Posts tagged - opioids

The Addiction Scam

Posted on: January 31, 2018, in: , , , , ,

One of the biggest hurdles psychiatry has to overcome is people that think they are sane. Now psychiatrists are taught that no one is sane, that everyone is psychotic, neurotic or “underserved.” Several techniques have been developed by the head shrinkers to made people question their own sanity and stability. First,, they medicalized normal behavior such as nail biting, checking to see if the front door is locked more than once when you leave the house, worrying about things, not worrying about things, being too introverted and inactive, being too extroverted and active, and so on, to the tune of more than 300 diagnoses in the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which is what the shrinks use to bill insurance for literally everything under the sun.

One of the biggest convincers of people that they are nuts, are “direct to consumer” drug ads. Trouble sleeping? Restless legs? Erectile dysfuntion? Feeling low? Ask your doctor if expensive drugging is right for you!

Well, the U.S. is one of only two countries in the world that allow “direct to consumer” ads for prescription drugs. Why? Well, it boosted drug sales by 30 percent or more when you and I went to our doctors and asked for some prescription we saw on TV.

Another convincer is to push the lie that everyone is addicted to something. You may not be a heroin addict shooting up in an alley, but you too, Mr. and Mrs. America, are addicted, and here is a laundry list of addictions basically pulled out of someone’s nether orifice to use in marketing drugs and psychiatric services. Oh and just in case you seek help for that “addiction” be warned that under certain circumstances, you can be held against your will in a facility for up to 72 hours. For those addicted to freedom, that could be a bummer.

OK, so here is the latest batch of “addictions.”

Cell phones
Gaming
Lust
Pornography
Energy Drinks
Wealth Culture
Shopping
Martial Arts are Said to Help with Gaming Addiction, but then there’s:
Exercise

Are you outraged? According to some idiots, outrage is also an addiction so before you find yourself in the loony bin for a 72-hour involuntary hold, better curb that outrage and take a pill.

So there are certain things, like opioid drugs, that cause cravings and physical distress if they are discontinued. The psychs are busily trying to convince everyone that shooting up in an alley is a mental disease that is incurable and must be maintained by pharmaceuticals for the rest of the addict’s life. They don’t think there is such a thing as willpower and try to get drug-free recovery categorized as quackery. So that 72-hour hold for shopping addiction can mean a lifetime on some psychiatric drug. Welcome to the crazy house.

 

 

No Comments

The Medicalizing of America

Posted on: January 19, 2018, in: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

Photo by Benjamin Combs on Unsplash

I’ve been plowing through news feeds for a few months now, and the issues I’m interested in – which focus on the spreading influence of BigPharma, psychiatry and the medication of America – have sort of settled into a number of issues. Here are some of the more prominent ones:

1.   The marketing of psychedelic drugs to cure most everything from depression to crime. The Military is pushing it, as well as anonymous donations to the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). LSD is good for you, magic mushrooms are a spiritual tonic, and taking psychedelic trips will make you a good person, empty the prisons, and you can tune in, turn on and drop out like last time.

2.   Along with number 1 above, is the first official admission that anti-depressants are no more effective than placebos and have wildly variant effects on individuals. One in six Americans takes an antidepressant, and about $150 billion is spent per year on such medications and related costs. So BigPharma will take a huge hit unless alternatives such as psychedelics and electroceuticals take hold.

3.   Electroceuticals, the implanting of electrical devices into the brain to deliver electricity or drugs, are back – back from MKULTRA where they were covertly tested on unwitting subjects along with other stuff like LSD as a way to brainwash people and control their behavior. This time it’s out in the open – credit Wikileaks and the revelations about NSA spying for that – under cover of “this will help you.” Might be of some use in Parkinson’s disease, but now the claims are that it cures everything, and BigPharma, like GlaxoSmithKline and the military are funding research in microshocking brains directly or through magnetic stimulation. Electroshock of the type seen in “One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest” is also back, with the FDA recently lowering the risk factor so children can have their brains zapped too.

4.   Legalization of marijuana began with medical marijuana and transitioned to what we all knew it was for — to get high. Liberal billionaires such as George Soros funded state legalization efforts even though Democrats have mostly stayed silent and let the potheads carry the ball. Liberals want the tax money for social programs, conservatives want the tax money for war, and so opposition has been wimpy. With THC at over 30 percent – up from 3 percent in the 1960s – marijuana induced paranoia and mental illness is on the rise which will be a windfall for the shrinks. Meanwhile, BigPharma is gearing up to produce marijuana, LSD, and so forth. They’ll drop the prices to squeeze out the competition, then control the formerly-illicit-but-now-FDA-approved drug market.

