Solving The Wrong Problem — Legal Opioids Are NOT Causing More Overdose Deaths
Big Pharma conspiracy theories are marketed every day to rationalize a false narrative: Addiction to legal opioids is being blamed for rising overdose deaths, caused in reality by black-market fentanyl (due to drug Prohibition). Policy makers are responsible, not drugs or drug makers.
More people are dying from drug overdoses than in past decades. The number is not an “epidemic” compared to deaths from obesity and several other causes, but drug overdoses may approach or overtake alcohol as a leading cause of death in a few years if the problem continues growing. I expect this to happen for one simple reason: we won’t solve the problem until we identify it correctly, and there are several groups (sadly, even journalists) who are benefitting from promoting the wrong problem.
The increase in overdose deaths is a result of black-market drugs, but every time most politicians, journalists, doctors, researchers, or other “experts” discuss the issue they talk solely about limiting legally prescribed opioids. I feel like I’m living in a gigantic insane asylum. They leap from the false idea that opioids are “highly addictive” to the questionable theory that opioid use for pain has led to higher levels of addiction as a “gateway drug,” and finally make the nonsensical jump to openly presuming that “over prescribing” has caused the rise in deaths.
They present these ideas as facts, and most people nod their head in agreement without thinking. Whenever drugs are verbally linked to death, we all think “Drugs are bad.” They’re marketing a fake problem. This is a criminal act in my opinion, because people are suffering and dying for the benefit of arrogant power brokers who are toying with the lives of Americans. Lies are being marketed as common-sense memes. Pain and addiction are poorly understood. There’s nothing “evidence based” about pain. We do know that how it feels to feel pain is a completely subjective sensation. We do not have a good theory of qualia yet.
I get sick to my stomach watching the members of the President’s “Opioid Commission” drone on and on about the wrong problem (drug manufacturers) in meetings filled with anti-opioid lobbyists and companies that rake in tax dollars as a substitute for creative thinking in a fair marketplace. Money is being diverted. People are being abused. I’m not a secret agent working for Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Yes, drug companies probably marketed opioids inappropriately in the last century, but it’s wrong to conflate overdoses (a new problem) with addiction (the rate hasn’t changed much) and falsely claim causation.
No amount of government control can save someone from themselves, but allowing authoritarianism to continue unabated can bring technological progress to a grinding halt. Properly labeled and marketed opioids (legal or not) do not kill responsible drug users. We must all support the following values: maximizing the freedom of individual choice while ensuring a commensurate balance of personal responsibility and limitation of government. Remove the tinfoil hat and embrace fallibilism. We not only make individual mistakes, but we must be allowed to make them. This is the most fundamental measure of freedom.
Some elite groups — including lobbyists, “rehab” interests, politicians, drug makers, law enforcement, bureaucrats, and insurances companies — are being selfishly served by triggering the most vile instincts of human behavior. Most of them have been deliberately fooling a gullible public, while others are mindlessly parroting statements and avoiding an unpopular stand (they are gullible, too). Saying “No, drugs are good!” is apparently too much to ask of a leader today. Not only are drugs good, but opioids are good. It’s a powerful, effective drug class that relieves pain. It’s time for the bigots who are already responsible for a considerable amount of suffering, suicide, and accidental death to admit error or keep quiet. It’s time for the criminals who are profiting from the spread of false information to be exposed.
People like Governor Chris Christie (addicted to food) claim they want to destigmatize drug addiction, yet they still support drug criminalization for personal use. Whenever these leaders speak, they consistently and wrongly connect the skyrocketing number of overdose deaths to legally manufactured opioids, when prescribing has declined or remained steady every year in recent history. They are working every day to spread another bad news article or research paper linking legal opioids and prescribed drugs to an “epidemic” that doesn’t exist. And even if it does exist, illicit drugs are being used— not prescribed drugs. Stigma is being expanded to pain patients.
Drug addicts can just as easily start by using illicit heroin, or diverted legal medication. How many members of Congress know they’re not even addressing the right problem, which means they know more drug addicts are going to be overdosing in the coming years? Doesn’t this make them corrupt? I readily concede that most are just slow-witted followers who mimic gibberish they see and hear. We need to start holding the corrupt members accountable, and educating the dumb ones.
No prescription is provided to most people who abuse drugs, and so every time we hear a politician bash drug makers for “flooding the streets” with legal opioids — they’re either ignorant or corrupt. Now, if someone who benefits from using opioids is undermedicated as a result of years of increasingly oppressive regulation — which today is nearly all pain patients— of course they’ll appear to be “drug seekers” who suffer from “opioid use disorder.” But we know the spiking overdose deaths referenced every day by “opioid epidemic” parrotheads are caused by illicit fentanyl, sold deceptively as a less potent drug. Heroin, hydrocodone, and now even cocaine are being laced with fentanyl from China.
We also know that law enforcement isn’t winning the war against drug cartels. The reason is easy to surmise: the cartels are more creative. The DEA has failed to police illicit drugs effectively, so to justify their continued existence and funding they’re “battling” against professionals and patients who follow the rules. They’re punishing the people who agree to have government monitor them in a database (what choice do they have anyway?). They’re barely affecting the drug addicts who aren’t in the database. Are they “saving” drug addicts? No, and I doubt they care. It’s easier to attack doctors, nurses, pharmacists, injured veterans, and elderly people. DEA leaders and public prosecutors can trick the many cavemen living among the masses into supporting their never ending “crackdowns.”
