One state is suing opioid manufacturers and distributors to pay for the creation of mental health clinics and opioid abuse treatment programs.
The post State Sets Massive Precedent, Makes Big Pharma Pay to Fix Opioid Crisis THEY CAUSED appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
While the United States controls more than 90 percent of the world"s opium supply in Afghanistan, the rate of Americans who are addicted to heroin and who have died from drug overdoses has skyrocketed.
The post Before US Troops Protected Poppies In Afghanistan, There was No Opioid Epidemic in America appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Instead of looking at the science and data on how to beat the opioid crisis, Trump is following the lead of Saudi Arabi whose plan of killing people for selling drugs has done nothing to deter use.
The post If Trump Really Cared About the Opioid Crisis He’d Legalize Weed, Not Turn the US into Saudi Arabia appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
A new JAMA research study concluded opiates do not work as well as over-the-counter medicines with much fewer serious side-effects.
The post Landmark JAMA Study Shows Over-the-Counter Pain Meds Work BETTER Than Deadly Opioids appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said he supports the lawsuit because it is "time for Big Pharma to pay for what they’ve done. It’s time that they are held accountable.”
A company whose founder, CEO, and 6 executives have all been arrested for bribing doctors to prescribe opioids, was approved by DEA to sell synthetic THC.
As the opioid crisis breaks records by killing more than 100 Americans every day, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has reached a record high in 2017.
On Sunday, 60 Minutes interviewed several former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) employees who came forward to blow the whistle, accusing several Fortune 500 drug distributor companies for the epidemic opiate overdoses.
For many years, Joe Rannazzisi was the head of the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control the division responsible for investigating the pharmaceutical industry consisting of pharmaceutical companies, distributors, pharmacies, as well as doctors and clinics which prescribe the highly-addictive opiates.
After years of investigations, his team finally believed they’d pinpointed the source of the abuse in the supply chain; the distributors. The DEA uncovered unscrupulous shipping of opiates to pharmacies in towns with small populations.
He had harsh criticisms for the opiate drug industry. He told correspondent Bill Whitaker:
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This is an industry that’s out of control. What they wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in the drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die. This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs.
Rannazzisi identified the big three he says are the major players who have been targeted by the DEA and who quickly learned how to push back, effectively winning their fight against the DEA’s oversight. He named Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen and claimed they control 90 percent of the opiate distribution in the U.S.
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The former DEA agent called it “a fact” that these companies are killing people by continuing to distribute dangerous opiates to crooked pharmacies which simply sell the goods to bad actors. Rannazzisi equated the distribution of the opiates to a band of drug dealers who were worse than street dealers:
These weren’t kids slinging crack on the Corner. These were professionals who were doing it. They were just drug dealers in lab coats.
Under the Controlled Substances Act, the distributors are supposed to report and stop shipments of suspicious orders (large shipments of opioids to people who have no legitimate need for those quantities of drugs).
Even after the distributors were fined millions of dollars by the DEA, little was done to curb the problem. The pharmaceutical distributors pushed back by recruiting lawyers from within the DEA to come and work with their companies. In essence, the drug companies recruited the very same lawyers who were writing policy for the DEA and who knew their loopholes and how to get the DEA off of their backs.
Linden Barber, who used to work for the DEA, jumped ship and went to work for the Quarles and Brady’s Health Law Group, helping clients navigate through compliance issues with the DEA.
Barber drafted the Marino Bill and lobbied Congress to introduce the bill with Tom Marino (R-PA). The bill became law, after passing without objection in both the House and the Senate and was signed into law in 2016 by President Barack H. Obama. It is known as the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act, a law which Rannazzisi claimed took away the DEA’s ability to reign in the unethical and illegal distribution of opiates to pharmacies which should not be receiving millions of pills of opiates only having a few residents to serve.
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According to the Washington Post:
The new law makes it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious narcotic shipments from the companies.
Marino then turned his attention to Rannazzisi. He asked the DEA to open an investigation into the head of the office of diversion claiming he was attempting to intimidate Congress. Rannazzisi was ultimately stripped of his supervisory leadership and he eventually resigned.
