Posts tagged - bigpharma

Medication Assisted Treatment in Prisons Does Not Improve Outcomes

Posted on: December 15, 2017, in: , , , ,

pixabay alcatrazThis story in The Fix claims that inmates in federal prisons are not getting medication assisted treatment (MAT) and that such treatment improves outcomes.

But hold on a minute. Inmates go cold turkey when they are incarcerated unless the prison has an active drug smuggling pipeline. So inmates clean up and are on no drugs during the term of their sentence.  MAT, on the other hand, puts them on a pharmaceutical such as methadone, naltrexone or  buprenorphine, which are categorized as opiates.

So despite claims that MAT is “Not Giving Drugs to Drug Addicts” that’s precisely what happens.

There are some things to be said for MAT, such as the user has a prescription and a pharmacy instead of a dealer in an alley, and usually the prescription is paid for by medical insurance or some sort of federal program, while the addict may hold up a liquor store for his fix. Aside from that, claims that MAT “improves outcomes,” is playing with definitions. They’re less likely to revert to their drug when released because they are full of another prescription opioid paid for by the taxpayer and produced by BigPharma.

The cold turkey inmate is more likely to go back to heroin for example, than a released inmate with a skinful of methadone, but  methadone is much harder to kick than heroin, and “BigPharma,” the big legal drug dealer, gets the cash instead of “guy in alley” the little illegal drug dealer. So the “successful outcome” is comparing a guy clean of drugs who may revert, to a guy full of prescription opioids for the rest of his life who is less likely to buy on the street.

Now say you are BigPharma or a BigPharma investor. You are in pretty good financial shape because drug addiction is classified as “Substance Use Disorder” which like a few  real diseases is incurable — at least according to the psychs. So the user is condemned to a life of prescriptions to treat his substance use disorder and that just means good times for BigPharma. Doesn’t mean MAT is bad, just that it doesn’t get an addict off drugs. It just switches him to another drug, so the “clean and free of drugs” outcome is not considered, because shrinks have decreed it is impossible.

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Earliest States to Legalize Weed “Need Mental Health Help”

Posted on: December 13, 2017, in: , , , , , ,

marijuana pixabay Two of the earliest states to legalize recreational marijuana – Colorado and Washington in 2012 — are in dire need of mental health services according to Mental Health America. Weed which in the 1960s had about 3 percent THC, how has as much as 34 percent of the drug, and psychiatrists have cautioned that at present concentrations weed can cause severe mental illness.

Colorado ranks 43rd in the study in “lower rates of access to care,” and Washington ranks 34th. Expect more crazy people as legalization takes hold in other states, and more calls go out for psychiatric help to quell the “mental health crisis of the underserved.”

Legalization of weed, decriminalization of hard drugs and the opioid crisis IMHO is part of a psychiatric/BigPharma marketing plan with the goal of making every American a BigPharma customer.

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Psychedelics Are Back, and They Cure Everything!

Posted on: November 21, 2017, in: , , , , , , , , ,

freakout pixabayHave you noticed the promotion of psychedelics recently? Since most Baby Boomer druggies can’t remember the 1960s, many have forgotten – except in vivid flashbacks – the downside of dropping acid and lots of other psychedelic concoctions. Little things like hallucinations and going nuts for a while or forever, and “scorched brain syndrome.”

Timothy Leary told us to “turn on, tune in and drop out,” but later said that LSD got into the public arena and was abused. Poor guy, he had it all figured out that it would only be used by PhDs and above, and then the unwashed masses got hold of it and used it to hallucinate. The CIA used it to drive soldiers crazy and to suicide, and stupid people who grew up watching Superman thought they could fly off tall buildings wearing meat bodies.

OK, so that was then. Today we also have stupid people – who exist in every generation – telling us that LSD, Ahuasca, DMT and other psychedelic substances can cure addiction, PTSD, depression,   anxiety, eating disorders, smoking, OCD, crime, toe fungus, warts,  and every other mental illness formerly treated by pharmaceuticals which have proven ineffective or for which the patents have expired.

But using LSD, for example on those with mental illness can make things worse, according to some sources Stupid people in academia — there are such people, after all Leary was a Harvard professor –  in the military, medicine, psychiatry and government seem to have decided that psychedelics, electroshock and mental health pharmaceuticals are useful, at least to the extent that “we don’t know why they are troubled, and we don’t know what these treatments do, so we’ll just roll the dice, blast their brains  with electricity or pickle them with drugs and see what happens. After all, this isn’t rocket science.”

