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.
As the opioid crisis continues, pharmaceutical companies continue to pay politicians to look the other way, and the federal government fails to push for legitimate solutions.
The post Legal Opioids Have Killed Hundreds of Thousands As Big Pharma Bribes Politicians to Ignore It appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The U.S. Health Secretary has left little hope that the federal government will reclassify cannabis and acknowledge its medicinal value anytime soon.
The post Health Secretary Who Gave Cialis to Children Says There Is ‘No Such Thing As Medical Marijuana’ appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
Focusing on harm reduction instead of punishment and prison profits, San Francisco is seeking to fight heroin addiction with science instead of an iron fist.
The post In a Blow to Drug Warriors: San Francisco To Open Country’s First Heroin Injection Site appeared first on The Free Thought Project.
The twin scourges of opioid addiction and worsening wealth inequality are literally draining the lifeblood from the American public. Case in point: The Centers for Disease Control confirmed earlier today that the average life expectancy at birth declined in 2016 for the second consecutive year - the first multiyear decline since 1963, when a flu epidemic led to a rash of deaths as hundreds of thousands of elderly Americans succumbed to the virus.
The increase has been fueled by a 21% rise in drug overdose deaths, according to the Washington Post.
Let that sink in for a second: In 1963, penicillin was a relatively recent innovation. We live in an age of unprecedented medicinal efficacy. Despite this, Americans are sicker than ever before.
And as if that weren’t enough, they’re also spending more on health-care than ever before. Data from the NHE shows the US spent a staggering $3.3 trillion on healthcare in 2016, equivalent to roughly 18% of GDP.
“I think we should take it very seriously,” said Bob Anderson, chief of the Mortality Statistics Branch at the National Center for Health Statistics, told the Washington Post. “If you look at the other developed countries in the world, they’re not seeing this kind of thing. Life expectancy is going up."
As we’ve highlighted time and time again, more than 42,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses alone in 2016 - a 28% increase over 2015. When deaths from drugs such as cocaine, methamphetamine and benzodiazepines are included, the overall increase was 21%.
A multiyear decline in life expectancy is more commonly associated with AIDS epidemics in southern and eastern Africa or wars in Syria and Afghanistan, said Majid Ezzati, a professor of public health at Imperial College London who has studied life expectancy.
“The story does come down to young people,” he said. “It’s the overdose story, to a large extent."
Last year - when the CDC data showed the first annualized drop in life expectancy since the early 1990s - public health observers declared that this could be the beginning of a seriously troubling trend that could have far reaching repercussions for the US economy. Experts, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton, examined the impact of so-called “diseases of despair” - drug overdoses, suicides and alcoholism - as well as small increases in deaths from heart disease, strokes and diabetes as the Baby Boom generation ages into retirement.
Furthermore, the 2016 data shows that just three major causes of death are responsible: unintentional injuries, Alzheimer’s disease and suicides, with the bulk of the difference attributable to the 63,632 people who died of overdoses. That total was an increase of more than 11,000 over the 52,404 who died of the same cause in 2015. This trend was largely driven by deaths from fentanyl and other synthetic opioids, which more than doubled from the previous year. Heroin and prescription opioid overdose deaths also rose, but more modestly.
At the same time, a long decline in deaths from heart disease continued a six-year trend of leveling out, Anderson said. The small decrease last year in the rate of the nation’s leading cause of death no longer canceled the drug epidemic’s impact on life expectancy, Anderson said.
“The key factor is the increase in drug overdose deaths,” he said.
Overall, life expectancy dropped by a tenth of a year, from 78.7 to 78.6. It fell two-tenths of a year for men, who have much higher overdose death rates, from 76.3 to 76.1 years. Women’s life expectancy held steady at 81.1 years.
While drug mortality has been increasing among all age groups since 1999, it’s highest among those ages 25 to 54. Their fatal overdose rate for all drugs was roughly 35 cases per 100,000 individuals in 2016, compared with 12 deaths per 100,000 for people under 24 and six deaths per 100,000 among seniors 65 and older.
Examining this data through the lens of gender reveals another startling detail: The bulk of this increase is driven by a spike in overdose deaths among men.
As WaPo points out, men of all ages (26 deaths per 100,000) are twice as likely to die of a drug overdose as women (13 per 100,000). At the state level, West Virginia stands alone as the epicenter of overdose mortality, with 52 deaths per 100,000 residents in 2016. The next two states, New Hampshire and Ohio, each saw 39 deaths per 100,000 last year.
“This is no longer an opioid crisis,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former Rhode Island congressman who was a member of President Trump’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and the Opioid Crisis. “This is a moral crisis . . . we know how to answer this problem, but we can’t get around our own prejudices."
During the campaign, President Trump promised to do everything in his power to combat the opioid epidemic. But so far, his actions have fallen far short of the recommendations from a committee that he created in March to study options to suppress the crisis. Most notably, Trump ignored a recommendation from the committee to declare the opioid crisis a national emergency - a designation that would’ve allowed the hardest-hit states to access federal disaster-relief funds. Instead Trump declared it a national health crisis, leaving states empty-handed.
Another factor that shows just how damaging opioids have been to the American public: last year, rates of heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory diseases, strokes, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, and kidney disease fell, as did the nation’s overall death rate. But this wasn’t enough to offset the impact of opioids.