Now, according to the former DEA agent, no one up the supply chain can be held accountable for increased diversion of dangerous and addictive narcotics. Rannazzisi said now no one in a drug company can be held liable for negligence in protecting the controlled substances.
Marino, the Congressman who made it all possible, has now been nominated to be President Donald Trump’s drug czar. In other words, the lawmaker who helped get the DEA off the backs of the drug distributors is now supposedly going to be responsible for safeguarding the nation’s supply of controlled substances and making sure the drugs are not abused. For those families who have lost a loved one to an opiate overdose, having Marino as the drug czar may not be very comforting. After all, he was lobbied by the very industry which manufactures and distributes the very drugs which killed their loved ones.
As TFTP has reported, more Americans died in opiate and related heroin overdoes in 2016 than in the entire Vietnam War. It is an epidemic. It is killing more Americans than guns or automobile accidents, and no one is doing anything about it. According to Rannazzisi, the DEA’s hands are now tied to plug the holes in the supply chain.
(RT) President Donald Trump has declared the opioid epidemic a national emergency and said his administration was drafting paperwork to make it official.
“The opioid crisis is an emergency, and I’m saying officially right now it is an emergency. It’s a national emergency,” President Trump told reporters before a security briefing on Thursday at his golf course in Bedminster, New Jersey.
“We’re going to spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis.”
Trump told reporters the drug crisis afflicting the US is a “serious problem the likes of which we have never had” and said he’s drawing up documents “to so attest.”
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Amid cont’d tough talk on NorKor, Trump declares the opioid crisis a “national emergency,” as commission recommended https://t.co/4SAcYwZIp1
— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) August 10, 2017
By declaring it a national emergency it removes some barriers and waives some federal rules such as one that restricts Medicaid recipients from receiving addiction treatment. It would also put pressure on Congress to provide more funding.
In early August, Trump’s commission on the opioid crisis issued a preliminary report that described the overdose death toll as “September 11th every three weeks,” and urged the president to immediately “declare a national emergency under either the Public Health Service Act or the Stafford Act.”
The report said 142 Americans died every day from a drug overdose, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). It added that 27 million people reported in 2015 they currently used illegal drugs or abuse prescription drugs, but only 21 million receive any type of treatment.
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The report also found that 40 percent of people with a substance abuse issue also suffered from mental health problems and less than half received treatment for either issue, and often it was lack of access to care, fear or shame and discrimination and lack of motivation.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price suggested earlier this week the president was leaning against the recommendation when he said the administration could deploy the necessary resources and attention without declaring a national emergency.
Still, Price stressed that “all things” were “on the table for the president.”
On August 2, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a dozen federal prosecutors will be sent to cities ravaged by the opioid epidemic to investigate health care fraud and opioid scams fueling the drug abuse epidemic.
Prosecutors, who will be funded by the Justice Department for three years, and tasking with rooting out pill mills and tracking down doctors and other health care providers who illegal prescribe or distribute narcotics such as fentanyl and other powerful painkillers, according to Sessions.
“You don’t collect a drug debt in a court of law, you collect it with a barrel of a gun,” he said.
President Trump’s opioid commission has urged him to declare a national state of emergency over America’s burgeoning opioid crisis. The recommendation comes from a preliminary draft of the commission’s report. [2]
By declaring an emergency, Trump’s cabinet would be able to take action, and Congress would be forced to fund potential solutions to the epidemic.
Drug overdoses likely killed more people in 2016 than the entire Vietnam War. The previous year, opioid overdoses claimed the lives of more people than car crashes, gun violence, and HIV/AIDs combined, when the AIDS epidemic was at its height in 1995.
The commission says in the report:
“With approximately 142 Americans dying every day, America is enduring a death toll equal to September 11th every three weeks. After September 11th, our President and our nation banded together to use every tool at our disposal to prevent any further American deaths.
Your declaration would empower your cabinet to take bold steps and would force Congress to focus on funding and empowering the Executive Branch even further to deal with this loss of life.”
Read: UN Says It Will Monitor the Fentanyl Market
The lawmakers made several other recommendations, including:
The commission warns in the report that “If this scourge has not found you or your family yet, without bold action by everyone, it soon will.” [2]
They go on:
“You, Mr. president, are the only person who can bring this type of intensity to the emergency and we believe you have the will to do so and to do so immediately. Our citizens are dying. We must act boldly to stop it.”
The Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis is chaired by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker (R), North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper (D), former Rep. Patrick Kennedy (D), and Dr. Bertha Madras.
Sources:
[1] Vox
[2] USA Today
 | Julie Fidler is a freelance writer, legal blogger, and the author of Adventures in Holy Matrimony: For Better or the Absolute Worst. She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and two ridiculously spoiled cats. She occasionally pontificates on her blog. |
New Jersey — A scathing investigative report from NJ.com has revealed some startling and damning facts about the exponential increase in fentanyl overdoses and the rate at which family practitioners prescribed it. In the center of the equation are pharmaceutical companies who’ve been exposed for paying doctors millions to push their deadly drug.
Prior to 2013, most Americans, unless they knew someone dying of cancer or who lived in immense pain, never heard of fentanyl. Now, this drug, which is magnitudes more powerful than heroin and far deadlier, has become a household name — for all the wrong reasons.
Fentanyl was created to be used as part of anesthesia to help prevent pain after surgery or other medical procedures. It was also used to treat pain in the terminally ill as well as those with severe and chronic debilitating pain. However, in 2013, the unscrupulous big wigs in the pharmaceutical industry saw it as a means of making their already opioid-saturated market that much more lucrative — and addictive.
A dose of fentanyl the size of a grain of sand is lethal. But that didn’t stop companies like Insys Pharmaceutical from spending $1.67 million from 2013 to 2015 pushing this drug on doctors. To be clear, they were not only marketing fentanyl to those who actually benefit from it, but they were rewarding family doctors for giving it to people for things like getting their tonsils out.
During that period, fentanyl deaths increased tenfold from just 42 in 2013 to 417 in 2015.
As NJ.com points out, since late 2011, enough fentanyl has been dispensed to allow every person who has died of cancer in New Jersey to fill a prescription for the drug eight times.
READ MORE: As Cops Throw People in Cages for Weed, the Makers of Deadly OxyContin Join the Ruling Class
As doctors and pharmaceutical companies get slaps on the wrist for dealing in this deadly drug, thousands of people across the country are dying at an increasing rate.
For the first time in U.S. History, more Americans died in 2016 of drug overdoses than were killed in the Vietnam War. Let that sink in.
Last year’s death toll in the War on Drugs was 59,000 killed, while during the entire Vietnam War, 1955 to 1975, 58,220 American service members’ lives were lost. And, thanks to the immoral and futile police approach to the drug problem, there appears to be no hope in sight for the tide to change.
According to NJ.com, data and documents show a system where pharmaceutical companies and doctors remain in a cozy and ethically dubious relationship, at best. It’s a system where cash and prescriptions go hand-in-hand. And it’s a system where, time and again, patients suffer and even die when something goes wrong, an occurrence that is far from rare.
In their investigation, NJ.com found some incredibly unscrupulous practices by doctors who were pushing fentanyl onto their patients while raking in all the extra cash from their cartel leaders in big pharma.
READ MORE: 6 Execs from Pharma Co. who Lobbied for Illegal Pot, Arrested for Bribing Docs to Push Deadly Fentanyl
“There’s enough money going around that if you saw this in the abstract, you’d think there was a drug cartel happening,” said Arthur Caplan, head of the Division of Bioethics at New York University.
It is a drug cartel, it’s just a legal one. And, it’s one that is solely created and maintained by government granted monopolies and contracts.
As the Free Thought Project previously reported, one of the manufacturers of a fentanyl drug was exposed for lobbying against marijuana as it is a direct threat to their opioid market, as well as their synthetic marijuana business. As the federal government grants Insys permission to make legal synthetic cannabis, they simultaneously enforce a war that kidnap, cages, and kills people for the natural version.
If you want to know why there is a drug war, ask yourself, ‘who benefits from it’?
Legal pot is detrimental to the opioid crisis and reduces addiction. However, this is bad business for big pharma.
Opiate addiction, overdose, and accidental death problems might simply be avoided if, ironically enough, marijuana is made legal nationwide.