So a bunch of states have legalized marijuana for medical use, and eight states have legalized it for recreational use. And as evidence it is truly a “gateway drug” small amounts of hard drugs have now been decriminalized in Oregon – stuff like  LSD, heroin, methamphetamine, etc, and initiatives are under way in California  and Oregon to legalize psychedelic mushrooms.

Now the The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies  (MAPS) is also trying to legalize psychedelics and marijuana, and other stupid people are already hard at work on legislation to legalize bad trips and drug-induced psychosis. With all these extravagant claims for psychedelics, these magical mystery cures, one might be advised to consider where these wild claims are coming from and who stands to profit from a nation on drugs.

After all, most of the studies, that all these reports of wonderfulness depend on, can’t be reproduced, meaning they are either sloppy or influenced by their funding to get a specific result. So look for yourself and don’t go dropping acid to cheer up, because you may end up stuck in Nightmare Town with a lot of burnouts from the 1960s.

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Hey, Addiction is a Brain Disease and “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Posted on: November 20, 2017, in: , , , , ,

drugs pixabayAccording to a statement on the Betty Ford Foundation website, and many other sources, addiction is a brain disease, not a character flaw. This “brain disease model” may be promoted by well-meaning people who have addicted loved ones, but it’s not accurate, just a PR concept, with no scientific evidence whatsoever. But search “addiction is a brain disease” and the Internet is full of people who bought into the lie, claiming that’s the way it is. Opioid addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction, it’s the new fashion statement to be addicted to one or more things that are just too big and strong for little old you to overcome, you poor thing.

Psychiatrists dreamed up this idea to make money and to get more people under their control. First they cozied up to traditional medicine to seem more official, and while psychiatrists have medical degrees, that’s just cover for voodoo head-bump crystal-vibration nonsense that is modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

They like to use diabetes, as an example of why drug abusers are so helpless. “It’s something that happens to your body, you can’t do anything about it, it’s not a moral failing, and it requires a drug for the rest of your life.” A drug which — just like all those street drugs out there — were produced by BigPharma.

So if you are drug addicted, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it, it’s your body’s fault, probably something you got from your parents via their DNA. And did I say “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Along with this brain disease model is the hint of a protected class of citizens who are not responsible for their condition. Drug addicts – I can see it coming – are not responsible for their condition and need care at public expense for the rest of their life, because, after all, it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT.

Well, I beg to differ. Anytime something you do – like knocking over liquor stores to feed your heroin habit, or injecting opioids or cooking meth in your spare room and screaming at people who aren’t there — you are killing yourself, endangering people around you and filling your neighborhood with crazy, amped up psychos who break into houses and shoot people who they think are going to kill them. THAT IS YOUR FAULT YOU JERK!

It’s not your body, it’s the choices and you’ve made them. The choices that led you down back alleys where needles litter the street,  and now you – and all the “brain disease model apologists for drugs and drug abusers” are determined to “reduce the stigma” and engage in “harm reduction” where you don’t get arrested for creating all this chaos, but instead you are swaddled into the caring arms of psychiatrists who will put you on methadone maintenance at public expense, or some of the new psychedelic drugs which means all those people who actually work at real jobs, creating useful products and services for society will pay for your treatment for the rest of your useless and non-productive life.

You can’t change your body, but you can change your mind. If you listen to the psychs they don’t give you a ghost of a chance to dig yourself out and you’ll just keep using street drugs, psych drugs, all kinds of deadly crap, until you overdose and die, and the psychs will shake their heads sadly and say they need more money to treat poor sorry-ass drug addicts like you who need sympathy and drugs to live.  Oh, and let’s get rid of the “stigma” of addiction, because after all it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!

One thing about sympathy? It’s deadly. It’s an agreement from others that you are a sad little nobody. It will suck the life out of you, kill your own ability to push through obstacles. It makes a basically good spiritual being think they get love and help only when they are pathetic.

The psychs won’t tell you this, but you are a basically good spiritual being, who’s been through hell and back. You are tough, you’re still here and you can change your life. It’s not destiny that determines your future, it’s the choices you make. So stop whining and get busy cleaning up. It’s not easy, the drugs make you a slave and you have to do courageous things to break those chains and escape.

