Canada spends $113M on COVID vaccine campaigns, but only $1.5M on opioid awareness ads

“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.

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.

Opioids can kill healthy and strong individuals

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.

More related stories:

Alberta’s chief medical officer grilled during civil suit.

Big Pharma to pay hundreds of millions in settlement with Native American tribes over opioid epidemic.

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.

No good reason for the opioid epidemic: Clinical trial showed no “significant difference” in pain relief for treating arm or leg pain using opioids vs non-opioids.

Sources include:

Brighteon.com

Rebel News.com

Rebel News.com

Recreational marijuana access reduces demand for prescription drugs

Showing Marijuana flower | Pikrepo

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2022/04/recreational-marijuana-access-reduces-demand-prescription-drugs

By Jim Hanchett |

 April 18, 2022

Legalization of recreational marijuana reduces the demand for costly prescription drugs through state Medicaid programs, according to an analysis by a Cornell researcher and a collaborator.

When states legalize marijuana, the volume of prescriptions within the drug classes that align with the medical indications for pain, depression, anxiety, sleep, psychosis and seizures significantly decline, the researchers found.

Shyam Raman, a doctoral student in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy, and Indiana University doctoral student Ashley Bradford conducted the research. Their article, “Recreational Cannabis Legalizations Associated with Reductions in Prescription Drug Utilizations Among Medicaid Enrollees,” published April 15 in the journal Health Economics.

Most cannabis research has focused on the impact of medical marijuana on demand for prescription drugs or the impact of recreational use legalization on opioid demand. This is among the first studies to focus on the impact of legal personal-use cannabis on a broad range of prescription drugs.

“These results have important implications,” Raman said. “The reductions in drug utilization that we find could lead to significant cost savings for state Medicaid programs. The results also indicate an opportunity to reduce the harm that can come with the dangerous side effects associated with some prescription drugs.”

Raman and Bradford based their study on an analysis of data retrieved from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in all 50 states from 2011 to 2019, a period that saw growth in the number of states permitting personal use of marijuana. 

About 40 states have legalized medical marijuana that must be prescribed by a doctor. So far, about 20 states have legalized personal-use cannabis for all adults, but that number is likely to rise. In those states, Raman and Bradford found a meaningful change in the demand for drugs used to treat sleep and anxiety disorders but no real impact on drugs used to treat nausea.

Raman and Bradford caution that cannabis use is not itself without harm, noting the many studies that associate it with a potential triggering of anxiety and psychoses such as schizophrenia. Also, patients who use marijuana to treat their medical conditions may be shifting away from visiting their doctor and therein creating discontinuities in primary care.

Jim Hanchett is assistant dean of communications and marketing in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy.

Drug companies poured 76 billion opioid pills into US neighborhoods in just six years

“…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.”

Source

http://www.wsws.org

By Genevieve Leigh
19 July 2019

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 hard hit

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.

Complicity of the political establishment

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.

The Obama administration’s role

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.

War on Drugs Has Done Far More Harm Than Illegal Drugs, Major Report Finds

Many illegal drugs are less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet seen as more dangerous due to biases.

War on Drugs Has Done Far More Harm Than Illegal Drugs, Major Report Finds

TheMindUnleashed.com

ELIAS MARAT

June 29, 2019

(TMU) — Illegal drugs including cocaine, ecstasy and opiates can potentially be less harmful than tobacco or alcohol yet are seen as dangerous narcotics due to cultural biases and politics rather than actual science, according to a report by the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

Calling for a comprehensive review of the international system that classifies drugs, the commission—comprised of 14 former heads of states from countries including Mexico, Colombia, Portugal and New Zealand—blasted the “incoherence and inconsistencies” of laws that cherry-pick the harmful effects of certain substances using “unreliable and scientifically dubious” methods.

The group also described how the scheduling system has propped up a global drug control regime that imposes major costs on society in the form of “collateral damage,” with some substances facing strict controls and others allowed for medical purposes. This has entailed patients in low-to-middle income countries facing surgery without anesthetics, a lack of crucial medicines, and excruciating and painful deaths that were wholly unnecessary and a result of a ban on opioid pain treatment.

In 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated that 83 percent of the global population resides in countries where access to opioid pain relief is either inadequate or nonexistent.

Michel Kazatchkine, a French physician and former head of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis, and Malaria, said that 75 to 80 percent of the global population lacks access to medicines and “all of the reasons are linked to repression and prohibition-based control systems,”according to the Guardian.

Other consequences include the spread of infectious diseases, higher mortality rates and prisons around the globe that are filled to the brim with drug users.

The group wrote:

“Such drug control policies have resulted in social and economic problems not only for people who use drugs but also for the general population, including health epidemics, prison overcrowding and arbitrary enforcement of drug laws.”

Continuing to criticize the arbitrary and biased application of drug laws, the group wrote:

“This de facto prohibition is arbitrary. the current distinction between legal and illegal substances is not unequivocally based on pharmacological research but in large part on historical and cultural precedents.

It is also distorted by and feeds into morally charged perceptions about a presumed ‘good and evil’ distinction between legal and illegal drugs.”

Ruth Dreifuss, former president of Switzerland and commission chair, blasted the classification while calling for a “critical review” that centers the WHO, modern scientific research and a criteria that sufficiently takes into account the harm and benefit of substances. Dreifuss said:

“The international system to classify drugs is at the core of the drug control regime – and unfortunately the core is rotten.” 

Dreifuss also noted how some illegal drugs such as cocaine, heroin, cannabis, and hashish haven’t been seriously evaluated in 30 years or weren’t evaluated at all, seriously undercutting the legitimacy of prohibitionist approaches.

Former president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos similarly affirmed that drugs should be reclassified. Speaking to journalists in an online briefing on the report, Santos noted that “the scientific basis [of classification] is non-existent.”

Continuing, the former president explained:

“It was a political decision. According to the studies we’ve seen over past years, substances like cannabis are less harmful than alcohol … I come from Colombia, probably the country that has paid the highest price for the war on drugs.”

Instead, the country has been saddled for over 50 years with an unwinnable drug war that causes “more damage, more harm” to the world than practical approaches to regulating the sale and consumption of drugs in a “good way,” he added.

The Global Commission added the “only responsible answer to this complex topic is to regulate the market of illegal drugs, starting by establishing regulations and a new scheduling system adapted to the dangerousness of each drug and based on solid scientific assessments,” in line with the same criteria used for food, medications, and other products that could potentially pose risks to consumer health.

The group added:

“While the international community continues to struggle to find a new consensus, countries should move forward with designing and implementing a more rational policy of scheduling, controlling and regulating psychoactive drugs.”

The group also recommended that milder and less harmful drugs should have restrictions loosened, especially to include “other legitimate uses” such as traditional, religious or social use.

Anand Grover, the former special U.N. rapporteur for health, India, said:

“We need to think of these things with a fresh outlook. We can’t go with the cultural biases of the west.”

 

US studies: More misery brought to you by Big Pharma

A week rarely passes without the publication of a major study documenting the misery unleashed on Americans by the US pharmaceutical industry and its rapacious drive for profits.

Source: US studies: More misery brought to you by Big Pharma – World Socialist Web Site

http://www.wsws.org

By Kate Randall
22 March 2019

Sharp rise in fentanyl overdose deaths, ADHD-drug-induced psychosis, prescription drug rationing due to cost

A week rarely passes without the publication of a major study documenting the misery unleashed on Americans by the US pharmaceutical industry and its rapacious drive for profits.

Earlier this month a study analyzing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data found that more than 150,000 Americans died from alcohol and drug-induced fatalities and suicide in 2017, the highest number ever recorded.

The biggest factor in this shocking number of “deaths of despair” were drug overdoses, in particular from synthetic opioids like fentanyl. While illicitly manufactured fentanyl and related drugs are now responsible for increasing numbers of deadly overdoses, blame for the rising rates of opioid addiction lies with Big Pharma, which has flooded neighborhoods across the country with prescription opioids, fully aware of their addictive and potentially deadly properties.

A Boston trial beginning in January heard testimony of how Insys Therapeutics executives pushed prescription narcotics through bribing doctors to prescribe an addictive fentanyl nasal spray.

Also in January, portions made public of a lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts allege that one of the founders of Purdue Pharma, who developed OxyContin, said in 1996 on the debut of the opioid painkiller that it would “be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.” Dr. Richard Sackler, whose family developed OxyContin, wrote at the time that they would push the drug by vilifying its addicted victims. “They are the culprits and the problem,” the email read. “They are reckless criminals.”

2011–2016: Fentanyl overdose deaths soar

A study released Thursday by the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) provided more grim detail on overdose deaths from fentanyl. In 2011–2012, fentanyl was involved in roughly 1,600 overdose deaths in the US in both years. From 2012 through 2014, fentanyl-related deaths more than doubled each year. By 2016, deaths attributed to fentanyl had skyrocketed to more than 18,335, a tenfold increase over 2011–2012 .