As TFTP has documented on several occasions, cannabis holds the promise of helping opiate addicts kick their addiction by substituting their cravings for opiates with the non-addictive pain killing properties of marijuana. And it’s not folklore. Doctors have experimented with cannabis as a substitute for opiates with high degrees of success.
Study after study has confirmed that medical cannabis access reduces harm from opioid abuse among the population. A recent study published in the Drug and Alcohol Dependency journal found that states with legal medical cannabis experience fewer hospitalizations related to opioids.
“Medical marijuana legalization was associated with 23% and 13% reductions in hospitalizations related to opioid dependence or abuse and [opioid pain reliever] OPR overdose, respectively; lagged effects were observed after policy implementation.”
Researchers from the University of California analyzed hospital administrative records for the period of 1997 to 2014. The author reported:
“This study demonstrated significant reductions on OPR- (opioid pain reliever) related hospitalizations associated with the implementation of medical marijuana policies. … We found reductions in OPR-related hospitalizations immediately after the year of policy implementation as well as delayed reductions in the third post-policy year.“
From the outside, this entire scenario looks like a case of big pharma pushing its deadly drugs while reaping massive profits. However, if we look closer, that scenario is not only made possible by, but fostered through, pharma’s ties to the state. As people beg the state for more regulation, real free enterprise solutions, like legal weed, are being ignored, or worse, prosecuted.
READ MORE: JAMA Admits 30% of Drugs Approved by FDA-Approved Are Seriously Dangerous
Until this paradigm of government and pharmaceutical collusion and the war on drugs comes to an end, we can only predict that this epidemic of mass opioid overdoses to get far worse.
Five goliath pharmaceutical companies have been served with a lawsuit from the State of Ohio for their role in the opioid epidemic, because, as state Attorney General Mike DeWine alleges, they “helped unleash a health care crisis that has had far-reaching financial, social, and deadly consequences in the State of Ohio.”
Ohio now joins a number of states in attempting to hold Big Pharma responsible for fueling the crisis of oft-ruinous addiction to legally prescribed opioid medications and their deemed illegal brethren, such as heroin.
Purdue Pharma, Endo Health Solutions, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and its subsidiary, Cephalon, Johnson & Johnson and subsidiary, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Allergan have all been named in the lawsuit.
“This lawsuit is about justice, it’s about fairness, it’s about what is right,” DeWine opined in an announcement from southern Ohio’s Ross County — an area crushed by the epidemic in fatalities from overdoses to legal painkillers and illegal heroin — as quoted by Southwestern Ohio NBC affiliate, WLWT. “These drug companies knew that what they were saying was wrong and they did it anyway and they continue to do so.”
Figures for 2016, which have yet to be released, are expected to handily top the distressing 3,050 fatal overdoses Ohio experienced in 2015 — figures wholly unacceptable to DeWine, and cogent of the nation’s struggle to rein in rampant over-prescribing and other facets of the opioid scourge.
NPR reports the lawsuit “accuses the companies of engaging in a sustained marketing campaign to downplay the addiction risks of the prescription opioid drugs they sell and to exaggerate the benefits of their use for health problems such as chronic pain.”
“We believe the evidence will also show that these companies got thousands and thousands of Ohioans — our friends, our family members, our co-workers, our kids — addicted to opioid pain medications, which has all too often led to use of the cheaper alternatives of heroin and synthetic opioids,” the Ohio attorney general asserted in a press release excoriating the five pharmaceutical companies Wednesday. “These drug manufacturers led prescribers to believe that opioids were not addictive, that addiction was an easy thing to overcome, or that addiction could actually be treated by taking even more opioids.
“They knew they were wrong, but they did it anyway — and they continue to do it. Despite all evidence to the contrary about the addictive nature of these pain medications, they are doing precious little to take responsibility for their actions and to tell the public the truth.”
Explicitly, DeWine notes, the lawsuit contends the medications at the core of the epidemic include OxyContin, MS Contin, Dilaudid, Butrans, Hysingla, and Targiniq from Purdue; Endo’s Percocet, Percodan, Opana, and Zydone; Actiq and Fentora made by Teva and Cephalon; Johnson & Johnson and Janssen’s Duragesic and Nucynta; and Kadian, Norco, and several generic opioids manufactured by Allergan.
