saved thousands of lives from opioids.
Follow Opioids.news for more news about the dangers posed by opioids.
Watch the video below to know why opioid poisoning is a public health catastrophe in Canada.
https://www.brighteon.com/embed/923e2a98-9d1d-4f77-ae10-4c7281789d5a
This video is from the Pool Pharmacy channel on Brighteon.com.
Alberta’s chief medical officer grilled during civil suit.
DEA: Fentanyl-laced fake prescription pills now contain potentially LETHAL dose of synthetic opioid.
Big Pharma firms paid doctors to push OPIOIDS to patients, documents show.
Sources include:
Michael Snyder
Dec 18, 2022
The largest cities in the United States are becoming cesspools of crime, drugs, violence and homelessness, and no matter what “solutions” our politicians come up with the problems just continue to get even worse. Sadly, this is even happening in the wealthiest cities in the whole country. New York City is the financial capital of the entire globe, and over the past two decades, San Francisco has been swimming in giant mountains of tech industry money. But today the streets of both cities look like something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. If things are this bad while economic conditions are still relatively stable, what will those streets look like two years from now when economic conditions are far worse?
New York City has seen some pretty rough times in the past, but the Big Apple has never had as many homeless people sleeping in shelters than it does right now…
New York City’s homeless problem does not appear to be getting any better.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, the numbers have actually hit an all-time high. They claim the average number of people sleeping in a shelter every night climbed to nearly 66,000 in October.
It is far more preferable to sleep in a shelter than it is to sleep in the streets because violence in NYC has escalated to very frightening levels…
Fatal stabbings and slashings are up an alarming 37% in the Big Apple this year.
The NYPD has logged 96 blade-involved killings so far in 2022, compared with 70 for the same period in 2021, according to department stats obtained by The Post.
Stabbings and slashings overall are up 10% in 2022, with 4,344 compared to 3,954 last year, the stats show.
Meanwhile, the downward spiral that we are witnessing in San Francisco is incredibly alarming.
I recently watched footage of what downtown San Francisco currently looks like, and afterwards, I was truly at a loss for words.
Have things really gotten this bad?
Part of the problem is that the office buildings downtown are much less occupied these days thanks to the “work at home revolution” that began during the early stages of the pandemic…
Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy, while the vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019.
Another major factor is drug addiction. Right now we are witnessing the worst drug crisis in the history of the United States, and it just keeps intensifying every year.
In fact, the number of drug overdose deaths among our teens actually “doubled from 2019 to 2021”…
Drug overdose deaths among US teens doubled from 2019 to 2021 – even as use of illicit substances declined – as fentanyl fueled a nationwide crisis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today that teenage overdoses increased 109 percent over the two years. Deaths caused by fentanyl alone increased 182 percent.
Once upon a time, the United States was such a lovely place to be.
But now our communities are degenerating into rapidly decaying hellholes and our streets are filled with violent predators.
Have you heard about a new trend called “jugging”?
From coast to coast, predators are patiently watching potential victims and they strike as “they juggle smartphones and car keys in parking lots or at home”…
A new crime trend is targeting the distracted and the elderly, with police warning about it from Alabama to California.
The big picture: Jugging involves thieves staking out unsuspecting victims at banks or retail stores before following and robbing them while they juggle smartphones and car keys in parking lots or at home.
But of course, not all predators will be satisfied with just robbing you.
When a 20-year-old pregnant woman was taken in by a 36-year-old man after being kicked out of her home, she was initially relieved to have a place to stay.
But that sense of relief didn’t last long…
A 20-year-old pregnant woman was kicked out of her house around Thanksgiving. Her luck appeared to be make a holiday rebound when a stranger offered her a warm meal and a place to stay. However, this was anything but charity.
Michael Barajas, 36, is accused of subjecting the young woman to unimaginable depravities over the course of three weeks.
It turns out that this particular predator actually had his teeth filed down into sharp points.
He literally looks like he is insane, and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson is describing him as “a monster”…
According to the Tri-County Times, Barajas has been charged with human trafficking, kidnapping, first-degree criminal sexual conduct, possession of methamphetamine, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and felony possession of a firearm.
“This guy is a monster,” said Swanson. “If you look at the teeth that are filed down and the threats of ripping out a throat, I will say no more.”
Anyone with any sense would never have gone with him.
But other predators can look completely innocent.
For example, one 33-year-old man recently thought that he was pulling over to help a woman that was in trouble on the side of the road.
