Posts tagged - OxyContin

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.

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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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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!

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Oregon Decriminalizes Hard Drugs

Posted on: September 05, 2017, in: , , , , , ,

Oregon Gov. Kate Brown on Aug. 15 signed Oregon House Bill 2355 that stiffens regulations on traffic stops, and also reduces the penalty for first offense possession of small amounts of Schedule 1 drugs — such as methadone, oxycodone, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, and methamphetamine — from a felony to a misdemeanor.

The bill was filed at the request of Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who said in a release that the bill implements anti-profiling laws and reduces penalties for lower-level drug offenders. Oregon Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D.) – who is also a pharmacist and former Kaiser Foundation vice president of research, said in a Washington Free Beacon article: “We’ve got to treat people, not put them in prison It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes. … This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also supported the bill and said in a release that the war on drugs has failed, and law enforcement money can be better spent elsewhere. It also says that minorities are unfairly targeted, and treatment, education and rehabilitation are the answers.

The majority of Republicans in both House and Senate voted against the bill as well as some Democrats. Democrat Sen. Betsy Johnson said the bill was misguided and called it a “hug-a thug-policy.”

Analysis:

One could argue that the war on drugs wasn’t lost, it was invented by pharmaceutical firms. Bayer invented heroin as a supposedly non-addictive treatment for morphine addiction. Doctors then backed off use of addictive opioids for pain relief except in the most extreme cases. Then Purdue pharmaceuticals in 1996 marketed a timed-release tablet that the company said was a non-addictive opioid called OxyContin which came into use for all sorts of minor pains. Predictably, OxyContin acted like the opioid it was and hooked thousands of people, then spread illegally into the society and ushered in what is now officially called “The Opioid Crisis.”.

Similarly, LSD was synthesized by a chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, was tested by the CIA at American Universities, and spread into society.

Oregon was a national leader in stopping methamphetamine use by passing a law in 2006 requiring a prescription to obtain the pseudoephedrine precursor.  Meth busts dropped in Oregon and Mississippi which had a similar law. But other states – under heavy lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry – failed to pass similar laws, and meth use rose again, as the precursors and meth itself were smuggled in from other states and Mexico.

So why would pharmaceutical firms risk association with illicit drug use, addiction, crime, degradation and death? Because now that “the war on drugs has failed,” and our prisons are full of casualties, “treatment” is conducted with pharmaceutical drugs, states like Oregon are legalizing marijuana and reducing penalties for opioid use, and billions of dollars are going to treat opioid addiction. How is opioid addiction treated? With something called Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT).  MAT takes people addicted to heroin, for example, and switches them to legal pharmaceutical products such as methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. The National Institute for Drug Abuse says addiction is a chronic disease which needs long-term care so the recovering addict may need these prescriptions for the rest of his or her life. And big pharma also markets another drug to use in cases of opioid overdose, called Naloxone (Also called Narcan and Evzio).  A supply should be carried by thousands of first responders, doctors, and family members of addicts or those on opioid pain relievers. The cost of a dose just jumped from $575 a dose to about $4,500 according to Wired Magazine, and has a shelf life of 18-24 months.

As for the statement: “[Jailing drug addicts] would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes?” See the above item on “medication assisted treatment,” by pharmaceuticals. And the statement is uttered by a pharmacist. Many groups see addiction as a disease, including the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine. The addict is not responsible for his addiction, says this theory, as it is changes in the brain and DNA which create addiction. It’s all body, and body is what doctors treat. Even psychiatrists think addiction, depression, schizophrenia etc. are all diseases, thus the terms “mental health” and “mental illness.” even though there are no scientific tests for disorders such as “oppositional defiant disorder” “ADHD” “obsessive compulsive disorder” and so on to the tune of some 300 different so-called diseases cataloged in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists to bill for insurance payments. There are tests for diabetes, but psychiatric “disorders” are simply voted on by psychiatrists from time to time, so that pharmaceutical companies can get busy and invent new pills. And thus we have speed given legally to children for not sitting still, the definition of autism expanded into “autism spectrum disorder” to scoop up millions more children and put them on expensive pharmaceuticals, and mental health given parity with physical health in the Affordable Care Act, to secure the funding for all this pharma. So the war on drugs has not been lost, it has been more clearly defined as a battle between pharmaceutical profits and the peace and security of American neighborhoods and families. And that is a battle we cannot lose.

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