DeWine told NPR’s All Things Considered the companies purposely deceived physicians and medical practitioners on the perils of the opioid medications — purely to rake in profits — to the horrific detriment of thousands of families whose loved ones became addicted or lost their lives.
“We believe that the evidence will show that these pharmaceutical companies purposely misled doctors about the dangers connected with pain meds that they produced, and that they did so for the purpose of increasing sales,” he asserted. “And boy, did they increase sales.”
“My daughter’s been gone over a year and it still doesn’t seem real,” Ohio father Roger Winemiller, whose daughter and son died within nine months of each other — both from overdoses on heroin — told WLWT.
Echoing one of the most common paths to illegal heroin, Winemiller described the lost battle with addiction his daughter faced, recalling that, to treat anxiety, she “started using pills and tried stuff that the doctor prescribed but it just didn’t work, then went to pills on the street then graduated to heroin.”
Included in the state’s lawsuit is an injunction demanding the companies cease deceptive practices — inflation of benefit and deflation of risks — surrounding opioid prescriptions.
Rather than pegging doctors equally responsible the opioid plague, DeWine told NPR’s Robert Siegel the weight of blame lies with the mendacious practices consciously undertaken by the five Big Pharma giants and their subsidiaries.
“This was not something that the pharmaceutical companies just woke up some day and just started to do a little bit of it,” the attorney general explained.
“I mean, there was a concerted effort for an extended number of years to really pound this into the heads of doctors. And when you’re told something time and time and time again and there’s a lot of advertising that is being spent, yeah, it takes a while to turn that around.”
Naturally, Big Pharma pushed back against the lawsuit — a spokeswoman for Janssen castigated the premise as “legally and factually unfounded.”
“Janssen has acted appropriately, responsibly and in the best interests of patients regarding our opioid pain medications,” Jessica Castles Smith told the Cleveland Plain Dealer by email, “which are FDA-approved and carry FDA-mandated warnings about the known risks of the medications on every product label.”
Purdue, however, appeared to capitulate somewhat — agreeing the epidemic must be addressed.
“OxyContin accounts for less than 2 percent of the opioid analgesic prescription market nationally,” the company told the Plain Dealer, “but we are an industry leader in the development of abuse-deterrent technology, advocating for the use of prescription drug monitoring programs and supporting access to Naloxone — all important components for combating the opioid crisis.”
NPR noted the state estimates more than 200,000 Ohioans currently battle addiction to opioids.
DeWine elaborated further, telling the Plain Dealer 80 percent of heroin addicts first were prescribed legal opioid medications — and that, although this particular lawsuit aims to hold manufacturers accountable, he refused to rule out future litigation against distributors.
Opioids continue to be doled out with alarming regularity for both acute and chronic pain, while viable alternatives to both treat pain and reduce opioid dependency — such as cannabis and kratom — remain unattainable thanks to the Federal Government’s laughable war on drugs.
In the meantime, a growing number of states and localities — including Everett, Washington, and the states of West Virginia, Mississippi, and Kentucky — as well as the Cherokee Nation, have employed legal means to call Big Pharma to task for recklessly allowing the opioid crisis to fester unhindered.
“It’s not the whole cause, but it’s a big part of the cause,” Winemiller said of the targets of the lawsuit. “I mean, there’s many, many people that’s gone to pain clinics, had surgeries or whatever, and they take this medication and they get hooked on it, and then they get cut off and so they go the cheaper route and end up with the heroin.”
He added, “I’ve lost two [children]. It’s just like a bad dream that won’t quit.”
Prior to the U.S. invasion and occupation that sent production and cultivation skyrocketing 35-fold in just the first 13 years, the Taliban had successfully decimated the opium poppy crop in Afghanistan.
Nearly 16 years later, Afghanistan’s lucrative drug trafficking business is still roaring along unhindered, and — with U.S. troops literally guarding the occupied nation’s 90-percent share of the world’s opium supply — potential competitors rightly seemed scarce.
That is, until North Korea just said ‘no’ to the Drug War.
“In its early stage, the Kim Jong-un regime declared a war against drugs, getting rid of poppy fields,” Kang Cheol-hwan, president of the defector organization, North Korea Strategy Center, told Yonhap News Agency last month. “But now they are cultivating them again.”