And forget about suicide, death doesn’t help. You come back the same spirit you were, with the same temptations, same vices, the same choices in front of you. Different body, different DNA, and it’s not the body that will make or break you. It’s not a chemical imbalance or some phony brain disease, it’s those stupid choices you make.

So stop blaming your body, your parents, the horrible and evil and terrible society that drives you to drink or use meth or some other crap you snort, eat, inject, smoke or cram up your ass. If you want to be a slave there are lots of others out there who will be happy to make you one. You can commiserate, share needles, give each other AIDS and hepatitis and die in some piss-stinking alley feeling really sorry for yourself. Or you can get well you sorry-ass addict and start helping other people — that’s the way out.

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Hillary Clinton: Teach Reading, Writing and Mental Health

Posted on: November 14, 2017, in: , , , , , , , ,

Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton wants a nationwide curriculum to teach depression and anxiety in high schools, according to Modern Healthcare. New York is already plowing ahead on mental health, as last year Gov. Cuomo already mandated the inclusion of  mental health issues in the curriculum.

But hold on a minute. Already, 3.4 million New York State residents are functionally illiterate  – many the product of dysfunctional public schools. But many schools now provide food, counseling, contraception, “life skills” like cooperation, self-control, motivation, and other so-called “soft skills.” And next year they begin training on mental health. Perhaps if public schools taught reading, writing and arithmetic really well, students would become literate and productive adults, and wouldn’t need to be medicated with psych drugs.

Because, you see, all this talk about mental health for children is nothing more than a marketing scheme to get them on  psychiatric pharmaceuticals, so those BigPharma CEOs can get even richer.

In 2013, around 8 million school kids were on psychiatric drugs  but there are still lots of kids out there who are “underserved” as they say, and Teenscreen for example, was funded by BigPharma and designed to get kids on stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall and  into the psychiatric pill-mill.

Education is already a mile wide and an inch deep, a swamp of social programming and political correctness. There are good teachers out there, but the social agenda is against them. Homeschooling, charter schools, check them out and whatever you do, keep your kids away from the psychs!

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Take the Poison and the Antidote and Call Me in the Morning

Posted on: November 14, 2017, in: , , , , ,

death pixabayBigPharma is busily creating poisons and antidotes, and making big bucks on both. The latest is Ingrezza, an antidote for tardive dyskinesia, caused by antipsychotic medications. Tardive dyskinesia causes uncontrollable motions of face and body such as sticking out the tongue, waving the arms, moving the lips and so on. Often it’s permanent. One of the problems with Ingrezza is “somnolence” so it can put you to sleep and you might snore, but hopefully your arms will stop waving and your mouth will stop moving. With lots of research, BigPharma will soon have some kind of speed-type stuff to handle that sleepy side-effect stuff. And a 30-count bottle of 40mg Ingrezza tablets will cost you – or the taxpayers if you have some kind of universal health coverage – about $5,275.

Other examples of the poison/antidote paradigm are all the street drugs – which were all invented by BigPharma – and now with medication assisted treatment, addicts get off the illegal street drug poisons and get onto the prescription medication antidotes like methadone, which are really actually poisons themselves, but at least they are billable under Medicaid and insurance and BigPharma can profit from them unlike the street drugs they invented but can no longer monetize.

But as the rehab people can tell you, methadone is an opioid which is actually harder to kick than heroin, as it takes longer to metabolize. Luckily, the psychiatrists have already decreed that addiction is a chronic disease, just exactly like diabetes, for example, and so lifelong medication assisted treatment is prescribed. So there’s little danger of addicts, or patients as they are now called, getting off the stuff for good, unless they die, and BigPharma has a drug to prevent that.

Somewhere  along the way, when the poisons/antidotes/poisons get too much for the body, BigPharma has a real antidote called Naloxone or Narcan that shuts off the effects of opioids temporarily and allows the addict/patient to begin breathing again. It doesn’t stop the addiction – which, as you will recall, is officially a lifelong disease – so poison antidote Narcan, poison, antidote, Narcan will likely continue until death of the addict/patient.

IMHO, BigPharma should be required to do amends on all the poisonous crap they have poured into the public bloodstream, by funding drug rehab centers around the country that have as a product a person stably off all drugs. In addition, Congress could implement this 12-step program to get America off drugs. Maybe then we could get back to a real life where drugs are only for real diseases.