While researchers found exponential increases in fatal fentanyl overdoses among all age groups, the largest average annual percent change occurred among young adults aged 25–34 and 15–24. Men are dying from opioid overdoses at nearly three times the rate of women. Overdose deaths are also increasing faster among blacks and Latinos.

Fentanyl can be 50 times more powerful than heroin. It can shut down breathing in less than a minute. It is more likely to cause an overdose than heroin due to its potency and also because the high fades more quickly than with heroin, which means drug users may inject it more frequently, increasing the risk of overdose.

The New England states—Connecticut, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont—saw the largest increase in fentanyl overdose deaths, with a 1 02.2 percent increase per year from 2011 to 2016. This compares to the region comprising Arizona, California, Hawaii and Nevada, which saw a very small annual increase. Although researchers had no firm explanation for these geographical disparities, one theory is that it is easier to mix a few white fentanyl crystals into the powdered form of heroin that is more popular in the eastern part of the country.

Newly prescribed ADHD medications may cause psychosis

Published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine was a study that found that certain medications used to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in teens and young adults may be more likely to cause psychosis, including symptoms such as paranoia, hallucinations, delusions and hearing voices.

Researchers found that patients ages 13 to 25 who had been newly prescribed amphetamines, such as Adderall and Vyvanse were more likely to develop psychosis than those prescribed methylphenidates, such as Ritalin and Concerta.

The rate of psychosis with either class of medications is relatively rare, occurring in one in 660, according to researchers. However, the CDC estimates that 11 percent of US children ages 4 to 17 are diagnosed with ADHD, making the potential pool of patients very large. While the study’s findings only showed the relationship between newly prescribed medications and psychosis, with over 3.5 million children currently taking an ADHD drug, this still amounts to tens of thousands of patients at risk each year.

According to data from IMS Health, US prescriptions to treat ADHD rose from 67.4 million in 2010 to 87.5 million in 2015. Sales of ADHD medications rose from $7.9 billion to $11.2 billion during this same period, a more than 40 percent increase.

Doctors are also prescribing these medications off-label for those who don’t have an ADHD diagnosis. Nonmedical use of ADHD medications on college campuses is exploding, with students obtaining the drugs from friends or family with a prescription, by obtaining a prescription by claiming to have ADHD, or from classmates selling their own prescriptions.

In these cases, the companies selling the drugs—including Shire and Teva—are profiting off of the use of “study drugs” on campuses across the country. Students dealing with the scramble for grades under the pressure of student debt, working in addition to studying, and competing for dwindling job opportunities upon graduation, are using the drugs to help them pull all-nighters to ace exams.

The drug companies are always striving to increase the appeal of their products, through consumer targeted advertising and other means. In 2016, the FDA approved Adzenys, a fruity-flavored film from Neos Therapeutics that dissolves in the mouth. The portability, convenience and tasty delivery increase the risk of abuse of the potentially addictive drug, not to mention the danger of psychosis documented in the study published in NEJM.

One-third of uninsured adults don’t take drugs as prescribed due to cost

An NCHC Data Brief published in the center’s March 2019 edition examined the strategies used by adults aged 18-64 to reduce the costs of prescription medications. In 2017, those who were uninsured were far more likely to take measures to cut costs than those with either private insurance or Medicaid.

To reduce the burden of skyrocketing drug prices, the uninsured asked their doctors to prescribe a cheaper medication, used “alternative therapies” to manage their conditions, or did not take their medication as prescribed. More than 33 percent of uninsured adults did not take their medications as prescribed by their doctor, by either leaving their prescription unfilled, dividing doses or spreading them out.

Those living under 400 percent of the poverty line—about $65,000 for a two-person household—are much more likely to be uninsured. With 12 percent of adults aged 18-64 uninsured, millions of Americans are forgoing prescription drugs due to cost, endangering their health and, potentially, their lives. This is but another demonstration of the incompatibility of the for-profit health system in the US, which places the cash hoards of Big Pharma executives over the well-being of the population, particularly its most vulnerable.

New Canadian Medical Association head calls for debate on decriminalizing opioids

Opioid crisis calls for ‘open and courageous conversation,’ says Dr. Gigi Osler

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CBC News

Sept 21, 2018

A woman is consoled while wiping away tears during a memorial service to remember those who have died in the province as a result of the drug overdose crisis, on International Overdose Awareness Day in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, B.C., on Thursday August 31, 2017. (Darryl Dyck/THE CANADIAN PRESS)

The new president of the Canadian Medical Association is calling on politicians to have an “open and courageous” debate about decriminalizing opioids in the face of a nationwide overdose crisis.

“I think the time for having those conversations is now,” Dr. Gigi Osler told the CBC’s Chris Hall in an interview airing Saturday on CBC Radio’s The House.

“With the opioid crisis at the stage it is now, it’s probably worth it to have that open and courageous conversation, to look at whether decriminalization would be part of the solution or would it contribute to the problem.”

Osler said she uses the word “courageous” to describe such a debate because Canadian society’s prevailing attitudes toward substance abuse — particularly of opioids — make such a conversation politically perilous. 

“There’s still a lot of stigma associated with people who have an opioid use disorder,” she said. “To decriminalize opioids almost means for some people they need to accept it.”

Dr. Gigi Osler is the new president of the Canadian Medical Association, and is calling on Canada’s politicians to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of decriminalizing opioids. (Dr. Gigi Osler)

At least 1,036 Canadians died in the first three months of this year of what appeared to be opioid overdoses, raising the opioid epidemic’s national death toll to more than 8,000 people since January 2016, according to newly released government figures.

“The opioid crisis certainly is a huge public health crisis right now,” Osler said, echoing Montreal and Toronto’s health departments, which are urging the federal government to treat drug use as a public health issue rather than a criminal one.

Trudeau: decriminalizing opioids ‘not part of the plan’

In the House of Commons on Wednesday, discussing the Liberals’ approach to the opioid crisis, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said his government “will not treat this as a criminal issue” — a statement his health minister, Ginette Petitpas Taylor, has echoed.

But for now, the door to decriminalization remains firmly shut. At a town hall in February, Trudeau said lifting criminal penalties for illegal opioid use is “not a step that Canada is looking at taking at this point.”

In July, a spokesperson for Petitpas Taylor said the government is working instead to reduce barriers to treatment by approving more than 25 supervised consumption sites and making it easier for health professionals to provide access to opioid substitution therapies.

Osler said those strategies are “all very much needed.”

“The one strategy that continues to be needed is optimal prescribing practices,” she added. “We continue to work with our physicians so we’re part of the solution in terms of appropriate opioid prescribing, recognizing when alternate therapies are available.”

But Osler also agreed with Petitpas Taylor’s statement earlier this week that there is “no silver bullet” solution for the crisis.

“It’s a complex problem,” she said.

It’s also getting worse, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s latest trend report. In 2016, slightly more than 3,000 Canadians died of apparent opioid overdoses. That number grew to close to 4,000 deaths last year.

Lowered Pain Tolerance From Opioid Use Does Not Happen With Cannabis

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http://www.rxleaf.com

Dragana Komnenov PhD

Sep 10, 2018

Lowered pain tolerance and the destructive cycle of chasing pain relief is a hallmark of opioids. Cannabis offers consistent pain relief without the risk of developing increased pain sensitivity.

When opioids first hit the market in 1911, and up until the 1990s, these were reserved for post-surgical (acute) pain and patients with cancer. Since then, opioid use for treatment of chronic pain has escalated. It is now one of the most over-prescribed medications in North America. Unfortunately, one of the most common side effects of long-term opioid use is sensitization to pain, or a decrease in pain tolerance. In other words, instead of acting as an analgesic and decreasing pain, overused opioids make individuals more sensitive to pain.

Patients on high doses of opioid pharmacotherapy may suffer escalating acute pain, which can lead to a vicious cycle of increasing the dose, but never again finding that pain relief. Currently, there are no strategies that would prevent, reverse or manage this state of increased pain sensitivity.

To put this sensitization issue into perspective, one study pointed out that patients with lower back pain, on long-lasting morphine, developed pain tolerance within one month of therapy. Further studies suggested that one of the culprits for this process involved a metabolite of morphine, called morphine-3-glucoronide.

Cannabis Research on Pain is Not Very Accurate

Cannabis is an alternative analgesic and anti-inflammatory medicine, as demonstrated by a several pre-clinical studies. However, when it comes to human trials, the data is very scarce and the available studies are inconclusive due to inherent design flaws. Most of the studies conducted, thus far, measured pain tolerance and pain threshold immediately after consumption of THC, CBD, or both (via smoking or oral formulations). Collectively, these studies suggest that cannabis has some analgesic effect but only in males, and not in females, and can increase the pain sensitivity and decrease pain threshold. Not exactly reliable results when you consider methodologies.

Continue:

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The Story of America’s 19th-Century Opiate Addiction

“Before 1900, the typical opiate addict in America was an upper-class or middle-class white woman.”

source link

http://www.smithsonianmag.com

By Erick Trickey

January 4, 2018

Doctors then, as now, overprescribed the painkiller to patients in need, and then, as now, government policy had a distinct bias.