North Korea’s opium poppies remained at least somewhat secreted from its citizens under the rule of Kim Jong-il.
In an August 2011 interview with NPR, Ma Young Ae — a defector and former North Korean spy who lives in Virginia — explained she “worked for Kim Jong Il’s internal police force. Her job was was to track down drug smugglers. That sounds like pretty normal law enforcement, except for one difference. She was supposed to stop small-time Korean drug dealers in order to protect the biggest drug dealer in the country: the North Korean government.
“Ma told us the North Korean government produced opium on a large scale. But it hid its poppy fields from most of the population. Ma only saw the fields because she was an insider.
“After harvesting the fields, the government would put its empty factories to use. The government would turn on its production lines at night and process opium, Ma says. Then they would pack the product in plastic cubes the size of dictionaries and smuggle it out of the country through China.”
Kim Jong-il’s son and successor instead chose to fight the war on drugs — until the Chinese Commerce Ministry suspended imports of coal from February through the end of the year, in response to one of Pyongyang’s contentious ballistic missiles tests.
Faced with the rapid loss of hard currency and an uphill battle to fund the regime’s activities — coal comprised an estimated 40 percent of North Korea’s exports to China — Kim Jong-un appears to have cozied to the wallet-stuffing possibilities the prized poppy provides.
Noting the war on drugs had already failed, Kang added, “The North is cultivating poppy fields again for drug smuggling as a way to secure funds to manage its regime.”
READ MORE: United States Exposed for Being Complicit in Arming and Training Child Soldiers in Afghanistan
Funding an entire government’s operations from the cultivation and production of opium should be a piece of cake — should illegal markets fail, America has an insidious obsession with opioids.
Tens of thousands each year die of overdoses from heroin, opioids, and/or their synthetics in the United States, alone — in large part, courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry’s reckless devotion to painkillers.
Vox reported March 29 the opioid “epidemic has by and large been caused by the rise in opioid overdose deaths. First, opioid painkiller overdoses began to rise, as doctors began to fill out a record number of prescriptions for the drugs in an attempt to treat patients’ pain conditions. Then, people hooked on painkillers began to move over to heroin as they or their sources of drugs lost their prescriptions. And recently, more people have begun moving to fentanyl, an opioid that’s even more potent and cheaper than heroin. The result is a deadly epidemic that so far shows no signs of slowing down.”
And how could it slow down?
Opioids doled out like candy by doctors and hospitals to those suffering but unaware of the addiction pitfalls inherent in rising tolerance, short-term prescriptions, and — in particular — the availability of potent substances like heroin and fentanyl on the black market.
This isn’t by far purely an issue to be blamed on illegal trade in drugs. Media Roots’ Abby Martin elaborated on the perniciousness of the opioid crisis in 2014, stating,
“In today’s globalized world of rule-for-profit, one can’t discount the role that multinational corporations play in US foreign policy decisions either. Not only have oil companies and private military contractors made a killing off the occupation, big pharmaceutical companies, which collectively lobby over 250 million dollars annually to Congress, need opium latex to manufacture drugs for this pill happy nation. As far as the political elite funneling the tainted funds, the recent HSBC bank scandal exposed how trillions of dollars in black market sales are brazenly being laundered offshore.”
For the welcome relief opioid painkillers offer those who suffer severe discomfort, the medications’ highly-addictive nature leaves doctors reluctant to write strong prescriptions. However, if tolerance builds, and medical personnel refuse to increase dosage accordingly, those still facing unbearable pain often shop black markets — where the purity and safety of substances cannot be verified — to supplement their supplies.
It must be duly noted, America’s opioid epidemic mushroomed only after U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan.
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“Within six months of the U.S. invasion,” wrote Matthieu Aikins for the December 4, 2014, Rolling Stone, “the warlords we backed were running the opium trade, and the spring of 2002 saw a bumper harvest of 3,400 tons.”
Just prior to boots and bombs hitting the ground, opium production in Afghanistan fell to an impressive low of 185 pounds — all-too ironically, thanks to Taliban efforts to eradicate the entire supply of opium poppies.