More heroin users are dying not because they’re less knowledgeable than in the past. More of them are dying because they don’t know the potency of the drug they’re being forced to use, because of drug criminalization and the new war against legal pain medication. They’re buying mislabeled drugs from a black market, and the DEA has been failing for a half-century to “get drugs off the streets.” Cartels are using more potent opioid analogues to avoid interdiction, and smaller local operations exhibiting a total disregard for product quality and human life are springing up everywhere. They sell drugs of unknown potency and chemical makeup.
These dangerous drugs and ideas are being sold to people in middle America, making the fake prescribing problem highly visible, so bigoted journalists are hopping on board the “click train.” There’s money to be made in goading neanderthals into bashing opioid users. Most reporters spread misleading information about a crisis connected to legal opioids that doesn’t exist. They scream about people “getting addicted” because of greedy drug manufacturers, as if those companies do not make money from many other types of ventures. Any reputable journalist from the last century would have laughed at a DEA whistleblower who approached them claiming the agency lacked the ability to use sufficient force, but CBS News chose to side with the United States government and the “war on drugs” crowd. Government is the side devoid of even a single speck of creative thought. Journalism is dead.
The compulsive spreading of this inaccurate information designed by leaders of an anti-opioid cult headed by Dr. Andrew Kolodny (The Heller School at Brandeis University) is a form of addictive behavior, is it not? I submit that anyone who expresses disdain for addiction by repeatedly referencing this pattern of lies tying legal opioids to overdose deaths is a hypocrite, as well as an addict who needs help. Medication hasn’t been “flooding the streets” for many years in most states, and who cares if legal drugs do flood the streets as long as opioid users can access quality controlled and reliably potent medication that won’t kill them? The thing killing opioid users is mislabeled, illicitly manufactured drugs. This is the problem we need to resolve.
Americans do not typically use heroin, so it’s not especially addictive. It’s not “highly addictive.” Even if we were facing an epidemic, contending we “must do something” via the use of armed force to interdict legal opioids as a “battle” against them is insane, because we’ve been doing precisely that for generations and making the problem worse. More deaths are happening for an evident reason, and if anything the inability to access legal opioids leads to more death. Even if the gateway drug theory were correct and more people were “getting addicted,” being addicted is not the same as overdosing.
We know from several years of testing that greater limitation on legal opioid prescribing doesn’t decrease the use of criminalized drugs. In fact, excessively restricting legal opioids diverted in the past for use by drug addicts can only do one thing: drive those addicts to the same black market drug we know is actually killing more and more opioid users. This is why overdose deaths are rising at such an alarming rate, especially after a series of additional prescribing restrictions have been established at both the state and federal levels. Using the prescribing system as a tool for policing “pre-crime” (see “The Minority Report,” by Philip K. Dick) is unConstitutional. Republicans have ironically destroyed the doctor-patient relationship and the prescribing system.
Individual patients deserve pain relief if they’re competent and they want it. They deserve to be able to work with a primary care doctor to get reliable medication. Any medication. Lies suggesting opioids “don’t work” for chronic pain are a hundred times worse than any lie told by any drug addict to score heroin. Marketing this lie as part of a pattern used to rationalize a fake moral panic is worse still. If the opioid commission wants to recommend funding help for all opioid users, fine. Make buprenorphine over-the-counter, or fund programs to make it free for all users. Fund scientific research. Decriminalize personal drug use at the federal level.
However, please stop allowing criminals to profit by feigning a desire to “save” drug addicts at the expense of our weakest, most vulnerable, and in many cases our greatest citizens (veterans, elderly, intractable, sickle cell…many others). All opioid users are not drug addicts, and treating them like drug addicts doesn’t “destigmatize” anyone. It places them both into a group despised by cavemen masquerading as empathetic Americans or altruists. Those who stand against individual responsibility and in favor of government overreach must be called out. If big pharma marketed any drug inappropriately in the last century, go ahead and fine them (again), but stop the ridiculous accusations about drug manufacturers causing more overdose deaths. More overdoses are occurring in Florida in large part because pill mills were closed, so more people are risking illicit drugs.
We know the damage done during Prohibition by authoritarian monsters, and today we have the same kind of leaders and intellectuals: people like Governor Christie, Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Dr. Kolodny. Yet we’re making the same mistakes again. Why are we allowing these people to influence policy at all? Why aren’t more people criticizing their terrible ideas? When someone tries to excessively police the individual use of drugs, they become the criminal. The FDA should oversee safe manufacturing of food and drugs, but neither they nor the CDC (the DEA shouldn’t even exist) should be allowed to oversee efficacy. We’re wasting tax dollars on a fake crisis, while government is causing a real one — a genocide.
Using a drug is not a crime. The DEA is a criminal organization. They have failed for 45 years to “get drugs off the streets,” so now they’re attacking an innocent group of people. It’s time for members of Congress to pick a side. The ones who rant about big pharma “flooding the streets” do not care about overdose victims. They are the ones flooding the streets, with illicit fentanyl. They flood the streets through inaction, by hand waving and marketing a fake epidemic, and by imposing greater and greater limitations on the ability for patients to access quality opioid medication. Meanwhile, more addiction sufferers are overdosing and chronic pain patients are suffering and committing suicide.