The man was bleeding, wounded in a bar fight, half-conscious. Charles Schuppert, a New Orleans surgeon, was summoned to help. It was the late 1870s, and Schuppert, like thousands of American doctors of his era, turned to the most effective drug in his kit. “I gave him an injection of morphine subcutaneously of ½ grain,” Schuppert wrote in his casebook. “This acted like a charm, as he came to in a minute from the stupor he was in and rested very easily.”

Physicians like Schuppert used morphine as a new-fangled wonder drug. Injected with a hypodermic syringe, the medication relieved pain, asthma, headaches, alcoholics’ delirium tremens, gastrointestinal diseases and menstrual cramps. “Doctors were really impressed by the speedy results they got,” says David T. Courtwright, author of Dark Paradise: A History of Opiate Addiction in America. “It’s almost as if someone had handed them a magic wand.”

By 1895, morphine and opium powders, like OxyContin and other prescription opioids today, had led to an addiction epidemic that affected roughly 1 in 200 Americans. Before 1900, the typical opiate addict in America was an upper-class or middle-class white woman. Today, doctors are re-learning lessons their predecessors learned more than a lifetime ago.

Opium’s history in the United States is as old as the nation itself. During the American Revolution, the Continental and British armies used opium to treat sick and wounded soldiers. Benjamin Franklin took opium late in life to cope with severe pain from a bladder stone. A doctor gave laudanum, a tincture of opium mixed with alcohol, to Alexander Hamilton after his fatal duel with Aaron Burr.

The Civil War helped set off America’s opiate epidemic. The Union Army alone issued nearly 10 million opium pills to its soldiers, plus 2.8 million ounces of opium powders and tinctures. An unknown number of soldiers returned home addicted, or with war wounds that opium relieved. “Even if a disabled soldier survived the war without becoming addicted, there was a good chance he would later meet up with a hypodermic-wielding physician,” Courtright wrote. The hypodermic syringe, introduced to the United States in 1856 and widely used to deliver morphine by the 1870s, played an even greater role, argued Courtwright in Dark Paradise. “Though it could cure little, it could relieve anything,” he wrote. “Doctors and patients alike were tempted to overuse.”

Opiates made up 15 percent of all prescriptions dispensed in Boston in 1888, according to a survey of the city’s drug stores. “In 1890, opiates were sold in an unregulated medical marketplace,” wrote Caroline Jean Acker in her 2002 book, Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control. “Physicians prescribed them for a wide range of indications, and pharmacists sold them to individuals medicating themselves for physical and mental discomforts.”

Male doctors turned to morphine to relieve many female patients’ menstrual cramps, “diseases of a nervous character,” and even morning sickness. Overuse led to addiction. By the late 1800s, women made up more than 60 percent of opium addicts. “Uterine and ovarian complications cause more ladies to fall into the [opium] habit, than all other diseases combined,” wrote Dr. Frederick Heman Hubbard in his 1881 book, The Opium Habit and Alcoholism.

Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, medical journals filled with warnings about the danger of morphine addiction. But many doctors were slow to heed them, because of inadequate medical education and a shortage of other treatments. “In the 19th century, when a physician decided to recommend or prescribe an opiate for a patient, the physician did not have a lot of alternatives,” said Courtwright in a recent interview. Financial pressures mattered too: demand for morphine from well-off patients, competition from other doctors and pharmacies willing to supply narcotics.

Only around 1895, at the peak of the epidemic, did doctors begin to slow and reverse the overuse of opiates. Advances in medicine and public health played a role: acceptance of the germ theory of disease, vaccines, x-rays, and the debut of new pain relievers, such as aspirin in 1899. Better sanitation meant fewer patients contracting dysentery or other gastrointestinal diseases, then turning to opiates for their constipating and pain-relieving effects.

Educating doctors was key to fighting the epidemic. Medical instructors and textbooks from the 1890s regularly delivered strong warnings against overusing opium. “By the late 19th century, [if] you pick up a medical journal about morphine addiction,” says Courtwright, “you’ll very commonly encounter a sentence like this: ‘Doctors who resort too quickly to the needle are lazy, they’re incompetent, they’re poorly trained, they’re behind the times.’” New regulations also helped: state laws passed between 1895 and 1915 restricted the sale of opiates to patients with a valid prescription, ending their availability as over-the-counter drugs.

As doctors led fewer patients to addiction, another kind of user emerged as the new face of the addict. Opium smoking spread across the United States from the 1870s into the 1910s, with Chinese immigrants operating opium dens in most major cities and Western towns. They attracted both indentured Chinese immigrant workers and white Americans, especially “lower-class urban males, often neophyte members of the underworld,” according to Dark Paradise. “It’s a poor town now-a-days that has not a Chinese laundry,” a white opium-smoker said in 1883, “and nearly every one of these has its layout” – an opium pipe and accessories.

That shift created a political opening for prohibition. “In the late 19th century, as long as the most common kind of narcotic addict was a sick old lady, a morphine or opium user, people weren’t really interested in throwing them in jail,” Courtwright says. “That was a bad problem, that was a scandal, but it wasn’t a crime.”

That changed in the 1910s and 1920s, he says. “When the typical drug user was a young tough on a street corner, hanging out with his friends and snorting heroin, that’s a very different and less sympathetic picture of narcotic addiction.”

The federal government’s efforts to ban opium grew out of its new colonialist ambitions in the Pacific. The Philippines were then a territory under American control, and the opium trade there raised significant concerns. President Theodore Roosevelt called for an international opium commission to meet in Shanghai at the urging of alarmed American missionaries stationed in the region. “U.S. delegates,” wrote Acker in Creating the American Junkie, “were in a poor position to advocate reform elsewhere when their own country lack national legislation regulating the opium trade.” Secretary of State Elihu Root submitted a draft bill to Congress that would ban the import of opium prepared for smoking and punish possession of it with up to two years in prison. “Since smoking opium was identified with Chinese, gamblers, and prostitutes,” Courtwright wrote, “little opposition was anticipated.”

Read More

National Crisis: Opioid epidemic costing US more than $500bn

Source link

http://www.sott.net
RT
Tue, 21 Nov 2017

© File Photo / Reuters

The cost of the opioid epidemic in the US has increased six-fold after a White House panel revised the total to include the value of lost lives. Previous estimates looked only at health care, law enforcement and economic activity.

The updated figures put the actual cost of the opioid crisis on the American economy in 2015 as $504 billion, or the equivalent of 2.8 per cent of GDP, according to a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), a study group serving the executive branch.

The half a trillion total is a sharp increase from a study released last year that estimated the cost of the opioid epidemic in 2013 at $79 billion. Most of the costs were attributed to health care and criminal justice spending, as well as lost productivity.

The CEA said it made adjustments to the prior research to accurately measure the number of opioid-related deaths and “other valuable activities in life besides work.”

“This is the first but not the last publication CEA plans to issue on the opioid crisis,” according to the report. “A better understanding of the economic causes contributing to the crisis is crucial for evaluating the success of various interventions to combat it.”

The staggering figures come less than a month after President Donald Trump declared opioid abuse a national public health emergency, while stopping short of designating federal disaster funds to tackle the problem.

Last year was the worst in US history for drug-related deaths. Attorney General Jeff Sessions said that about “60,000 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses” in 2016, up 8,000 from 2015.

“This epidemic is filling up our cemeteries, our emergency rooms, and equally tragic, our foster homes,” Sessions said.

Comment: Further reading:

• The Deep State and opioids trafficking
• America’s worst drug crisis ever displayed in maps and charts
• 60 Minutes bombshell: Congress is to blame for the opioid epidemic

Why Canada should declare a national opioid emergency too

Source link

theconversation.com

Pauline Voon

Research Associate at the BC Centre on Substance Use and Doctoral Candidate in Population and Public Health, University of British Columbia

Nov 19, 2017

In the United States, President Donald Trump has formally declared the opioid overdose crisis to be a national public health emergency. The numbers he cited speak for themselves: More than 64,000 Americans died from opioid overdose last year, which translates to more than 175 per day, or almost seven every hour.

The situation in Canada is just as devastating, with opioid overdoses estimated to cause at least 16 hospitalizations and eight deaths each day.

This did not happen overnight. The number of opioid overdose deaths has risen at an alarming rate since the early 2000s. Now, more than a decade later, communities, health professionals and some politicians such as NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, are still pushing for a national health emergency to be declared here in Canada as well.

By declaring a national public welfare emergency, the federal government could both acknowledge the scale of the opioid overdose crisis and unlock funds critical to a successful response.

Such a move would not be without precedent.

From SARS and H1N1 to opioid deaths

We should have learned by now, from past health crises that have affected our entire nation.

When 44 deaths were caused by SARS in Canada in 2003, the National Advisory Committee on SARS and Public Health urged the Government of Canada to “consider incorporating in legislation a mechanism for dealing with health emergencies” — one that “would be activated in lockstep with provincial emergency acts in the event of a pan-Canadian health emergency.”