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The Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Railroad

Posted on: November 01, 2017, in: , , , , , , ,

robot pixabayYou take 200 depressed people, implant wires into their brains. Half of the implants you charge with electricity, half you don’t, to get a good control group. Results? A flop, but some people want to keep the implants after the test. Why? Well, as studies have established, depressed people feel better when people ask them how they feel, with a live person running their fingers through those wires in the head. Ethics aside, the big question is – who will pay for these implants, the follow ups, the flashlight batteries, and after the subject’s demise the autopsy, brain slicing and microscopy?

The patients won’t be paying, because as psychiatry transitions from pharmaceuticals that don’t work to implants that won’t work (electroceuticals they are called) bigpharma needs trillion-dollar revenues to overcome generic drug competition, expiring patents, the gradually rising specter of drug side effects such as mass murder, and basically, the fact that popular drugs like antidepressants don’t work, or work only because of “the placebo effect.” And to fund this transition we’re talking big money, that can only come from Medicare, the Veterans Administration, insurance companies or best of all, a single-payer health care system that operates on “from each according to ability, to each according to need.”

This is the beginning, IMHO, of a drive to get deep brain implants, and their cousins, “transcranial magnetic stimulation” paid for not as freaky science experiments but as legitimate treatments for mental and physical disorders. And that means some big bucks, in the “Trillion-with-a-T” range. In exchange, perhaps we can one day plug into our computers and learn to play the piano or dance the tethered tango.

In the meantime, to get us accustomed to the idea, we’re already implanting RFID dog-tracking chips in people for their own good and to give them immediate access to buy stuff from the snack machine, login to computers and use pay toilets. It’s like those spy movies where the guy — to get off the grid — must dig a tracking chip out of his arm with a steak knife.

First to get the implants will be guys with big federal government pockets. Veterans with VA benefits and PTSD, most likely, on lifetime subscription plans paid for by adding to our Chinese debt. Anyway, we’re being railroaded down the track of bad ideas fueled by good sci-fi movies. And – I have to do this – as the Borg always said, “resistance is futile.“

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The Opioid Crisis: A BigPharma Marketing Scheme?

Posted on: October 26, 2017, in: , , , , , ,

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.

 

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Las Vegas Shooter on Psych Drugs

Posted on: October 04, 2017, in: , , , , , , ,

According to the Las Vegas Review Journal, mass murderer Stephen Paddock, was prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Valium in June, and also in 2016. The drug, which is also known as diazepam, was reported to create an increased risk of aggressive behavior, according to a Finnish study of some 960 people, reported by CBS.

According to the CBS article “the odds of committing homicide were 31 percent higher during time periods when offenders were on antidepressants, versus when they were not.” But the article quickly went on to say that the danger was insignificant, and psychiatrists, as could be expected, agreed.

Notably,  Scientology actress Kirstie Alley was scorned on Monday when she said that psychiatric drugs contributed to many mass shootings. And the Citizens Commission for Human Rights has been saying that for years. None of that now seems so far-fetched, especially since investigators have so far been unable to find a motive for the largest mass shooting in American history.

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Depressed? Antidepressants an Expensive Scam

Posted on: October 03, 2017, in: , , , ,

According to Scientific American, one out of 10 Americans take anti-depressants, and they are the most commonly taken prescription drugs in America.

But antidepressants are a scam. “An in-depth analysis of clinical trials,” said the Scientific American story subhead “reveals widespread underreporting of negative side effects, including suicide attempts and aggressive behavior.”

Other studies established that antidepressants are only slightly better at dealing with depression than placebos, and the slight difference might be because of the “placebo effect” of the antidepressants. The more it costs, the better it should work, right?

Another report said that cutting down on sugar reduces depression.

Exercise PixabayA number of studies say that exercise reduces depression. A Duke University study back in 2000 for example, found exercise just as effective as Zoloft for kicking clinical depression and better than Zoloft for keeping it away. But 17 years later, doctors are prescribing antidepressants instead of exercise because — well, it’s easier and there’s big money in it. What’s the actual cost for a hit of Zoloft? $169 for 30 25 mg tablets. Maybe your copay is much less, but somebody is paying the difference, and that’s why bigpharma keeps pushing this stuff.

And then there’s death. Antidepressants significantly increased the risk of death, according to a study.

A recent report from the National Institute of Mental Health showed that one of the better treatments for those who have attempted suicide is written and verbal communication and cognitive behavioral therapy.

And finally, if you’re pregnant, a 16-year study of one million Danish children found that use of antidepressants during pregnancy increased the probability of mental illness in the children.

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