5.   On the tail of marijuana legalization are other measures to mainstream hard drugs through “harm reduction” “decriminalization” and outright legalization. Turns out marijuana was a “gateway drug” and the marketing always starts with “The war on drugs has been lost,” which is a lie. Just turns out that drugs are big money and government wants in on the trillion-dollar BigPharma economy. If it really heats up like it did in Colombia, BigPharma and lots of Pablo Escobar lookalikes will end up running the United States. Some states are going to use the tax money for drug treatment programs which leads to number 6:

6.   “Medication Assisted Treatment” is now being heavily promoted as a treatment for addictions of all kinds: opioid addiction, sex addiction, videogame addiction, food addiction, ad infinitum. And while most of these addictions don’t exist, the psychs say addiction is a chronic brain disease and there’s no cure so addicts must be put on other drugs like methodone, which are paid for by medical insurance, and maintained on those drugs for the rest of their lives. So BigPharma, — which controls the FDA and will soon control Congress, the POTUS, political PACs and so on – will control the solution to the problem of addiction.

7.   The polarization of politics, fights of religious freedom vs. gender equity, and other nasty infighting will most likely be resolved when the parties stirring it up are uncovered, but in the meantime, the stirring up is most likely a distraction to pull attention away from the medicalizing of America and the growth of BigPharma, the psychs and the economic systems fueling it.

No Comments

What BigPharma Learned from Pablo Escobar

Posted on: January 08, 2018, in: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Pablo Escobar By Colombian National Police - Colombia National Registry; Colombian National Police, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Pablo Escobar By Colombian National Police – Colombia National Registry; Colombian National Police, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons

Suppose you were Pablo Escobar, the Columbian drug lord, back in the 1970s and wanted to increase cocaine’s market share. How would you proceed, what strategies would you use, what kind of activities would fill up your “to do” list?

While the coca leaf had been used for centuries by Native Americans of the Andes as a stimulant that wasn’t really a very lucrative market, so expanding into a rich country was a bright idea.

Item 1 On Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Get Rich Americans Using Cocaine. Well, back in the 1800s Albert Niemann – a German chemist who also invented mustard gas – isolated the really strong stuff from the coca leaf and cocaine was used for surgery and to treat morphine addiction. It was the medication assisted treatment of the day: treat an addiction with another addictive drug. So what followed were wild claims of cocaine’s curative powers, a pick me up, added to all kinds of patent medicine and a drink called Coca Cola after the Coca plant. By the mid 1900s, suspicion grew that cocaine was addictive, so it was made illegal, and it was not readily available, so use dwindled.

Then  in 1974 the New York Times Magazine touted cocaine as a way to get high without needles or addiction, a 1975 book on cocaine said that it was a good drug, and Newsweek Magazine ran illustrations  of stylish men and women doing lines of cocaine, comparing it to champagne and caviar. Well, who wouldn’t love some cocaine?

And here we go back to Pablo Escobar’s “to do” list. Suddenly cocaine was “stylish and non-addictive” and so a demand was created, the warnings from the past were ignored, and demand exploded.

Item 2 on Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Make $50 Billion. Pablo Escobar, who had been a minor criminal, now entered the smuggling business, expanded production and transshipping points, began paying off or murdering judges, police officers and politicians, and supply met demand and demand just kept growing. Turns out that cocaine is highly addictive, contrary to what was said in the New York Times Magazine, so everyone craved the next line of the drug. As a result, Escobar became one of the richest men in the world, worth an estimated $56 billion by 1990 at today’s exchange rate.

Item 3 on Pablo Escobar’s To Do List: Take Over the Country. In 1982, Escobar – who as part of his public relations campaign, gave money and soccer fields to the poor as well as greasing the palms of officials – was elected an alternate member of the Chamber of Representatives of Colombia , and became one of the most powerful men in the world. He controlled many public officials, ordered assassinations, sponsored terrorist attacks, paid townspeople for being lookouts and gave bonuses for killing police officers. He and his Medellin Cartel were unstoppable for a time.

Pablo Escobar’s Mistakes: However, Escobar made some mistakes, including causing the violent deaths of 20,000 people, and thousands more from addiction and crime, and he himself was murdered at age 44.

BigPharma

Now let’s take up BigPharma, those giant pharmaceutical companies around the world. First, BigPharma invented the street drugs we’ve been trying to just say no to. 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.

Now one shouldn’t suppose that BigPharma, being corporations and all, and under the regulation of the Food and Drug Administration and supervised by doctors and psychiatrists do anything as crude as Pablo Escobar. No sir, they are legit, they’ve learned a lot from Escobar, as you can see from what follows.