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Read more: Solutions to Canada’s opioid crisis

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In 2009, when 428 deaths were caused by the H1N1 flu virus in Canada, an Emergency Operations Centre was mobilized 24 hours a day, seven days a week for several weeks. This provided more than 6,000 person-days of manpower to help coordinate emergency responses across the country.

In comparison, only 113 person-days of assistance for the opioid crisis have been reported by the Public Health Agency of Canada — to help write reports in two jurisdictions last year — despite more than 2,800 deaths from opioid overdoses in 2016 alone.

Public Health Agency of Canada’s response to the opioid crisis versus the H1N1 flu. Author provided

The federal government has already implemented important measures, such as improving access to life-saving treatments and approving supervised injection sites across the country.

However, there is still much more that can be done.

Funding pain management research

For instance, Statistics Canada is mandated to produce statistics on the health of Canadians. Unfortunately, the latest available data on painkiller misuse was released in 2012 (via the Canadian Community Health Survey – Mental Health) and no updated version has been collected since. Scientists across the country are eager to help, but may not have the resources to do so.

Providing national public data repositories would allow researchers across the country to help determine overdose trends, high-risk sub-populations and other important information that could inform national policy decisions and target health responses where they are most urgently needed.

Desperate for relief from pain following knee surgery, opioid user Lorna Bird was forced to buy drugs from the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside after her doctor stopped prescribing an opioid in response to new standards. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jonathan Hayward)

The federal government also has the power to determine which areas of research should be given priority in funding. New initiatives such as the Canadian Research Initiative in Substance Misuse are an important step forward for guiding evidence-based treatments for substance-use disorders.

Priority funding pools could also be set aside to encourage research, education and clinical care targeted toward finding safer pain management approaches — a serious problem that exists for much of the opioid-using population. Currently, there is a concerning lack of evidence-based alternative treatments for chronic pain patients whose opioid prescriptions are being cut off.

All hands on deck

Finally, empowering the health-care workforce to help address the opioid epidemic is essential.

In the United States, nurse practitioners (NPs) and physician assistants (PAs) play an important role. The Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act signed by President Obama on July 22, 2016, authorizes qualified NPs and PAs to prescribe medications for patients with Opioid Use Disorder. This provides more than 86,000 extra people who could be eligible to help prescribe life-saving addiction treatments, in addition to physicians.

Tracey Loyer, right, waits to receive a syringe of hydromorphone from addictions registered nurse Sherif Amara, before injecting herself at the Providence Health Care Crosstown Clinic in Vancouver, B.C. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck)

In Canada, there is not enough recognition of the potential role for nurses and other allied health professionals to help. Allocating funding for more training and staffing for these skilled professionals would promote an “all hands on deck” approach to assessing and treating pain and addiction, administering overdose-reversing interventions, assisting with urgent clinical research and educating and supporting affected communities.

If Canada were to declare a public welfare emergency, more health centres with skilled staff performing these essential roles could be immediately mobilized to help curb the opioid epidemic.

It’s time to recognize the opioid overdose crisis as the national public health emergency that it is.

Debate over drug consumption sites might be coming to end

Source

CBC News

By Aaron Wherry,

Posted: Nov 05, 2017  

An increase in sites has not been matched by an increase in complaints

Insite in Vancouver was the first city in North America to open a supervised injection site nearly 15 years ago. Now there are 22 sites approved in Canada. (Darryl Dyck/CP file photo)

In the space of two years, the number of supervised consumption sites approved to operate in Canada has gone from one to 22, plus three interim sites.

In November 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s new Liberal government was sworn in, there was only Vancouver’s Insite.

Health Canada has now granted approval to two dozen new sites in 11 cities. There are permanent or mobile facilities approved for Victoria, Surrey, Kelowna, Kamloops, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Lethbridge, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. Another five applications are pending.

That simple count alone might suggest that the debate over supervised consumption sites, or at least the most pitched and divisive version of that debate, is rapidly receding into the past.

There also appears to be a difference of tone in the partisan discussion.

Measuring political opposition

Interviewed by CBC News in British Columbia earlier this year, Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer ranged from being somewhat critical to unenthusiastic about such facilities. And while his comments this week to the Globe and Mail fall short of a full endorsement for such facilities, there does seem to be something like openness.

“My message to people in British Columbia and Vancouver is a sincere desire to find policy that works, balancing the legitimate and proper concerns of families and individuals who have real concerns about [supervised consumption] in their community with the need to save lives, the recognition that addicts are in a type of place where they will do what they can to get their hands on narcotics and take them,” Scheer said.

Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer might not be enthusiastic about supervised consumption sites, but his criticism this week was not strident. (Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

​Liberals still jumped on Scheer’s other comments about dealing with drug addiction — he suggested prosecution for drug use can move people towards rehabilitation — and Conservatives responded by alleging the Liberals are somehow planning to decriminalize all narcotics.

But perhaps there is some measure of progress here anyway.

Compare Scheer in 2017 with Tony Clement’s declaration in 2008, when he was the ruling Conservative Party’s health minister, that Vancouver’s Insite was an “abomination.”

A Supreme Court ruling kept Insite operating. But when the Conservative government tabled legislation to establish new tests and requirements for establishing a similar site, the Tories sent a note to supporters entitled, “Keep heroin out of our backyards.”

“Do you want a supervised drug consumption site in your community?” wrote Jenni Byrne, the party’s campaign manager. “I don’t want one anywhere near my home.”

In the midst of the 2015 election campaign, a Conservative note warned supporters that a Liberal or NDP government would “actually expand these injection houses to neighbourhoods like yours, all across Canada.”

Back in December 2016, Scheer was warning supporters of his leadership campaign that the Liberal government “wants to impose heroin injection facilities on neighbourhoods.”

That emphasis on public consultation is still there, outright opposition may still exist in the Conservative ranks and the party might yet return to its previous tone, but Scheer’s comments this week lacked a certain stridency.

And that lack of objection may extend beyond the Conservative Party.

 

 

  Opioid crisis changes context

“Whereas it took many, many years of advocacy and civil disobedience to establish a supervised injecting site in Vancouver, it’s become a lot less politicized, a lot less controversial and I think there are no really sane actors who are sitting around questioning whether there is a role for these initiatives anymore,” says Dr. Thomas Kerr, a researcher at the University of British Columbia who has studied Insite, noting that temporary facilities have been allowed to set up in Toronto and Ottawa.

The deadly opioid epidemic and the emergence of fentanyl have no doubt changed the context. At least 2,458 deaths in 2016 have been linked to opioid-related overdoses. And, unfortunately, it sometimes takes a widespread crisis to make change.

As such, it is possible a re-elected Conservative government would have also ended up expanding the number of supervised drug consumption sites. But the Liberal government, while rewriting Conservative legislation around such sites, has at least not hesitated.

The rapid increase in approvals may, in fact, result in Canada being a world leader in the use of supervised  sites. According to a count from earlier this year, the Netherlands had 30 of the world’s 92 consumption sites, followed by Germany with 24.

In her previous role as health minister, Liberal Jane Philpott reversed a ban on the medical use of pharmaceutical grade heroin to treat some people with addictions (Conservatives loudly touted that ban in 2013, but were quiet when Philpott reversed it).. Another drug, hydromorphone, is being used in Ottawa.

Kerr says new approaches are being tested as the number of sites increases, including checking drugs for unknown contaminants.

 

Politics News

Big city mayors call for coordinated nation-wide response to opioid crisis

 

 Not a panacea

It is tempting to wonder whether such a significant expansion of sites, which exist to save lives, reduce the spread of disease, improve public safety and encourage treatment, could invite a backlash: if improvements aren’t apparent, or surrounding neighbourhoods somehow seem to suffer.

But both Philpott and Kerr point to a different risk: that communities will think a consumption site is a solution in and of itself.

“What I might be concerned about is that I worry that people will get the message somehow that this is a panacea or a silver bullet, that it’s going to somehow magically address the really complex circumstances that we’re facing as a country in terms of the rising rates of overdose deaths,” Philpott said in an interview earlier this year. “This is one of a really broad range of tools that fall into the classic four pillar response to drug policy.”

(Those pillars being harm reduction, prevention, treatment and enforcement.)

What about decriminalization?

In terms of what else can be done, Kerr is among those who believe a different system of regulation and decriminalization is best for those dealing with addictions to drugs like heroin.

“It’s really, really hard to engage people in care when society treats them like a criminal and when they have to endure all the stigma, including in health-care settings, that arises from criminalization,” Kerr says.

The Liberal government has repeatedly ruled out decriminalization of hard drugs.

If the Canadian experience is any lesson, it might be deeply controversial and loudly opposed until, all of a sudden, it isn’t.