But once he got out of his vehicle, two men jumped out from their hiding spots and viciously attacked him…
Shortly before 11 p.m. on Wednesday, an unnamed 33-year-old man was driving along near the intersection of Hutchinson Road and South George Washington Boulevard, a rather rural area just outside Yuba City, about 40 miles north of Sacramento, when he spotted a woman standing near a black SUV on the side of the road. She flagged the man down, indicating that she was in some kind of distress.
The man pulled over and exited his vehicle to see how he could help. However, once he left his vehicle, two seemingly armed men jumped out of the woman’s SUV. One appeared to have a gun, the other had a knife. Under threat of violence, they zip-tied the driver’s legs together and stole his wallet and car keys. The three con artists then poured gasoline all over the victim and lit him on fire before they left, driving away in their own SUV and taking the victim’s car too.
This is what our country has become.
We are rapidly evolving into a “Mad Max society”, and that is because we have rejected the values that this nation was founded upon.
And if we stay on the path that we are currently on, things are only going to get worse.
Ignoring what is happening is not going to make it go away.
Social decay is systematically eating away at the foundations of our civilization, and at this point, America’s decline is really starting to accelerate.
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:
So what does our BC Gov do? It goes after the dispensary that has been helping people suffering from pain and addictions for years. Shame on this archaic thinking government. Stop pretending you care about people. It’s always about money and control. Scum.
There has never been a time in our history when more Americans have been on drugs. According to the most recent government numbers, 24.6 million Americans have used an illegal drug within the last 30 days. Of course the number of Americans taking legal drugs is actually far, far higher. According to Bloomberg, 46 percent of all Americans have taken at least one legal pharmaceutical drug within the last 30 days. In most instances, those legal drugs have been prescribed by doctors with the intention of helping people, but sometimes legal drugs are even more addictive than illegal drugs are. In particular, opioids have destroyed countless American lives over the past decade, and in so many cases those that got addicted originally got them legally. Today, Americans consume approximately 80 percent of the total global supply of opioids, and it is a major national crisis. But even if we were able to get rid of all the opioids, we would still be the most drugged up nation on the entire planet. We have become a nation of addicts, and the self-destructive path that we are on does not have a positive ending.
Whenever I come across a story about a really crazy crime that someone has committed, it almost always involves drugs. For example, just check out this doozy from West Virginia…
A stripper has been convicted of beheading her boyfriend’s disabled Star Wars-obsessed son after having sex with him. Roena Cheryl Mills, 43, was last Thursday found guilty of the first-degree murder of 29 year-old Bo White at a house in Lerona, West Virginia, in April 2018. Mills – who has the phrase ‘special kinda crazy’ tattooed across her chest – reportedly targeted Bo after having sex with him in return for drugs.
The stronger the addiction, the more desperate addicts become to get their next fix.
And very desperate people do very desperate things.
One of the first things that you will notice when drugs start taking over an area is that crime goes way up. Addicts are always looking for a way to fund their lifestyles, and retailers all over the nation are being hit particularly hard right now.
In fact, Home Depot is specifically blaming “the opioid crisis” for the epidemic of theft that they have been witnessing…
The company said organized criminals are stealing millions of dollars’ worth of goods from it and other retailers and storing the merchandise in warehouses. The theft, which retailers call shrink, has gotten so bad that it will narrow Home Depot’s operating profit margins next year, executives said during a meeting with analysts and investors.
“This is happening everywhere in retail,” Chief Executive Officer Craig Menear said. “We think this ties to the opioid crisis, but we’re not positive about that.”
Each year, doctors issue approximately 300 million prescriptions for pain medications.
That number is way, way too high, and so many Americans end up as addicts.
There has been an effort to educate the American people about these drugs in recent years, but most of us still don’t realize how incredibly dangerous they can be.
Sadly, the number of Americans dying from opioid overdoses continues to steadily grow…
More than 61,300 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses in 2017, up from the previous year’s record of 54,800. (See the graphic.) That’s more than the number of Americans who died in the Vietnam War. And it’s happening every year.
Opioids are directly or indirectly responsible for about 70 percent of those overdose deaths.
If you can believe it, the number of Americans dying from drug overdoses has actually more than doubled since 2010.
So many people never would have imagined that their doctors would prescribe them something that is highly addictive and highly dangerous, and once you are hooked it can be exceedingly difficult to escape.
The New York Times has said that what we are facing is “the worst drug crisis in American history”, and for once I actually agree with the New York Times.
I have mostly focused on opioids so far in this article, but there are so many other classes of drugs that are also a massive problem in the U.S. right now.