Item 1 on BigPharma’s ToDo List: Get All Americans on Drugs, Rich and Poor.

OK, so now BigPharma has all those addictive drugs just sitting there on the shelves, and so something has to change. So here comes the “To do” list again, this time from BigPharma. And while Escobar was just a two-bit criminal from a small undeveloped country, BigPharma is big, well-heeled, corporate, and from developed countries.

So here goes: First, opioids were being used mostly for severe pain, like terminal cancer, and doctors are very worried about prescribing opioids because of the danger of addiction. So as a result a lot of people are going around without drugs, and that’s got to change. So in 1996 Purdue Pharma ran some ads about a new opioid called Oxycontin that said it was a timed release opioid and was not habit forming, so doctors could feel good about prescribing it for pain. Well, the dam broke and doctors started prescribing it like mad for everything that might be a bit painful. Contrary to what Purdue said, people got addicted, and like all opioids they needed more and more to stay high until they overdosed and died. If their prescriptions ran out they went to the street for something else, like heroin. But all these overdose deaths looked bad and also got rid of users, so BigPharma invented drugs like Narcan and Evzio that block opioids and bring the overdoser back to life.

The psychs played a part in all this by categorizing addiction as a “chronic brain disease” so once you have it, you need treatment the rest of your life. So once you are brought back to life, you are put on other BigPharma drugs in something called “medication assisted treatment” or MAT. As you may recall, cocaine was originally used to treat morphine addiction, so BigPharma took this idea and updated it. Some of the drugs used for MAT include methodone, Buprenorphine  and Naltrexone.

So the more people that die of opioid overdoses, the more everyone wants “treatment rather than prison” which means put the addict on BigPharma’s MAT drugs for the rest off their lives, and that just kicks up the profits, investors clean up,  and everyone that counts is very happy.

The next thing is to use drugs that make you crazy – like LSD and Marijuana – which now has around 35 percent THC instead of the 3 percent it had back in the hippie 1960s – to treat mental illness. Then when you go crazy, you need antidepressants and antipsychotics, as long as we ignore the fact that the drugs you’re being treated with can make you paranoid, make you hallucinate, and make you go nuts and shoot lots of people in schools, churches and Las Vegas music concerts. But I digress.

Lots of states are now legalizing marijuana. George Soros has spent $80 million bankrolling campaigns to legalize weed, and guess what solution is prescribed for cannabis-induced psychosis? (It does cause psychosis in long-term users ) Psychiatric medications of course! And now Washington State and Colorado who were the first states to legalize weed, are at the top of the list in states needing mental health help for all the weed-smoking wackos going bonkers.

Remember the New York Times Magazine articles all aglow about the benefits and non-addiction of cocaine, the happy articles of how cocaine was very fashionable and like champagne and caviar? Well, BigPharma is taking a leaf from Pablo Escobar’s book, or the media are doing it on their own because they are dopers themselves, here are some of the things that are being promoted as good for you:

Psychedelics are now touted as cures for PTSD, depression, addiction, anxiety, eating disorders, smoking, OCD and crime, among others. Wow, what a miracle drug as long as you forget the 1960s. If you can remember the 60s you weren’t there except maybe for the flashbacks. And the military (remember MKULTRA and LSD testing?) is touting ecstasy as a PTSD treatment. It’s miraculous!  And then when you go really crazy on LSD or ecstasy, what’s the treatment? Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety drugs, anti-psychotic drugs. And with government healthcare it’s not just the rich that get hooked and fucked up, it’s EVERYBODY!

OK, so no matter which addictive or psychosis-inducing drug you get hooked on, no matter if you got hooked on the street or in the doctor’s office, there’s another drug that’s legal that you can get with a prescription that is a “cure” for the drug you took before. And if the first three anti-depressants don’t work, there’s another one that might, and if that doesn’t work there’s always electroshock to turn you into a compliant vegetable so you can be given many many drugs by the nice attendants.

As a result, one in six Americans are on psych medications, from antidepressants to ADHD speed, to every kind of shit under the sun. The FDA — a government agency supposed to be the watchdog– accepts payments from drug companies to fast-track approvals, and the head of the FDA was once a consultant to some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies. And it’s all completely legal, even though half a million people have died of opioid overdoses from 2000-2015! So compared to BigPharma, Pablo Escobar was in kindergarten! So as a people, we’re circling the drain of addiction and a drugged existence, and BigPharma and the headshrinkers that smooth the takeover are making a killing.