Another Record Breaking Year for Opium Production in U.S. Occupied Afghanistan

Waking Times

Isaac Davis, Staff Writer
November 2, 2017

 

Now officially a national federal emergency, the opioid crisis is gutting America. The roots of this complex issue lie in supply, not demand, and while we are beginning to see major pharmaceutical executives being indicted for conspiracy and bribery of doctors, we have a long way to go to turn this thing around.

Pharmaceutical and synthetic opioids are a major part of the catastrophe, but the other side of the supply chain is actual opium, and the world’s biggest opium market just happens to be occupied Afghanistan, the epicenter of the global heroin trade. The United States military has been operating in Afghanistan as part of the war on terror for over 16 years now, and opium production in the war-torn nation continues to increase, year-over-year, coinciding with the rise of the opioid crisis.

 2017 looks to be another record year for opium production in Afghanistan. As reported by Business Insider:

“The country has produced the majority of the world’s opium for some time, despite billions of dollars spent by the US to fight it during the 16-year-long war there. Afghan and Western officials now say that rather than getting smuggled out of Afghanistan in the form of opium syrup, at least half of the crop is getting processed domestically, before leaving the country as morphine or heroin.” [Source]

This particular article goes on to attribute the high production of opium, morphine and heroin on the Taliban, suggesting that the U.S. has been spending billions in taxpayer dollars directly fighting the drug war in Afghanistan.

“Those forms are easier to smuggle, and they are much more valuable for the Taliban, which reportedly draws at least 60% of its income from the drug trade. With its increasing focus on trafficking drugs, the Taliban has taken on more of the functions a drug cartel.” [Source]

What is not mentioned, however, is the fact that international trade in illegal drugs from war-torn countries is essential to geopolitics, implying that the U.S. military is being used to create an environment where the drug trade is allowed to flourish.

“It’s clear that drug trafficking is a major factor in world scheme, and some people put it up as maybe number three, after oil being number one, and then arms number two, and then drugs number three. Actually there’s a certain amount of interaction between those because very often where you’re having illicit trafficking of arms, the planes that take arms in one direction, the arms are paid for with drugs and the planes come back with drugs.” ~Peter Dale Scott

This suggestion coincides with production data since the U.S. invasion, and with statements made by a former U.S. who in 2015 stated that the CIA was actively involved in the Afghan drug trade.

“I’m ashamed to say that I have participated in these drug smuggling operations on many occasions. For a long time, I tried to convince myself that we were doing it for the right cause, but this burden is destroying me inside and I just can’t stand it anymore” he admitted before the court audience.

“The CIA has been dealing drugs since its creation. They’ve been smuggling drugs everywhere in the world for the past 60 years, in Taiwan in 1949 to support General Chiang Kai-shek against the Chinese commies, in Vietnam, in Nicaragua, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg” he launched out during the court trial. “We helped the Mujahideen develop poppy cultivation to fight the Soviets, but we took back matters in our own hands in 2001 when we invaded Afghanistan under Bush” he pleaded. ~John F. Abbotsford, a 38-year old Afghan war veteran [Source]

If you’re hoping or expecting a sudden end to the opioid crisis just because President Trump has called for the government-funded production of anti-opioid television commercials, you’re hope is misplaced. Afghanistan is a major key in this puzzle, as are the pharmaceutical companies.

Read more articles from Isaac Davis.

About the Author

Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here.

The Deep State trafficking killer opioids

With permission from

jonrappoport.wordpress.com

by Jon Rappoport

The Deep State trafficking killer Opioids

Raw notes on my Coast to Coast AM Noory interview

November 3, 2017

For those who doubt that Big Pharma is part of the destructive Deep State, consider the following:

Since July 26, 2000, when a landmark review was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), pharmaceutical companies, their FDA partner, many members of Congress, medical schools, and doctors have been aware that approved medical drugs have been killing and maiming Americans at a disastrous rate.

These drugs, brought to you by Pharma, kill 106,000 Americans a year like clockwork. That extrapolates to over a MILLION deaths per decade.

The 2000 JAMA review was written by the late Dr. Barbara Starfield, who was a revered public health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

I interviewed Dr. Starfield in 2009, a year or so before her death. She confirmed several key points: the figure of 106,000 deaths was a conservative estimate; there was NO comprehensive effort by the federal government to reverse this trend; no one from the federal government had ever approached her to consult on “the situation.”

At the top of the food chain, Big Pharma executives and financiers are completely aware of what their drugs are doing.

You could call this reckless endangerment, or negligent homicide. I call it what it is: murder.

The effort to kill, maim, debilitate, and disable large sectors of the population makes that population easier to control. That IS a Deep State operation. In one way or another, it has been so since the dawn of organized society.

Now we have the opioid crisis. These medical drugs are wiping out people at an alarming rate. As I’ve written in recent articles, one of the two major pipelines for the trafficked drugs starts with the pharmaceutical manufacturers, who are intentionally distributing opioids far beyond any legitimate need.

Here are my raw notes I prepared for the Coast to Coast AM interview I did two days ago with George Noory. They tell the story in telegraphic fashion:

PURDUE PHARMA push their opioid far beyond any ethical boundary—Sackler family—$35 billion in profits from OXYCONTIN. Paid $600 million in fine. Several individuals sentenced to, wait for it, 400 hours of community service.

PURDUE guilty of lying to doctors about dangers, falsely claiming patients could stay on drug long term. Paid doctors and researchers to say the dangers of addiction were overblown. Promoted that the drug could be used for a wide range of (off-label) conditions.

INSYS PHARMA: DOJ JUST ARRESTED THE FOUNDER JOHN KAPOOR ON CHARGE OF RICO RACKETEERING—USING BRIBERY AND FRAUD TO ILLEGALLY DISTRIBUTE FENTANYL TYPE OPIOID.

EXAMPLES OF OPIODS: MORPHINE, FENTANYL, OXYCONTIN, NALAXONE, DEMEROL, HEROIN, DILAUDID, VICODIN, CODEINE, PERCODAN, PERCOSET. THESE ARE GATEWAY DRUGS INTO HEROIN WHEN A PERSON’S PILLS ARE CUT OFF.

FENTANYL 50 TIMES STRONGER THAN MORPHINE.

OVER 100 MEDICAL OPIOIDS. UNCONSCIONABLE. ONLY NEED MORPHINE AND A FEW OTHERS. PROLIFERATION OF THE DRUGS FUELED EPIDEMIC AND ADDICTION. THESE ARE THE PILLS ON THE STREETS.

KILLER STATS: 2 MILLION OPIOID ADDICTS IN THE US.

300,000 DEATHS SINCE THE YEAR 2000 IN THE US.

ROUGHLY 33 THOUSAND DEATHS PER YEAR FROM OPIOIDS.

CBS: IN 2015, 90 MILLION ADULTS IN THE US TOOK A LEGIT PRESCRIBED OPIOID. Doesn’t count illegal trafficking.

EFFECTS: DEATH FROM RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION, OVERDOSE.

Common side effects of opioid administration include sedation, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, constipation, physical dependence, tolerance, and respiratory depression. Physical dependence and addiction are clinical concerns that may prevent proper prescribing and in turn inadequate pain management.

MY INSIDER SOURCE AND WASHINGTON POST: A 2016 LAW SIGNED BY OBAMA SHACKLED DEA IN ITS EFFORTS TO CRACK DOWN ON BIG PHARMA TRAFFICKERS (That law is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, signed by President Obama on 4/9/16.)

THE OTHER MAJOR TRAFFICKING PIPELINE—FOX NEWS—CHINA UNDERGROUND LABS/DEA: “A homemade designer version of fentanyl, the highly addictive opioid which is similar to morphine but is 50 to 100 times more potent, has been the center of drug busts across the country this month—with law enforcement pinpointing its origin from underground labs in China. The DEA says the China-U.S. supply is further fueling the country’s drug epidemic.”

“’This [Chinese] stuff is unbelievably potent. It is so powerful that even a tiny amount can kill you,’ DEA spokesman Rusty Payne tells FOX Business. ‘China is by far the most significant manufacturer of illicit designer synthetic drugs. There is so much manufacturing of new drugs, [it’s] amazing what is coming out of China. Hundreds of [versions], including synthetic fentanyl and fentanyl-based compounds’.”

“Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced this week details on a mail-order furanyl fentanyl smuggling ring bust. The operation had been bringing the drug — which has been dubbed ‘White China’ — into the U.S from Asia. NYPD Chief of Detective Bob Boyce said that this was the first time investigators have seen this type of fentanyl in New York City.”

“Also this week, Cincinnati Customs and Border Protection agents said they seized 83 shipments of illegal synthetic drugs, including 36 pounds of furanyl fentanyl, from China.”

The Boston Globe: “An extremely powerful drug used as an elephant tranquilizer has quickly become a new killer in the nation’s opioid epidemic, and New England authorities and health workers are bracing for its arrival.”

“The drug, carfentanil, is a synthetic opioid that is 10,000 times stronger than morphine and 100 times more potent than fentanyl, another deadly synthetic opioid.”