In fact, federal officials are telling us that meth “is making a big comeback” in this country…
Meth producers in Mexico are cranking up the speed of production, and the drug is making a big comeback in the U.S.
“Across the country, it’s probably still the largest problem we have in America,” Derek Maltz, former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s (DEA) Special Operations Division, told Yahoo Finance. ”The Mexican cartels… they make it at levels that we’ve never seen before. So business is booming, the country’s addicted, and it’s really, really out of control.”
“We’re talking super labs,” another former DEA agent, Kevin Hartmann, told a local TV station in Texas. “Super labs that can produce multi hundred kilograms of methamphetamine.”
Meth is insanely addictive, and it will literally take over your life once you open the door.
When asked about her multi-year addiction, one opioid addict described it this way…
Erika Haas calls it “the pull.”
When Haas was 24, her doctor prescribed OxyContin for back pain. She quickly progressed to heroin – and then to methamphetamines. Now 30 and in recovery, she described the grip that meth had over her for more than five years.
“It’s like God tells you that if you take another breath, your children will die,” she said, shaking her head and trying to hold back tears. “You do everything you can not to take a breath. But eventually you do. That’s what it’s like. Your brain just screams at you.”
Thanks to decades of border security neglect, the big Mexican drug cartels are able to pump drugs into this country at a staggering rate.
And now they have apparently come up with a new form of meth that is stronger and cheaper than before…
Primarily imported from Mexico by major drug traffickers, “meth 2.0” is stronger, cheaper and far more plentiful than the old home-cooked variety. And with historic levels of funding from the federal government focused exclusively on fighting opioid addiction, states and counties are scrambling to find resources to combat this most recent drug plague.
Law enforcement officials are doing the best that they can to fight back, but without sufficient border security it is often a losing battle.
In South Dakota, they recently came up with a new slogan to show that they are trying to fight back: “Meth. We’re on it.”
A lot of people got a good laugh out of that, but unfortunately that slogan accurately describes what is happening in community after community all across the United States.
The ancient Greeks used the word “pharmakeia” to describe the mystical pull that these sorts of drugs can have on people. This is a crisis that just seems to get bigger with each passing year, and it is one of the primary causes for the social decay that we see all around us.
Those that have been snared by these drugs need our love and compassion, because they are truly victims of a relentless war against our nation. So many lives have already been destroyed, and we desperately need our politicians on the national level to start taking this threat a whole lot more seriously.
About the Author: I am a voice crying out for change in a society that generally seems content to stay asleep. My name is Michael Snyder and I am the publisher of The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I have written four books that are available on Amazon.com including The Beginning Of The End, Get Prepared Now, and Living A Life That Really Matters. (#CommissionsEarned) By purchasing those books you help to support my work. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but due to government regulations I need those that republish my articles to include this “About the Author” section with each article. In order to comply with those government regulations, I need to tell you that the controversial opinions in this article are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the websites where my work is republished. This article may contain opinions on political matters, but it is not intended to promote the candidacy of any particular political candidate. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions. Those responding to this article by making comments are solely responsible for their viewpoints, and those viewpoints do not necessarily represent the viewpoints of Michael Snyder or the operators of the websites where my work is republished. I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is a great help.
![A man found unconscious after overdosing on opioids puts his hands over his head in the back of an ambulance in the Boston suburb of Malden, Massachusetts, December 2, 2017 [Brian Snyder/Reuters]](https://talesfromtheloublog.files.wordpress.com/2019/12/cde83d535747423a804693e61441a15b_18.jpg "Drugs, guns, and despair: How America is killing Americans")
American life expectancy has declined.
There’s no foreign invasion. No war within its borders. No one to blame but ourselves. How then, is America killing Americans?
Most reports point to three things: drugs and alcohol, guns, and despair.
There is also fat. Statistically, it is more important, but oddly, it is not often included in discussions about the decline in life expectancy.
This last decline is from 78.7 years of life to 78.6. That does not sound terribly frightening. One-tenth of a year. One month and one week less to live. However, it has gone down for three years in a row, which has not happened in more than 100 years. The last time life expectancy went down was during World War I, when apart from deaths at the front, the US suffered an influenza epidemic that killed 675,000 people.
Is it just the US?
An article published on BMJ (previously the British Medical Journal) looked at 18 high-income countries: Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Portugal, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the US.
Over the last quarter of a century, the lifespans in all of those countries have gone up. People are living four to five years longer, except in the US, where it has only increased by 3.7 years. Actually, the US fell into last place in life expectancy in 2001 and the gap has been growing since. The Germans, the next lowest on the list, get to live almost two years longer than the Americans. The Japanese make it to 84 – or almost six more years.