Item 2 on BigPharma’s To Do List: Make a LOT of Money: OK, so while Pablo Escobar made a measley $50 billion, BigPharma makes in excess of $1 trillion with a T and half of that comes from the US and Canada.  Now some of that is for real drugs that do good, like asthma medication, heart pills, insulin, and so forth. But  13% of the US population is on antidepressants and 13 percent on prescription opioids, and some 25 million Americans are addicted to illegal drugs.    And with the psychs pushing the idea that everybody is crazy and “underserved,” and with states legalizing weed and Oregon decriminalizing hard drugs and pushing to legalize psychedelics, expect those numbers to grow pretty fast.

Depressed? Sad? Crazy? Too Happy? Impulsive? Can’t sit in a school desk for 8 hours? Legs restless? Have a child that doesn’t mind? Stressed? (Everyone is you know), Can’t read? Trouble in the bedroom? Like computer games too much? Into drugs? Well, if you answered yes to any of these, you are in luck! You or your kid is nuts and needs some drugs and BigPharma has them, and your insurance will probably pay for them. Meanwhile, BigPharma is pulling in a trillion in revenues which is much better than Pablo’s crew, but BigPharma CEOs are not making much, what with the overhead and all. Compensation of the top 20 ranges from a paltry $13 million to only $41 million per year, nowhere near Pablo’s $30 billion per year in personal income, but you know, BigPharma has to keep a low profile, pay off investors and such, while Pablo just shot anybody who got in the way.

OK, so here are the key points: Use one drug to get off another drug, legalize and then flood the country with drugs, hype the opioid crisis, increase funding for “treatment” which is just more drugs, and let users keep using through something called “harm reduction,” in which the government provides clean needles, safe spaces to shoot up, BigPharma provides clean heroin, or meth, or ecstasy, or whatever, and there’s plenty of Narcan and Evzio around to treat overdoses, and those drugs are all free to users. You try to get users into treatment, or course, with BigPharma MAT drugs and everything is rosy. Pablo would approve.

No Comments

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.

No Comments

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.

No Comments

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.

No Comments

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.

 

No Comments

How to Get All Americans on Drugs

Posted on: September 22, 2017, in: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The problem we psychiatrists and pharmaceutical CEOs face is how to hook more than 323 million people in the United States.  Those 323 million people are living their lives and many don’t realize they should be on drugs. Fortunately, one in six are already taking psychoactive drugs, so the problem might not be so tough after all. That leaves some 270 million more to go. And a year ago, ABC News reported that: 21.5 million people aged 12 and older had a substance use disorder in 2014.

OK, so that leaves about 248 million total that aren’t on regular psychoactive drugs. About 40,000 people died last year of opioid overdoses, so that helps trim the odds, but it’s a slow process, and about 4 million babies were born in the same period, and even though from .06 percent to .34 percent of them were born addicted to opioids, they keep arriving and most are born clean. Luckily, kids – especially boys – don’t like to sit still and thus they drive teachers crazy, so we put at least 10 percent of the teachers on antidepressants and about 11 percent of children aged 4-17 are on ADHD drugs. As they get older, well, you know how teenagers love drugs!

By the time they get to be teenagers, 15 percent have all the indicators of lifetime alcohol abusers, and 16 percent are confirmed drug abusers. But even though drugs are easy for them to access — 81 percent have the opportunity to use illicit substances, unfortunately only about 42.5 percent actually tried them. So we’ve got to do better at getting them to try drugs, and then lace them with opioids or Fentanyl to make those kids permanent users.

Once we’ve got those low-hanging fruit, though, the tough part starts, and we need a plan, as there’s a lot of people still resisting psychoactive drugs and cutting into our profits and our control. Medical offices are doing their part, asking patients if they have pain and prescribing heavy opioids for it. But “the opioid crisis” as the whiners call it, is giving opioids a bad name. Luckily we’ve got “direct to consumer” ads for prescription drugs so that bumped our sales up 30 percent or more, but we’ve got a lot more to do. So the next step is a bit of a detour, but stay with me, it will all make sense in a moment.

The first step is to legalize street drugs, starting with marijuana. About 20 states have legalized it for medical use which is pretty easy to establish for most people. “Ow! My back hurts,” is about all it takes. Eight states have legalized marijuana for recreational use, and there’s not much push-back on it, surprisingly. Luckily, parents and grandparents from the 1960s – who smoked weed with 1-3 percent THC – don’t realize that the THC in these new varieties can be as high as 37 percent. And very bright marijuana dispensaries are putting THC in gummy bears, cookies, candy and berry smoothies, to draw in the younger crowd.

The next step is to legalize heroin, methamphetamine, etc. Now if you don’t think that’s possible, hold on to your hat. Oregon has already decriminalized possession of small amounts,  and a California ballot measure would legalize psychedelic mushrooms, and that’s just the beginning.