“The Drug Enforcement Administration has issued a nationwide alert about the drug, which its acting chief called ‘crazy dangerous.’ In Massachusetts, State Police have warned their crime lab staff about how to handle carfentanil during analysis. Even inhaling the drug or absorbing it through a cut can be fatal.”

“Law enforcement and health officials believe most users do not know they are ingesting carfentanil, which apparently is often mistakenly thought to be heroin or a mixture of heroin and fentanyl, a weaker but still lethal synthetic opioid.”

“If carfentanil’s trade route is similar to that of fentanyl, the path stretches from Chinese manufacturers to Mexican processors to smugglers who supply dealers in the United States, law enforcement officials said.”

—end of my notes—

People don’t want to admit Big Pharma trafficking operations are conscious and intentional. “Oh, they made a mistake.” “Oh, they didn’t know.” “Oh, it’s only about the money.”

When you make the drugs and sell the drugs and traffic the drugs and see the catastrophic effects, it’s not a mistake.

It’s not only about money.

At the highest levels, you want to be doing what you’re doing.

Just consult the two great British Opium Wars against China. The 19th century wars were fought to ensure a clear path for the exporting of opium into China, where millions of dead-end addicts were created. On purpose.

The idea that we now live in a kinder gentler society where the pharma barons would never intentionally do harm…that is a nothing more than a convenient fiction.

---

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

Why Should Taxpayers Pay for the Opioid Crisis When Pharma Caused It?

Source: Why Should Taxpayers Pay for the Opioid Crisis When Pharma Caused It? | Alternet

AlterNet

By Martha Rosenberg

October 30, 2017

  

Photo Credit: Lightspring / Shutterstock

As everyone today knows, opioid narcotics like fentanyl, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, morphine and oxycodone have created a toxic epidemic in the United States with at least 100 daily overdose deaths. This happened because Pharma paid off doctors, medical associations and federal lawmakers to loosen opioid regulations.

There was a reason narcotics were traditionally limited to severe pain cases, not “everyday” pain—they are addicting and can kill, as we are now seeing. But Pharma—especially the Sackler family’s Purdue which makes OxyContin—banked on the fact that younger doctors and patients did not remember why narcotics were so heavily restricted. They were right.

As new Pharma-driven prescribing guidelines were drafted and the industry-appeasing FDA waved new pills and patches through despite daily deaths, brazen “pill mills” and “Oxy docs” popped up, as did legions of addicts. Soon “opioid addiction” treatment clinics popped up to play the other side of the street—the addictions caused by the pill mills—further enriching Pharma.

Not only can narcotics like the popular OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and the fentanyl patch lead to coma, respiratory depression, shock, pulmonary edema and death, but studies suggest they can increase a body’s sensitivity to pain and make pain worse—a phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The drugs also cause constipation, hormonal derangement and negative mental changes.

The label on Purdue’s OxyContin says “WARNING: ADDICTION, ABUSE AND MISUSE; LIFE-THREATENING RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION; ACCIDENTAL INGESTION; NEONATAL OPIOID WITHDRAWAL SYNDROME; CYTOCHROME P450 3A4 INTERACTION; and RISKS FROM CONCOMITANT USE WITH BENZODIAZEPINES OR OTHER CNS DEPRESSANTS.”

Many opioid addicts began their downward spiral with opioid prescriptions they should never have been given for chronic pain. Unlike acute pain, chronic pain should seldom if ever be treated with opioids, but thanks to the short-term pill approach of our health care system, it usually is. The cost to society of the opioid epidemic in crime, disability, treatment of addiction and overdoses, lost wages and of course deaths has yet to be fully calculated.

“The problem is, patients are started, develop tolerance, need a higher dose, get tolerant to the higher dose, use more than prescribed, ask for early refills, get switched to a ‘pain management specialist,’ who if they violate the pain contracts, get fired, discharged, and then they go to the street for the opioids,” says James O’Donnell, a pharmacology professor at Rush University in Chicago.

The following medical case from a pharmaceutical textbook shows just how dangerous opioid drugs can be, whether derived naturally from poppies or created synthetically by chemists:

“A 35-year-old divorced male school teacher and wrestling coach in a southwestern state was seen by a sports medicine specialist. He had complained of chronic low back pain, and he had been taking hydrocodone/acetaminophen for the pain. The sports specialist was concerned about acetaminophen toxicity, and prescribed ‘low dose’ methadone, 10mg twice daily, and discontinued the hydrocodone/acetaminophen. The next day, he stayed at his parent’s home. He was very drowsy, sleeping on and off most of the day, and went to bed early. In the late morning of the third day, his mother was unable to awaken him. He was declared dead by EMS.”

Trump has announced a national public health emergency over opioids for a scourge created by Pharma. When the extent of damage from cigarettes was revealed, Big Tobacco agreed to cease advertising and to pay, in perpetuity, various states to compensate them for some of the medical costs of caring for persons with smoking-related illnesses. Like Pharma, Big Tobacco said cigarettes “weren’t addictive.”

Martha Rosenberg is an investigative health reporter and the author of “Born With a Junk Food Deficiency: How Flaks, Quacks and Hacks Pimp the Public Health (Random House).”

OxyContin Nation: Meet The Billionaire Family Who Helped Spark America’s Opiod Crisis

“It’s time for the American people to learn the truth about the opioid crisis and the very few elites who have profited. The question You should ask: why did our government allow this to happen?”

Source: OxyContin Nation: Meet The Billionaire Family Who Helped Spark America’s Opiod Crisis | Zero Hedge

http://www.zerohedge.com

by Tyler Durden

Oct 28, 2017

 

Unbeknownst to many, the Sackler Family, with assets of $13 billion, the nation’s 19th wealthiest family is one the top players in philanthropy. You can find the Sackler Gallery in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. or visit the Sackler wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Sackler’s even have a museum at Harvard, Guggenheim, and dozen of universities around the country. If it’s art— the Sackler family has it.

Participating in the art game takes money and a lot of it. So, where does the Sackler money come from?

According to Forbes, the “Sacklers continue to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the businesses in 2016– some $700 million last year, by Forbes’ calculations – from an estimated $3 billion in Purdue Pharma revenues plus at least $1.5 billion in sales from their foreign companies”.

Forbes outlines a brief history lesson of how the Sackler family got started in the world of medicine-

The family fortune began in 1952 when three doctors — Arthur (d. 1987), Mortimer (d. 2010) and Raymond Sackler — purchased Purdue, then a small and struggling New York drug manufacturer. The company spent decades selling products like earwax remover and laxatives before moving into pain medications by the late 1980s. To create OxyContin, Purdue married oxycodone, a generic painkiller, with a time-release mechanism to combat abuse by spreading the drug’s effects over a half-day.

The FDA approved the medication in 1995 and it soon took off. By 2003 OxyContin sales hit $1.6 billion as the drug helped drive a huge nationwide spike in opioid prescribing. At its peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet  — nearly enough for every American to have a bottle.

Now opioid prescriptions are declining amid increased scrutiny over drug addiction, down 12% since 2012 according to data from healthcare information firm IMS Health. OxyContin (which is also beginning to face competition from authorized generics while fighting to protect its patents over tamper-proof, extended-release oxycodone) saw prescriptions fall 17%.  

It wasn’t until the 1980’s, as explained by Forbes, the Sackler family through their family-owned drug company called Purdue Pharma created OxyContin. Then in 1995, the FDA approved the medication and sales exploded. Sales hit $1.6 billion in 2003, as a nationwide spike in opioids was seen. By the peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescription for opioid painkillers, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet. Good times for the Sacklers from 1996- 2012, as the family drug business exploded.

According to The New Yorker, Oxycontin ” has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue” since 1995. OxyContin’s sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin, which makes it highly addictive.

The New Yorker further says Purdue used marketing techniques to deceive the American public of the drug’s true addictive characteristics.

 Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.” Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

Oddly enough, around the time OxyContin was approved, prescription opioid deaths across the United States surged. Fast forward to more relevant times, where heroin and fentanyl deaths are exploding.

Diving into the opioid crisis onto the streets of Baltimore. It’s very common to see local citizens shooting up heroin on city streets. In this video, I asked a man how did this addiction start? Guess what he said?… It all started with legal painkillers, such as OxyContin. 

 

As a few parasitical elites make billions flooding America’s streets with opioids. We the every day American citizen have to deal with the consequences, as President Trump outlined in yesterday’s opioid crisis speech:

• In 2016, more than two million Americans had an addiction to prescription or illicit opioids.
• Since 2000, over 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids.
• Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of injury death in the United States, outnumbering both traffic crashes and gun-related deaths.
• In 2015, there were 52,404 drug overdose deaths — 33,091 of those deaths, almost two-thirds, involved the use of opioids.
• The situation has only gotten worse, with drug overdose deaths in 2016 expected to exceed 64,000.
• This represents a rate of 175 deaths a day.

Bottomline: It’s time for the American people to learn the truth about the opioid crisis and the very few elites who have profited. The question You should ask: why did our government allow this to happen?