Drug overdoses killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2017 – an increase of 95 percent over 10 years (up from 36,000 in 2007).
Guns killed nearly 40,000 Americans in 2017, according to official statistics, which only counts cases if guns were “the principal cause” of death but not if they only “contributed” to it; that is 4.43 deaths per 100,000. By contrast, the death rate from gun violence in Japan and the United Kingdom is 0.04 and 0.06 respectively.
About two-thirds of all gun deaths in the US are suicides. This tells us there is plenty of despair. It has gone up by 33 percent in the last two decades while the global suicide rate has declined by 30 percent in roughly the same period.
Then there is fat.
The US is one of the most obese nations in the world, second only to island nations and Kuwait. It is listed as having an obesity rate of 36.2 percent. Most of the Western European countries have a rate of 20 to 25 percent.
Obesity is a relatively new problem and studies of it are even newer. The statistics are rapidly changing and becoming more dire. It started with saying that only severe obesity mattered and that it could shorten a lifespan by about 10 years. Moderate obesity was supposed to be OK, probably, but newer studies have said that it can take up to three years on average from someone’s life.
Do these four elements have anything in common?
Yes. Free market theology is at the root of it all.
America has a profit-driven health care system. Not only is it more expensive than any other system in the world, but it creates special inefficiencies and distortions. Its goal is always to sell an item, usually a drug or a service. How, then, can it address the obvious causes of the obesity epidemic – bad diet, lack of exercise, and a sedentary lifestyle? For the most part, it cannot and it does not.
The more insidious contributor to the American wideness and wallow is the food industry which uses excessive levels of sugar, fat and salt to ensure food is addictive.
The pharmaceutical industry also plays a major role in this. Its protected status allows it to spread addiction to various medications, causing more damage than the Mafia, the Colombian cartels and the Mexicans that Donald Trump accuses of bringing drugs over the border, combined.
Meanwhile, money from the gun industry and the NRA – a profit-seeking enterprise – keep Americans shooting themselves and each other.
Maps of suicide and addiction rates are maps of despair. They largely match the disappearance of American manufacturing. We can date that decline to President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies of the 1980s. They gutted the industrial midlands, destroyed the unions, leaving the traditional working-class poor and powerless. A certain portion of them turned to alcoholism, addiction and suicide.
There are other things that the American health care system cannot address, and that free market theology considers non-existent: self-esteem, supportive communities, positive expectation for the future, especially for children, which clearly affect healthy lifestyles and life expectancy.
Free market theology insists that what we pay for things is the best and only true measure of their value. The higher inequality rises, the more we have the feeling that this must be true.
Teaching was once a highly regarded, even revered profession. Teachers were doing a public service. They had college and advanced degrees. But now their pay has become closer to the poverty line than to the middle class. How valuable can they be?
As the 1 percent continue to amass wealth, we are getting to the point where they are literally sucking the life out of the 99 percent.
That is how America kills Americans.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
Following decades of increased life expectancy rates, Americans have been dying earlier for three consecutive years since 2014, turning the elusive quest for the ‘American Dream’ into a real-life nightmare for many. Corporate America must accept some portion of the blame for the looming disaster.
Something is killing Americans and researchers have yet to find the culprit. But we can risk some intuitive guesses.
According to researchers from the Center on Society and Health, Virginia Commonwealth University School of Medicine, American life expectancy has not kept pace with that of other wealthy countries and is now in fact decreasing.
The National Center for Health Statistics reported that life expectancy in the United States peaked (78.9 years) in 2014 and subsequently dropped for 3 consecutive years, hitting 78.6 years in 2017. The decrease was most significant among men (0.4 years) than women (0.2 years) and happened across racial-ethnic lines: between 2014 and 2016, life expectancy decreased among non-Hispanic white populations (from 78.8 to 78.5 years), non-Hispanic black populations (from 75.3 years to 74.8 years), and Hispanic populations (82.1 to 81.8 years).
“By 2014, midlife mortality was increasing across all racial groups, caused by drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases,” wrote researchers Steven H. Woolf and Heidi Schoomaker in a study that appears in the latest issue of the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association.
At the very beginning of the report, Woolf and Schoomaker reveal that the geographical area with the largest relative increases occurred “in the Ohio Valley and New England.”
“The implications for public health and the economy are substantial,” they added, “making it vital to understand the underlying causes.”
Incidentally, it would be difficult for any observer of the U.S. political scene to read that passage without immediately connecting it to the 2016 presidential election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Taking advantage of the deep industrial decline that has long plagued the Ohio Valley, made up of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky, Trump successfully tapped into a very real social illness, at least partially connected to economic stagnation, which helped propel him into the White House.
