We are seeing renewed attacks on prescription pain medications. Those orchestrating the attacks are citing increased abuse as their cause. The first of the most recent assaults on prescription pain medications began in 2006 with the overdose death of Daniel Smith, the son of Anna Nicole Smith, who likewise died of an overdose in 2007, and then Heath Ledger in 2008, and Michael Jackson in 2009. All of the aforementioned deaths were widely publicized and it was revealed that all were taking excessive amounts of prescription drugs which they were procuring through multiple sources and under multiple identities.
So how do the deaths of four individuals come to affect the lives of millions? The deaths of these celebrities were used as the foundation for a campaign designed to make prescription pain medications harder to acquire for every citizen, even those being prescribed the medications for documented chronic pain.
Today the new push is being put forth as a reaction to war veterans who have become addicted to pain medications.
This all would seem quite reasonable at first glance. That is unless you have real pain and want to have it alleviated through the controlled use of pain medications. In other words, policies being made as a reaction to abuse are hindering legitimate use. If you want to understand why, you have to look at medications and pharmaceutical companies for what they truly are.
Pharmaceutical companies are drug dealers and medications are the drugs they deal. In days of old a pirate on the high seas could become legitimate through a commission from the king, which made his activities state sponsored and thus legal with the stroke of a pen. Of course the other pirates still saw the commissioned pirates as nothing more than competition. In short, the pharmaceutical companies are state sponsored drug dealers, and at the same time are competition for non-state sponsored drug dealers.
Pharmaceutical drugs are preferred by Americans as they are assumed to be safer. Afghanistan has in the past five years seen bumper crops of poppies and record heroin production. The heroin is brought into the United States through South America and when coupled with South America’s cocaine, represents a $40 billion a year industry in the United States.
Prescription pain medications, being sold by pharmaceutical companies represent direct competition to the heroin being dealt by the non-state sponsored drug dealers. What we need to realize is that the state sponsored drug dealers and the non-state sponsored drug dealers are acquainted with one another, as the $40 billion illicit drug industry could not possibly operate in the United States without the sanction of our corporate government.
Thus when a conflict arises between the sanctioned drug dealers and the non-sanctioned drug dealers, it must be worked out to the mutual satisfaction of both as the end goal for both organizations is to make money, of which the corporate government gets a cut.
So what we have here is a problem as heroin sales are suffering due to the American people’s preference to the pharmaceutical drugs. The National Drug Threat Assessment of 2010 from the U.S. Department of Justice National Drug Intelligence Center contains the following statement.
Prescription Opioid Users Have Switched to Heroin
Some opioid abusers use prescription opioids or heroin, depending on availability and the price of each drug, and heroin availability is increasing in many regions in response to higher demand. Treatment providers in some areas of the United States reported in 2008 that prescription opioid abusers switch to heroin as they build tolerance to prescription opioids and seek a more euphoric high. Further, treatment providers are reporting that some prescription opioid abusers are switching to heroin in a few areas where heroin is less costly or more available than prescription opioids. It is also common for some heroin abusers to use prescription opioids when they cannot obtain heroin. Diverted CPDs are often more readily available than heroin in all drug markets; however, heroin use increased in many areas of the country in 2009, possibly because of increased demand among abusers of prescription opioids who could no longer afford CPDs. Prescription opioids are typically more expensive than heroin. For example, oxycodone abusers with a high tolerance may ingest 400 milligrams of the drug daily (five 80-mg tablets) for an average daily cost of $400. These abusers could maintain their addictions with 2 grams of heroin daily, at a cost of one-third to one-half that of prescription opioids, depending on the area of the country and the purity of the heroin.
It is plain to see how new restrictions limiting the availability of prescription drugs enacted in 2009 have bolstered heroin sales. And I believe that was the intent.
So what did the pharmaceutical companies get in trade? Last week the U.S. Supreme Court put forth a ruling limiting the damages that can be recovered by citizens maimed or killed as a result of taking untested flu shots, thus making up the revenues lost through accommodating the heroin dealers. And remember the heroin industry is just a part of a much larger cartel composed of the $40 billion a year drug war proponents and the $100 billion a year prison industry.
At any rate the sanctioned drug dealers and non-sanctioned drug dealers have apparently come to an accommodation which is mutually beneficial. Two winners, but who are the losers? That would be the American people. Those victimized are citizens being denied pain medication for legitimate ailments, those incarcerated as they chose to use the non-sanctioned drugs as they were more readily available, and of course the American worker being displaced by subsidized labor coming out of the prison system.
It is all really very ugly if you stop and think about it. Personally I do not think I will be supporting our government’s push to increase heroin use in my country.
WOW u just figured that out