Make Big Pharma Pay for the Opioid Crisis

Source: Make Big Pharma Pay for the Opioid Crisis

With permission from

http://www.counterpunch.org

by Karen Hicks

October 19, 2017

Photo by Maryland GovPics | CC by 2.0

Big Pharma is the culprit for the opioid crisis we have today.  This is about crime in the suites.   Big Pharma is the biggest legal drug pusher. The 2017 ranking of just the top 10 U.S. biotech and pharmaceutical companies equals $321 billion, based on revenue, according to a current Financial Times equity screener database. Drug overdoses, primarily from opioids are now the leading cause of death for Americans under age 50.  In 2016, drug overdoses killed more people than guns or car accidents.

Government grants (mostly from the National Science Foundation) to university laboratories do the basic science to explore the causes of disease, which is essential before a cure can be investigated.  Big Pharma then cherry picks the most promising prospects into their corporate labs to find a formula that will work to treat the disease.  After they make progress through clinical trials, they apply to the FDA for approval. Then the highly sophisticated advertising begins. Mostly beautiful, young and fashionably dressed pharma reps are the drug pushers.  They  seduce doctors and their staff in their offices with free lunches and free samples (like street pushers do to hook addicts) and whisk doctors to exotic, tropical locations for “seminars.”

The “Mad Men” phenomenon of present-day drug advertising is also seductive.  The actors in the ads are mostly white and middle to upper class.  They live in beautiful, big homes. The long list of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are recited generally while we watch the actors play tennis, pet their dogs, play with their grandchildren, run through fields of daisies or swim in crystal clear water in slow motion.   Middle-to-upper class Americans with generous company-sponsored health insurance pay very little for a wide variety of drugs.  “Other” people, unable to pay for legal medicines, turn to the streets to alleviate the painful symptoms of diseases they suffer with. And where do their “prescribers” end up?  Mass incarceration of mostly people of color is the answer to that question.

Some members of Congress are now pushing for government funding of opioid treatment centers.  NO!  Make Big Pharma pay!  People who were damaged by legal drugs used to seek trial lawyers to bring product liability lawsuits for damages but the enormous political power of corporate lobbyists now diminishes the ability of citizens to do that.  Furthermore, individual lawsuits take years to work their way through the courts before cases take on class action status.  I experienced this during the 1970s in the now infamous case of the damages done to hundreds of thousands of women who, like me, fell for the pharma advertising that claimed the Dalkon Shield IUD contraceptive was 100% safe and effective. Users experienced a variety of pelvic diseases, perforated uteruses, hemorrhaging, hysterectomy, infertility, and even death. After more than ten years of suffering and mounting lawsuits, this case of egregious corporate crime was exposed.  A large trust fund was eventually set up in 1999, almost 20 years after the damages took place.

Big Tobacco used deceptive advertising back in the day for getting people hooked on smoking. Some of the ads used actors dressed in a doctor’s white coat claiming that menthol cigarettes actually “soothed” the throat!  After decades, Big Tobacco finally made multiple million dollar payouts to many state health departments to help with healthcare needs.

Big Pharma must pay for its sins and take responsibility for this epidemic.  They must set up treatment centers and pay for rehabilitation of the unknowing patients who got hooked (or who had generous supplies of them in their medicine cabinets where teens could get easy access to them).  The medical need for pain relief after major surgeries is essential.  But were doctors ever instructed by Pharma to tell their patients that they must be weaned off the opioids slowly?  Or did they keep writing endless prescriptions once their patients get hooked because the risks were trivialized by Big Pharma?

More articles by:Karen Hicks

Karen Hicks is a retired adjunct professor at Lehigh University and the author of Surviving the Dalkon Shield IUD:  Women vs. the Pharmaceutical Industry.  She organized women from all over the country to fight the A.H. Robbins company (now defunct) that for years suppressed the critical information that could have spared women of these medical tragedies.

14 years of rising opioid deaths in Colorado REVERSED after marijuana was legalized

Source: 14 years of rising opioid deaths in Colorado REVERSED after marijuana was legalized – NaturalNews.com

With permission from

Natural News

by: JD Heyes

October 19, 2017

 As the country and lawmakers in Washington continue to debate the merits (and legality) of marijuana, the state of Colorado has made a startling discovery: The quasi-legalization of recreational pot use there has had a dramatically positive effect on the rate of opioid deaths.

As reported by Reason Magazine, since the legalized sale of recreational marijuana began in January 2014 after voters in the state approved a measure permitting it (recreational use still remains against federal law, however), the state has witnessed a 6.5 percent fall in opioid deaths.

Research published in the American Journal of Public Health revealed the findings, which are sure to animate advocates for wider legalization of recreational marijuana as well as those, perhaps, who are working to bring the current opioid epidemic under control.

“Legalization of cannabis in Colorado was associated with short-term reductions in opioid-related deaths. As additional data become available, research should replicate these analyses in other states with legal recreational cannabis,” the researchers concluded after studying and analyzing the opioid death rate in the state between 2000 – 2015.

“That suggestions yet another argument for marijuana legalization,” argued Reason, a libertarian publication that has long advocated for the issue. “Pot might stem and even reverse some of the trends unleashed by America’s decades-long drug war.”

Actually, one of the biggest causes of the current opioid epidemic is the modern medical system and Big Pharma. For years pharmaceutical firms have pushed the habit-forming pain medications and doctors over-prescribed them (like antibiotics) to the point where the federal government had to step in and regulate their sales.

Having said that, Reason does make this valid point: The federal government may well have also been complicit in the rise of the opioid epidemic, having stymied deeper research into the pain-killing qualities of marijuana.

That dearth of research, and the government’s inability to stave off the epidemic is probably what is driving President Donald J. Trump to continue the government’s “get tough” approach to controlling opioids, the magazine reported. The administration looks set to declare the epidemic a “national emergency,” which Reason believes will only worsen the problem:

A shift in attitudes can go a long way to combat opioid use in a way that strong-arms tactics never can.

Washington was the first state to outright legalize recreation marijuana use in 2012, but the first pot shops did not open until July 2014. Since that time recreational marijuana use has occurred in Alaska, Oregon, California, Nevada, Maine, and Massachusetts, and via the legislature in Vermont.

However, none of these states have as yet sold marijuana recreationally for as long as Colorado, but the effects of having easier access to legal marijuana on the opioid death rate has nevertheless been examined before. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in October 2014 found that between 1999 and 2010, states with laws permitting the sale and use of marijuana for medical purposes had an almost 25 percent lower “mean annual opioid overdose mortality rate” than states that did not permit medical use of cannabis.

“Because chronic pain is a major indication for medical cannabis,” said those researchers, “laws that establish access to medical cannabis may change overdose mortality related opioid analgesics in states that have enacted them.”

The current opioid epidemic has been labeled the worst drug crisis in American history. The death rate is now rivaling that of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, with overdoses from opioid ingestion now killing some 27,000 people per year.

In fact, as Natural News founder/editor Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, has noted often, Big Pharma is the biggest killer of Americans each year than anything else. As for overdoses, they are now killing more Americans each year than automobiles. (Related: Keep track of Big Pharma-related deaths in real time at PharmaDeathClock.com.)

J.D. Heyes is editor of The National Sentinel and a senior writer for Natural News and News Target.

Sources include:

NaturalNews.com

Reason.com

Insider reveals how the opioid crime network operates!

Source: No More Fake News Exclusive: insider reveals how the opioid crime network operates! « Jon Rappoport’s Blog

jonrappoport.wordpress.com

by Jon Rappoport

October 17, 2017

PBS Frontline (2/23/2016): “The opioid epidemic has been called the worst drug crisis in American history…with overdoses from heroin and other opioids now killing more than 27,000 people a year…” (Note: prescription opioids are now a very significant gateway-drug leading addicts into heroin.)

CBS News (8/1/2017): “Nearly 92 million U.S. adults, or about 38 percent of the population, took a legitimately prescribed opioid like OxyContin or Percocet in 2015, according to results from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health.”

On the condition of anonymity, an insider with intimate knowledge of the opioid crime network spoke with me. He is not a participant or a criminal. He has spent years exposing the network.

My initial question to him was prompted by the current Washington Post series on collusion between members of Congress and the drug industry. The collusion has produced a new law that makes it much harder for the US DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) to shut down major opioid traffickers. (That law is the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016, signed by President Obama on 4/9/16.)

My question was: how could a corrupt little pharmacy or medical clinic in a small town, in the middle of nowhere, sell, as reported, a MILLION opioid pills a year?

Here is the answer my source confirmed: a criminal doctor or doctors are writing 75-100 opioid prescriptions a day like clockwork; “patients” are flooding in from all over the country (many of them flying in once a month); they are sold the opioid prescriptions, and either fill them right there in the clinic, or take them to a friendly pharmacy.

These patients are actually dealers. They return home and sell the pills to addicts.