Significantly, thirty-seven states witnessed significant jumps in midlife mortality in the years leading up to 2017. As the researchers pointed out, however, the trend was concentrated in certain states, many of which, for example in New England, did not support Trump in 2016.
“Between 2010 and 2017, the largest relative increases in mortality occurred in New England (New Hampshire, 23.3%; Maine, 20.7%; Vermont, 19.9%, Massachusetts 12.1%) and the Ohio Valley (West Virginia, 23.0%; Ohio, 21.6%; Indiana, 14.8%; Kentucky, 14.7%), as well as in New Mexico (17.5%), South Dakota (15.5%), Pennsylvania (14.4%), North Dakota (12.7%), Alaska (12.0%), and Maryland (11.0%). In contrast, the nation’s most populous states (California, Texas, and New York) experienced relatively small increases in midlife mortality.
Eight of the 10 states with the highest number of excess deaths were in the industrial Midwest or Appalachia, whereas rural US counties experienced greater increases in midlife mortality than did urban counties.
A tragic irony of the study suggests that greater access to healthcare, notably among the more affluent white population, actually correlates to an increase in higher mortality rates. The reason is connected to the out-of-control prescription of opioid drugs to combat pain and depression.
“The sharp increase in overdose deaths that began in the 1990s primarily affected white populations and came in 3 waves,” the report explained: (1) the introduction of OxyContin in 1996 and overuse of prescription opioids, followed by (2) increased heroin use, often by patients who had become addicted to prescription opioids, and (3) the subsequent emergence of potent synthetic opioids (eg, fentanyl analogues)—the latter triggering a large post-2013 increase in overdose deaths.
“That white populations first experienced a larger increase in overdose deaths than nonwhite populations may reflect their greater access to health care (and thus prescription drugs).”
In September, Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin, reached a tentative settlement with 23 states and more than 2,000 cities and counties that sued the company, owned by the Sackler family, over its role in the opioid crisis
Other factors also helped to drive up the U.S. mortality rate, including alcoholic liver disease and suicides, 85% of which occurred with a firearm or other method.
The United States spends more on health care than any other country, yet its overall health report card fares worse than those of other wealthy countries. Americans experience higher rates of illness and injury and die earlier than people in other high-income nations.
Researchers were perplexed but not surprised by the data as there existed clear signs back in the 1980s that the United States was heading for a cliff as far as longevity rates go.
So what is it that’s claiming the life of Americans, many at the prime of their life, at a faster pace than in the past? The reality is that it is likely to be an accumulation of negative factors that are finally beginning to take a toll. For example, apart from the opioid crisis, there has also been an almost total collapse of union representation across Corporate America, which has essentially crushed any form of workplace democracy. This author, a former member of three worker unions, witnessed this egregious abuse of corporate power firsthand, which is apparent by the total stagnation of wages for many decades.
Today’s real average wage – that is, after accounting for inflation – has about the same purchasing power it did about half a century ago. Meanwhile, in the majority of cases, increases in salary have a marked tendency to go to the highest-paid tier of executives.
In a report by Pew Research, “real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.”
One needs only consider the growing mountain of tuition debt now consuming the paychecks of many university graduates, many of whom have yet to land their dream 6-figure job from their relatively worthless liberal education, to better understand the quiet desperation that exists across the country.
At the same time, the exponential rise in the use of social media, which has been proven to trigger depression and loneliness in users, also deserves serious consideration. What society is experiencing with its massive online presence is a total overhaul as to the way human beings relate to each other. Presently, it would be very difficult to argue that the changes have been positive; in fact, they seem to be contributing to the early demise of millions of Americans in the prime of life.
Taken together, abusive labor practices that ignores workplace democracy, the epidemic of opioid usage, compounded by the anti-social features of ‘social media’ suggests a perfect storm of factors precipitating the rise of early deaths in the United States. Since all of these areas fall in one way or another under the control of corporate power, this powerful agency must find ways to help address the problem. The future success of America depends upon it.
sputniknews.com
Nov 28, 2019
US life expectancy continued to decline for the third year in a row, while midlife mortality rates increased for all population groups, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) reported on Tuesday.
According to JAMA, midlife mortality, which is defined as mortality for individuals between the ages of 25 and 64, had increased “across all racial groups” and was caused by “drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, suicides, and a diverse list of organ system diseases.”
The increase in midlife mortality occurred from 2014 to 2017, which was the last year examined in the study.