Mint Press News’ Mnar Muhawesh wrote last year, “The War in Afghanistan saw the country’s practically dead opium industry expanded dramatically. By 2014, Afghanistan was producing twice as much opium as it did in 2000. By 2015, Afghanistan was the source of 90 percent of the world’s opium poppy.”
Claiming terrorism as the impetus for invading Afghanistan would be at least as absurd as the Drug Enforcement Agency claiming the global War on Drugs has been a success. Taliban forces have returned in strength to the nation whose opium poppies are guarded by U.S. troops — who are putatively present to fight in the ongoing War on Terror.
After a moment deeply pondering the last point, it’s imperative to address current events — specifically, U.S. military vessels already present in the South and East China Seas, amid dangerously high tensions with North Korea.
North Korea — who announced weeks ago its debilitated economy would seek relief from, yes, the cultivation and production of opium poppies.
Perpetually bellicose Pyongyang is no stranger to hyperbole in military prowess — so much so, threats of direct nuclear strikes by North Korea against the United States are typically downplayed by Washington, if not dismissed with a snide grin.
Pyongyang’s testing of ballistic and other missiles have been deemed a threat to the national security of South Korea, where a U.S. missile defense system pointed North has further heightened hostilities on the peninsula and in the region.
Of one such missile launch Sunday, Defense Secretary James Mattis admonished,
“The leader of North Korea again recklessly tried to provoke something by launching a missile.”
Kim In Ryong, North Korea’s Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, warned on Monday the U.S. has “created a dangerous situation in which a thermonuclear war may break out at any minute” — adding, Pyongyang “is ready to react to any mode of war desired by the U.S.”
READ MORE: WATCH: Cops Terrorize, Taser, Kidnap High School Kid Because they Smelled Weed
Whether that war includes plans for the U.S. usurpation of North Korea’s literal cash crop of opium poppies will undoubtedly be determined soon.
As more of the blame for the world’s exacerbating opiate overdose crisis is now being rightly put on the pharmaceutical industry, the dark side of this epidemic in the fact that the production of opium containing poppies has exploded since the military occupation of Afghanistan beginning in 2001.
According to Russian diplomat Sergey Lavrov, there are signs of collusion between NATO and drug producers and traffickers working to flood the world with opium. Remarking on how the mission to rid Afghanistan of terrorists quickly became distorted after the invasion, ultimately creating a never-ending supply of drugs to the West.
“During their operation in Afghanistan, the terrorist threat has not been rooted out, while the drug threat has increased many times over. The drug industry prospered. There is factual evidence that some of the NATO contingents in Afghanistan turned a blind eye to the illegal drug trafficking, even if they were not directly involved in these criminal schemes.” ~Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister
So, what exactly is the evidence? In a 2014 report, the UN notes that poppy production had reached an all time global high, with shocking increases in heroin users worldwide.
“The amount of land used for cultivating opium poppies around the world is at an all-time high, says a UN report. Afghanistan is largely behind the increase, with its crop growing by 36 percent over a year, producing 80 percent of the world’s opium.
A World Drug Report released by the UN’s Vienna-based Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has charted the global use of drugs. Although it says that global drug use is “stable,” it notes that the cultivation of opium has grown drastically.” [Source]
As noted by TDC:
“When the Untied Nations produces a report that reads like a corporate stock prospectus you know something is fishy. The UN report was very detailed about the number of new addicts, the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan and the final destination.” [Source]
In short, if a NATO country is overseeing the security and military occupation of Afghanistan, and suddenly poppy production explodes, then at the very least NATO is permissive of the cultivation and exportation of the world’s deadliest and most addictive street drug.
Furthermore, as noted by Lavrov, there is a strategy of managed chaos in play at present in the Middle East and northern Africa, disrupting and ruining the lives of millions of people, for the benefit of America and those in positions to temporarily profit from unfettered access to the natural resources of targeted nations.
“The concept of managed chaos appeared long ago as a method of strengthening US influence. Its basic premise is that managed chaos projects should be launched away from the United States in regions that are crucial for global economic and financial development.” ~Sergey Lavrov
Lavrov’s comments on the opium crisis and managed chaos are included in the following video.
Via Waking Times