Where do the small clinics and pharmacies obtain the huge number of opioid pills? From distributors. These are legitimate companies. They may distribute all sorts of medicines. It’s their business. They know they are committing egregious crimes.

Where do these big distributors obtain their opioid pills? From pharmaceutical companies who manufacture them.

The manufacturers and the distributors have an ongoing relationship. They know exactly what they’re doing. They know the bulk of the product is going into “street sales.”

The distributors and the manufacturers are drug traffickers.

There is no doubt about this. No one is “making a mistake.” No one is in the dark. No one is being fooled.

When the DEA tries to clamp down on opioid manufacturers, this is not a sudden action, as some manufacturers try to claim. The DEA has already made several prior visits and has tried to convince the manufacturers to stop what they’re doing—to no avail.

I suggested to my source that the opioid distributors and their suppliers, the manufacturers, have a “nudge and a wink” relationship. He quickly told me it was far more than that. He left no doubt in my mind that these relationships are undertaken and maintained with full knowledge about the trafficking enterprise these partners are engaged in.

He pointed out that the 2016 law referenced above, passed by Congress—with most of the members completely unware of what they were voting for—radically changed the conditions under which the DEA could immediately freeze huge and obviously criminal shipments of opioids. It’s not a slam-dunk anymore. Far from it.

Before imposing a freeze, instead of simply showing that the (criminal) shipment poses an IMMINENT threat of death or grave harm to users, the Agency now has to demonstrate there is an IMMEDIATE threat.

This word game means the DEA must establish that people could die, not next week or next month (imminent), but “right now” (immediate). If this seems logically absurd and intentionally perverse, it is. Obviously, “immediate” is designed to give rise to back and forth debate, legalistic challenges, long postponements—and ultimately a straitjacket preventing decisive actions against opioid distributors and manufacturers.

The Washington Post (link to 10/15/2017 article below) reached out to Obama, who signed the 2016 law, and his then Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, the highest law-enforcement officer in the nation. The DEA is organized under the Attorney General and the Dept. of Justice.

Both Obama and Lynch “declined” to discuss the law. Naturally.

Who played a central role in crafting the law and pushing it through Congress?

The Post (10/15/2017): “Deeply involved in the effort to help the [drug] industry was the DEA’s former associate chief counsel, D. Linden Barber. While at the DEA, he helped design and carry out the early stages of the agency’s tough enforcement campaign, which targeted drug companies that were failing to report suspicious orders of narcotics.”

What?

Barber worked against the drug industry while employed by the DEA, and then he left the Agency and turned around and attacked it.

Continuing, The Post (10/15/2017): “When Barber went to work for the drug industry [he now works for Cardinal Health], in 2011, he brought an intimate knowledge of the DEA’s strategy and how it could be attacked to protect the [drug] companies. He was one of dozens of DEA officials recruited by the drug industry during the past decade.”

“Barber played a key role in crafting an early version of the legislation [the 2016 law] that would eventually curtail the DEA’s power, according to an internal email written by a Justice Department official to a colleague. ‘He [Barber] wrote the…bill,” the official wrote in 2014.”

The opioid crime network extends to Congress, former (if not present) DEA employees, medical-drug distribution companies, and pharmaceutical manufacturers.

It then includes medical clinics and pharmacies and prescription-writing doctors.

The murderous network is addicting, maiming, and killing Americans in huge numbers.

Jon Rappoport

The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.

The NFL’s Pot Problem

“In an interview with New Frontier Data, former NFL player Boo Williams opined that much of the NFL’s resistance to reforming its cannabis policy is due to corporate pressure, notably from the alcohol and pharmaceutical industries. “There’s going to be loss of profit from competition,” he said, if the legalization of adult-use cannabis leads to fans replacing their Budweiser with buds, or their Miller Lites with lighting up.”

Source: The NFL’s Pot Problem – High Times

hightimes.com

By J.J. McCoy

September 13, 2017   

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For decades, professional football players have habitually treated pain after games and practice sessions with everything from beers to over-the-counter anti-inflammatories or powerful prescription painkillers. The NFL’s dependence on drugs for pain management has drawn the attention of law enforcement, has been the subject of a federal lawsuit and is under investigation by the Drug Enforcement Administration.How bad has it gotten? Consider that in a given season, the league overall averages a 100 percent injury rate: Even a team’s backups and third-stringers get hurt. Those casualties add up over time, with predictable results. A 2011 survey of more than 600 retired players by the Washington University School of Medicine (funded by ESPN) found that they used opioids at an overall rate four times that of the general US population. And no other major professional sport features so many outspoken proponents of cannabis’s medicinal qualities, which makes sense given that no other sport is so closely associated with pain and injury.As noted in New Frontier Data’s “The Cannabis Industry Annual Report: 2017 Legal Marijuana Outlook,” Kannalife, a company founded in 2010, holds an exclusive license with the National Institutes of Health for the commercialization of US patent #6630507 (a cannabis patent held by the US government). Kannalife is focused on developing cannabis-based neuroprotective medicines for the treatment of hepatic encephalopathy and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

As football fans and anyone who saw the 2014 feature film Concussion know, CTE has gained heightened visibility in recent years due to the number of current and former NFL players and other athletes who have been diagnosed with diseases linked to concussive impacts.

Continue:

The NFL’s Pot Problem – High Times

Opioid Use Now Tops Tobacco Use in the U.S.

Recent federal data shows that more people in the U.S. use opioid painkillers than tobacco, highlighting the tragic opioid crisis gripping the country.

Source: Opioid Use Now Tops Tobacco Use in the U.S. | Natural Society

With permission from

naturalsociety.com

by Julie Fidler
Posted on August 20, 2017

More opioid prescriptions in Tennessee than residentsA survey released by the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) shows that more people in the U.S. use opioid painkillers than tobacco, highlighting the tragic opioid crisis gripping the country. [1]

A federal review published in the spring showed that opioid prescriptions in the U.S. decreased for the 1st time in 2 decades, which suggests that doctors are finally starting to heed warnings about the drugs’ addictive properties. However, that decrease has not translated into fewer deaths. The SAMHSA report illustrates just how widespread the problem remains.

The problem is especially severe in Tennessee, where there are more opioid prescriptions written than people actually living in the state. There are 1.18 opioid prescriptions per every resident of Tennessee. More people died from overdoses in the state in 2014 than from car crashes or shootings. [2]

Source: CDC

Nationally, 37.8% of American adults are using some type of opioid painkiller, while 31.1% of U.S. adults use tobacco problems.

According to the 2015 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), a division of the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), more than 91.8 million Americans 18 and older used prescription painkillers last year. By comparison, 75.4 million U.S. adults used tobacco products. [1]

Those numbers creep even higher when children 12 and older are included; to 97.5 million and 78.3 million, respectively. And more than 12.5% of those users admitted to misusing the painkillers.

Danny Winder, director of the Vanderbilt Center for Addiction Research in Nashville, said:

“You’d like to think that is good news and reflects a reduction of tobacco use, but unfortunately that’s not the case. It’s a particularly pernicious problem because of its prevalence…Anytime you have a substance that is legally available and has addictive properties, that’s setting up the problem.” [2]

Actually, smoking rates have declined significantly in the U.S. in the last 50 years. From 2005 to 2015, smoking among adults declined from 20.9% to, or 45.1 million, to 15.1%, or 36.5 million. In the last year alone, the overall smoking rate fell 1.7 percentage points, resulting in the lowest prevalence since the CDC began collecting data in 1965.

However, you don’t generally associate tobacco use with hard drugs, yet many people who die from heroin overdoses begin with a dependence on prescription opioids. Even in those who don’t overdose or graduate to heroin, painkiller addiction can be devastating. In 2015, approximately 40% of unemployed people in the U.S. used a prescription opioid. [2]

Another disturbing finding from the survey is that in 2014, 27.0 million people aged 12 and older had reported using an illicit drug (10.2%). This percentage in 2014 was higher than those in every year from 2002 to 2013. [1]

The 2nd most common type of illicit drug use remained nonmedical painkiller use, but the percentage of people aged 12 or older in 2014 who were current nonmedical users of pain relievers (1.6%) was lower than the percentages in most years from 2002 to 2012.

The 2014 NSDUH estimated 66.9 million people aged 12 or older were tobacco users. 

Dr. Richard Soper, chief at the Center for Behavioral Wellness in Nashville, said:

“We require tobacco companies to put warning labels on tobacco products; you don’t really see that in opioid products. As long as the FDA is continuing to approve opioids, there will still be access to it. There will still be doctors writing prescriptions.” [3]

In early 2016, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published draft guidelines outlining testing standards for generic drugs that have been produced to be harder to crush and dissolve or snort. The agency requires that generic drug makers be able to prove that their product is bioequivalent to the name brand drug. But under the new guidelines, manufacturers will also have to prove that their generic drug has the same anti-abuse properties as its name brand equivalent.

However, this is the same agency that approved OxyContin for use in children in August 2015.

Sources:

[1] Newsmax

[2] The Tennessean

[3] The Daily Caller

CDC