“US life expectancy increased for most of the past 60 years, but the rate of increase slowed over time and life expectancy decreased after 2014,” the study concludes. “The implications for public health and the economy are substantial.”
The Ohio Valley, which includes parts of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana, and northern New England were listed as being among the hardest-hit geographic areas, as they have seen a loss of manufacturing jobs in recent years, and Ohio and West Virginia have been particularly affected by the opioid-addiction epidemic.
Meanwhile, the National Center for Health Statistics said on Wednesday that the US fertility rate declined in 2018 for the fourth straight year. The 2018 fertility rate was 59.1 births for every 1,000 women of childbearing age, a record low. The decline has been ongoing since the 2008 financial crisis, with a slight uptick in 2014. Fertility rates tend to decline in periods of economic distress, but in this instance, the fertility rate has not rebounded even as the economy has recovered.
“It is hard for me to believe that the birthrate just keeps going down,” University of New Hampshire demographer Kenneth Johnson told the New York Times.
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.”
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma steered up to $13 billion in profits to the company’s controlling Sackler family, according to U.S. states opposing efforts to halt lawsuits alleging the company and its owners helped fuel the U.S. opioid epidemic.
The wealthy Sacklers received the money from Purdue during an unspecified time frame, according to court documents and portions of a deposition filed in the drugmaker’s bankruptcy proceedings this week.
Purdue ultimately transferred $12 billion or $13 billion to the family, a company adviser testified in the deposition. The deposition, taken last week, was revealed in court filings on Thursday and Friday.
The financial figure is significantly larger than the roughly $4 billion previous lawsuits have alleged the Sacklers took out of Purdue, and was cited as part of coordinated legal broadsides this week against the company’s attempts to shield itself and the family from sprawling opioid litigation.
Many states want the Sacklers to contribute more than an initial $3 billion they have pledged toward resolving the lawsuits as part of a settlement Purdue has proposed.
Attorneys general from 24 states and the District of Columbia on Friday objected to Purdue’s September request that a U.S. bankruptcy judge halt more than 2,600 lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages, and they raised financial transfers to the Sacklers in their legal arguments.
So, too, did lawyers representing 500 cities, counties and Native American tribes, according to an earlier court filing.
“The distribution numbers do not reflect the fact that many billions of dollars from that amount were paid in taxes and reinvested in businesses that will be sold as part of the proposed settlement,” said Daniel S. Connolly, a lawyer for family members facing lawsuits who are related to the late Raymond Sackler, one of the modern Purdue’s co-founders, in a statement.
A spokesman for relatives of another deceased company co-founder, Mortimer Sackler, who also face litigation, had no immediate comment.
Purdue had no immediate comment on the payments. The company and family have denied allegations they contributed to the U.S. opioid crisis.
The lawsuits, largely brought by state and local governments, allege Purdue and the Sacklers contributed to a public health crisis that has claimed the lives of nearly 400,000 people since 1999 by aggressively marketing opioids while downplaying their addiction and overdose risks.
“The Sacklers are billionaires, they are not bankrupt,” Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, among the officials opposing Purdue’s efforts to halt lawsuits, told Reuters in an interview. “They should not be allowed to use the filing to shield their assets.”
Purdue filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month after reaching a deal it valued at more than $10 billion that would resolve the bulk of the cases against the company and the Sacklers.
The company contends it needs the litigation against it and the Sacklers paused for about nine months so it can attempt to settle with hold-out plaintiffs and preserve money that would otherwise be spent fighting the cases.
Purdue said the costs of continued litigation were “staggering,” putting its legal expenses this year at nearly $250 million.
“Without a stay of the litigation, only lawyers will win,” the company said in a statement.
Typically, a bankruptcy filing triggers an “automatic stay” of all litigation without a specific order from a judge.
However, Purdue is seeking an injunction to stop the lawsuits because the Sacklers did not seek bankruptcy protection and there is an exception to the automatic stay for government actions that seek to enforce laws related to public health and safety.
Healey said the exception gives the states a strong argument to move forward with their cases against the OxyContin maker. “We’re exercising our police power and have the right to do so,” she said.
The Sacklers have offered to cede control of Purdue to the plaintiffs and contribute $3 billion, and potentially more through the sale of another pharmaceutical business they own, toward the proposed settlement. Purdue is also in discussions to resolve a U.S. Justice Department probe that could carry a financial penalty.
Healey said the Sacklers should increase their contribution and she criticized the structure of the deal, which is premised in part on the continued sale of OxyContin, a drug that critics say helped launch the nation’s opioid addiction crisis.