So with marijuana legalized, opioids all over the place, the next step is something called “Harm Reduction.” This is where we really scoop up the undrugged. Here’s how it sounds, goes something like this: “The war on drugs is lost, you can’t keep people off drugs, the kids are going to experiment, so we might as well legalize everything, and make it safe to use. Give the kids clean needles, drugs that aren’t laced with other stuff, give them a safe place to use. Kids are going to experiment, so let’s make it safe for them to do so. Keep government out of things we do to our own bodies, follow the libertarian ideal, use drugs if you want. Stuff like meth that makes you crazy, well just be careful, you know.”

So here’s our opportunity. Drugs are going to hook millions of people. Couple shots of meth and bang! We have a psycho who needs lifelong maintenance care. Kids on opioids just trippin’ away, everybody smoking powerful weed. We’re already discovering – surprise surprise – that marijuana use causes psychosis, which should bring in lots of visits to psychiatry, during which they can prescribe “Medication Assisted Treatment” or MAT. So what you do with MAT is switch the user from an opioid or meth or weed to methadone, buprenorphine or naltrexone. Those are legal drugs that we manufacture, and with the Affordable Care Act’s parity between physical and mental health, it’s all paid for by the taxpayers. And by the way, methadone is super addictive as well, and the psychiatrists have deemed drug dependence an illness that is lifelong,  so we have a lifetime income for every customer we treat.

But now comes the beautiful part. Our pharmaceutical companies can now produce ecstasy, heroin, oxycontin, methamphetamine, codeine, all that lovely stuff. We’re all rigged up to produce billions of pills, and make trillions of dollars, and we are all legal, so people trust our products. Then we drop the prices to squeeze out all the other competitors, then we own the drug business, and almost all of those 323 million people are our customers, paying us trillions of dollars.

But wait, there’s more! With all those overdoses, we also have a drug for that! Evzio, for example, will save those dying of overdoses, and costs $4,500/dose. With everyone on opioids, every first responder, cop, teacher, parent, doctor, nurse, bartender, drill sargeant, minister is going to need one! Bonanza!

Right now, in 2017, BigPharma — I think we’re justified in calling ourselves that, don’t you? — BigPharma is making more than $1 trillion a year in revenue on drugs, with a 21 percent profit margin, and some 7,000 new drugs in development. Oh sure, we have our detractors, the Scientologists, drug abuse organizations, parents, law enforcement, but we alone practically support the media networks with direct to consumer drug ads, we support state and local governments with taxes on drug sales, and in a few years we will run this country. We’ve been spreading lies about Scientology since 1950, but more needs to be done.

Pablo Escobar controlled the government of Colombia with cocaine drug money, but he’s small potatoes compared to what we will do to Planet Earth! Viva Farmaceutico! Viva Psiquiatria! Viva Mucho Dinero!

No Comments

AGs Urge Health Insurers to Prioritize Non-Opioid Pain Treatment

Posted on: September 21, 2017, in: , ,

Thirty-seven state Attorneys General signed a letter to America’s Health Insurance Plans to urge insurers to ” …review their payment and coverage policies and revise them, as necessary and appropriate, to encourage healthcare providers to prioritize non-opioid pain management options over opioid prescriptions for the treatment of chronic, non-cancer pain

“Although the amount of pain reported by Americans has remained steady since 1999,” continued the letter, “prescriptions for opioid painkillers have nearly quadrupled over the same timeframe.” The letter attributes the rise in opioid overdose deaths to the four-fold increase in prescriptions.

No Comments

Attorneys General Investigate BigPharma 

Posted on: September 19, 2017, in: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman today announced a bipartisan coalition of 41 attorneys general from across the country who will investigate whether pharmaceutical companies are engaged in any unlawful practices in the marketing and distribution of prescription opioids. Information and documents were demanded of Endo International plc, Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd./Cephalon Inc. and Allergan Inc.

Also under scrutiny are Amerisource Bergen, Cardinal Health and McKesson which handle 90 percent of the opioid distribution in the U.S, and make about $500 billion per year in revenue. “Too often, prescription opioids are the on-ramp to addiction for millions of Americans,” said Schneiderman in a release. “We’re committed to getting to the bottom of a broken system that has fueled the epidemic and taken far too many lives.”

Schneiderman in the release says that agreements with insurers have put an end to requiring prior authorization for medication-assisted treatment (“MAT”). But Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price said earlier this year the MAT is “ … just substituting one opioid for another, we’re not moving the dial much.”

No Comments

← Older posts
Newer posts →