There’s lots of attention now on treating opioid addicts. In the news this week, FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said that the government would focus on Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) to help all the addicts hooked on opioids. But not everybody likes that idea.
“If we’re just substituting one opioid for another,” said Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, in the same news article. “We’re not moving the dial much.” Price may have been referring to the idea – pushed by psychiatrists and pharmaceutical firms – that addiction is a lifelong mental disease, and needs lifelong “treatment” with other opioids manufactured and sold by BigPharma. One hooked person is a lifelong customer, regardless of whether the addiction began on the street or in a doctor’s office.
Big pharma created heroin (Bayer) and LSD (Sandoz). Merck pioneered the commercial manufacture of morphine, distributed cocaine and invented MDMA. OxyContin which started the latest “opioid crisis” was created by German scientists and pushed into society by Purdue Pharma. Crystal meth was first created in Japan and after World War II Abbott Laboratories won FDA approval for meth as a remedy for alcoholism and weight gain. Fentanyl, responsible for the majority of opioid overdose deaths, was invented by Janssen Pharmaceutica.
Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT) takes people addicted to heroin, for example, and switches them to legal pharmaceutical products such as methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. So much for the poison.
BigPharma also markets the antidote. A drug to use in cases of opioid overdose, called Naloxone (Also called Narcan and Evzio). Thousands of first responders, doctors, and family members of addicts or those on opioid pain relievers now carry this opioid antidote. The cost of a dose just jumped from $575 to about $4,500 according to Wired Magazine, and has a shelf life of 18-24 months.
So poison plus antidote, it’s all good if you’re BigPharma. Create all the nasty drugs to hook people, get your reps to push prescription opioids, hook thousands, create a crisis, and divert the addicts to Medication Assisted Treatment on other opioids you can bill insurance for. The ones that overdose, give them a $4500 shot of Naloxone and keep them alive and using.
And since drug addiction is a mental disease, the psychs get in on the fun as well, prescribing shrink meds that have lots of side effects like mass shootings, after which psychs can offer counseling in the form of more prescriptions. And now that marijuana legalization is spreading, the psychs have conveniently discovered that smoking weed creates psychosis, which needs treatment, pharmaceuticals, etc. And down the rabbit hole we go.