(Source: Reuters)
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.”
And now, researchers have uncovered a new reason why: the cannabis plant produces pain-relieving molecules that are 30 times more potent at reducing inflammation than aspirin.
What makes the discovery so groundbreaking is that it could carve a new path to natural pain relief medications that would save patients who suffer chronic pain from the risks of addiction associated with opioid-based pain killers.
According to the team of researchers at Canada’s University of Guelph, they found out how the two important molecules—cannflavin A and cannflavin B—were produced through a combination of genomics and biochemistry.
The two cannflavins, known as “flavonoids,” were identified in 1985 when scientists proved that they had benefits which could fight inflammation at a gram-for-gram rate of about 30 times that of aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid.
However, prohibitionist laws in Canada prevented further research into the potent anti-inflammatory qualities of the molecules.
But with Canada joining the growing bandwagon of countries legalizing cannabis for medical and recreational purposes, molecular and cellular biology Professors Tariq Akhtar and Steven Rothstein were able to resume an analysis into cannabis and how it produces cannflavins.
In a press release, Akhtar explained:
“Our objective was to better understand how these molecules are made, which is a relatively straightforward exercise these days.
There are many sequenced genomes that are publicly available, including the genome of Cannabis sativa, which can be mined for information. If you know what you’re looking for, one can bring genes to life, so to speak, and piece together how molecules like cannflavins A and B are assembled.”
Their full findings, which were published in the peer-reviewed journalPhytochemistry, offer an exciting opportunity to create new natural health products with equal or greater power than traditional synthetic or opioid-based pain relievers.
Akhtar continued:
“There’s clearly a need to develop alternatives for relief of acute and chronic pain that go beyond opioids.
These molecules are non-psychoactive and they target the inflammation at the source, making them ideal painkillers.”
University of Guelph@uofgUniversity of Guelph researchers are the first to uncover how the cannabis plant creates important pain-relieving molecules that are 30 times more powerful at reducing inflammation than Aspirin https://news.uoguelph.ca/2019/07/u-of-g%e2%80%afresearchers-first-to-unlock-access-to-pain%e2%80%afrelief%e2%80%afpotential-of-cannabis%e2%80%af/ … #UofG @UofGuelphNews
U of G Researchers First to Unlock Access to Pain Relief Potential of Cannabis
University of Guelph researchers are the first to uncover how the cannabis plant creates important pain-relieving molecules that are 30 times more powerful at reducing inflammation than Aspirin….
news.uoguelph.ca
In recent years, drug overdose deaths have reached monstrous proportions, with 65,000 fatal drug overdoses taking place in 2017 alone. Many who abuse the pills have prolonged addictive fixations on opioids, with the hardest-hit age group ranging from 25 to 34 years old. Out of that age group, 12,325 died in 2017, among whom two-thirds were men.
Professor Rothstein, however, hopes that his team’s latest discovery can help make a powerful difference in people’s lives.
“Being able to offer a new pain relief option is exciting, and we are proud that our work has the potential to become a new tool in the pain relief arsenal.”
“…it confirms in the most concrete terms the criminal role played by drug companies in creating the deadly opioid epidemic that now kills 70,000 people a year in the US. The prescription opioid epidemic alone resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.”
“…The solution to the opioid crisis lies in the mobilization of the working class to take ownership of the for-profit pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and the entire healthcare industry in order to provide medical care in the interest of human need, not private profit.”
Previously undisclosed drug company data released by the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has provided the most comprehensive look to date at the nation’s opioid crisis. The database, which traces the path of every single narcotic sold in America—from manufacturer to distributor to pharmacy from 2006 to 2012—has been analyzed in a report by the Washington Post.
The data, along with the history of its delayed release, is remarkable in many ways. First, it confirms in the most concrete terms the criminal role played by drug companies in creating the deadly opioid epidemic that now kills 70,000 people a year in the US. The prescription opioid epidemic alone resulted in nearly 100,000 deaths from 2006 through 2012.
According to the database, throughout the documented six-year period in which the drug epidemic was beginning to spin out of control, drug companies poured 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills into US neighborhoods.
This almost incomprehensible number meant that during these years, the companies distributed enough pills to supply every adult and child in the country with 36 pills each per year.
However, the distribution of the pills was not uniform from state to state or from city to city. The state of Kentucky, for example, was flooded with enough pills to give every person 63.3 pills each per year; South Carolina, 58; and Tennessee, 57.7.
West Virginia, the state with the highest opioid death rate during this period, received enough pills to give every person 66.5 pills each year.
Rural areas were among the hardest hit. In Norton, Virginia, there were enough pills to provide 306 pills per person a year; Martinsville, Virginia, 242; Mingo County, West Virginia, 203.
During the years covered by the database, 2006 to 2012, annual opioid deaths rose from under 18,000 a year to more than 23,000, with prescription drugs cited as factors in almost half the deaths. The volume of the pills handled by the companies also skyrocketed as the epidemic surged, increasing about 51 percent from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012.
Since then, overall opioid deaths in the US have skyrocketed. The flooding of markets with prescription drugs, especially in economically depressed areas, spawned increased heroin use and ultimately, along with a number of other factors, led to the current fentanyl crisis that added more than 67,000 to the death toll from 2013 to 2017.
There is no doubt that the top drug manufacturers and distributors are guilty a thousand times over for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people; for the incalculable pain and suffering on the part of those addicted, their children, and their families; for the economic and social devastation the crisis has brought to large swaths of rural America. It has placed an immense strain on healthcare systems, social services, and the foster care system. These companies made billions of dollars off of human suffering.
However, the insidious character of this massive operation extends well beyond the drug manufacturers and drug distributors. The drug manufacturers and distributors were able to carry out this operation only because of critical structural support they received from the highest level of the political establishment.
The data revealed Monday comes from an exclusive database controlled and viewable only by the DEA, a government-controlled body supposedly meant to oversee and police these companies. The information to which this body had access is highly detailed, including the name, DEA registration number, address and business activity of every seller and buyer of a controlled substance in the United States. The database also includes drug codes, transaction dates, and total dosage units and grams of narcotics sold.
It is not only the drug companies who have been fighting to keep this database secret, but the DEA along with the US Department of Justice. The database was only unveiled after a yearlong battle for access to the documents waged by the Washington Post and HD Media. What accounts for this secrecy?
The truth is, as with every major industry, the drug corporations routinely buy off politicians to secure ideal business conditions. The DEA exemplifies the fact that the federal agencies supposedly tasked with policing big business—the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—are under the thumb of the corporations and run political interference for them.
Innumerable facts support this claim. First, despite access to this overwhelming data, over the course of this entire crisis the DEA has taken only the most limited action against these companies, which has resulted in many of them paying a pittance in fees for their crimes.
However, even this minimal oversight was too much for the companies and their counterparts in Washington. As the opioid crisis was erupting, the US Congress was working to eviscerate the oversight powers of the DEA, starting in 2014 and culminating in the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, which passed by overwhelming votes in Congress and was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama.
The main purpose of the legislation was to stop the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control from halting drug shipments for unusually large and unexplained sales. For example, when several Walgreens pharmacies in Florida sold more than 1 million opioid pills in a year, compared to a nationwide average of 74,000, the Office of Diversion Control could impose fines and suspend distribution, preventing the drugs from reaching the streets pending the results of an investigation.
The 2016 law effectively ended the ability of the DEA to suspend such orders. Political action committees representing the pharmaceutical industry contributed at least $1.5 million to the 23 lawmakers who sponsored or co-sponsored four versions of the bill. Overall, the drug industry spent $102 million lobbying Congress on the bill and related legislation between 2014 and 2016.
At least 46 investigators and attorneys from the DEA, including 32 directly from the Office of Diversion Control, were hired by the pharmaceutical companies after scrutiny of the drug distributors began in 2014.
The intimate connection between these gigantic corporate monopolies and the institutions of state power revealed in the case of opioid drug distributors is the relationship that prevails across-the-board throughout the capitalist system internationally.
Over the course of the last three years, various lawsuits have been brought against different drug companies. Some have been successful in bringing attention to the issues involved and in securing some monetary retribution from the companies. There are currently dozens of drug companies being sued in federal court in Cleveland by nearly 2,000 cities, towns and counties alleging that they conspired to flood the nation with opioids.
While these efforts rightfully target many of the guilty parties involved in the creation of this crisis, the results of the lawsuits, however “successful,” will ultimately do little to repair the damage done by the drug epidemic over the course of the last decade, let alone make whole the families who have suffered the trauma of losing loved ones.
More fundamental than the individuals involved in these crimes is the social system that produces them. The subordination of the political establishment to the private interests of corporations is not a feature of life that will be changed through lawsuits. Rather, the solution to the opioid crisis lies in the mobilization of the working class to take ownership of the for-profit pharmaceutical companies, drug distributors and the entire healthcare industry in order to provide medical care in the interest of human need, not private profit.
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:
Tales from the Conspiratum 