Increasing incidences of Alzheimer’s disease have also contributed to this trend.
“As people avoid [cancer and heart disease], they’re going to survive long enough to die of Alzheimer’s,” he said.
And while only limited provisional data is available for 2017, things don’t look any better.
“My guess is that when all of the data are in that the [2017] trend line will be at least as steep as for 2016, if not steeper,” Anderson said.
And in case you wondered what all this has to do with me... apart from it"s "your" life expectancy, well this is what happened to the only thing that really matters to everyone... The Dow... the last time that US life expectancy dropped for two straight years...
Authored by Allen Marshall (Crimson Avenger) via Defiant Living blog,
America is the only nation brought forth by a set of beliefs, and those beliefs, captured so eloquently in our founding documents, are some of the most powerful and inspiring ever conceived. We consider this to be the land of the free, where the individual is supreme and nothing prevents us from going as far as our talents can take us. That image of America – that “brand” – is incredibly strong.
However, there’s a very large gap between that long-held image and the reality of America today.
What was once a government built for the people is now a government run for the rich and powerful, one that throws the people under the bus whenever their interests differ from those of the corporate and political leaders who run the show.
And living in one world (the corrupt) while stubbornly believing you live in another (the ideal), despite mounds of evidence, causes a distinct kind of stress, often called cognitive dissonance.
Psychologists suggest that when people are in a state of cognitive dissonance, they’ll search for a way to resolve it, either by rejecting one view or the other as either wrong or unimportant. If you’re a smoker looking at the link between smoking and cancer, for example, you’ll either quit smoking or decide that the research is biased, wrong, or doesn’t apply (in other words, that you’re smart enough to quit before the long-term damage is done).
But what happens if you can’t resolve the two?
For most of us Americans, resolving our cognitive dissonance would mean either accepting that we’re impotent and living futile (and feudal) lives, or rejecting our lifestyles and actively fighting the rot in the system.
If we’re not willing to do either of those, the dissonance stays – and eats at us.
People carrying this kind of ongoing, underlying stress find ways of coping with it; in America we’re doing it with self-medication, compulsive behaviors and distractions. Consider the following examples of the way we cope with the ever-present stress in our lives:
We’re collectively doing so much damage to ourselves, solely to protect our psyches from the reality that the America that used to be is no longer the America we have. And who does that help? As you can see from the points above, it doesn’t help us: Instead, it helps the rich and powerful who are subverting the system. They’re corrupting everything this country once was, and by willfully refusing to acknowledge that reality, we’re inadvertently helping them to do it.
The best thing we can do – for our mental and physical health, as well as for our country – is to open our eyes to what America has become, not what we wish it still was. It’s time to face reality and take action.
According to a new study from the Health Statistic Center of West Virginia, overdose deaths related to methamphetamine have increased by 500 percent in just four short years.
In fact, a record-number 129 people have passed from overdoses in 2017 - and that number is expected to climb through the holiday season.
As the late American-German poet, Charles Bukowski once said, “My dear, Find what you love and let it kill you.” It seems as some West Virginians have taken it to heart...
Chad Napier, prevention officer with the Appalachian High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area said, about half the meth overdoses involve fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid that remains the leading cause of drug overdoses in the state. Napier further said, addicts are using meth mixed with fentanyl, sometimes unknowingly, which is the reason for the overdose surge.
In November, we highlighted how 60.1% of heroin tested by authorities in Canada for the 2017 period contained fentanyl. We also noted, cocaine and methamphetamine saw a noticeable surge as well. The situation in Canada is critical with one funeral home in Vancouver warning of “too many bodies.”
As we’ve pointed out in the article, fentanyl is being shipped from China into Canada, then distributed across North America. In West Virginia’s case, meth dealers have graduated from their Breaking Bad recreational vehicles— to now demanding super meth from extravagant laboratories in Mexico.
So far, Kanawha and Cabell counties in West Virginia have been hit the hardest in meth-related overdoses. About thirty Kanawha residents and twenty eight in Cabell have died with the epidemic spreading to other counties such as Raleigh and Wood.
“A lot of these people don’t know what they’re getting,” Napier said.
“We’re seeing the meth cut with fentanyl, so that’s increasing the meth [overdose] numbers, I believe.”
The Health Statistic Center of West Virginia said, meth-related overdoses across the state have dramatically increased over the past four years from 21 in 2014, 49 in 2015, 107 in 2016 to 129 deaths so far in 2017.
Dr. Rahul Gupta, state health commissioner warned, residents are mixing meth and opioids producing a dangerous concoction that could kill anyone who comes in contact with it. The journey of the Mexican-made meth started in the southern states and has now spread to the east.
“We’re seeing a lot more meth, and it’s a different kind of meth than we were seeing five or six years ago,” Gupta said.
“There’s a push from the cartels to get these drugs out there.”
So it seems, Mexican drug cartels have seen one too many episodes of Breaking Bad, as they attempt to empire build across the United States killing what’s left of America’s middle class through a powerful concoction of meth and synthetic opioids.
President Trump is finally acquiescing to his opioid commission’s recommendation that he swiftly appoint an “opioid czar” to coordinate the federal government’s response to the rapidly worsening opioid epidemic.
And his pick is: Former campaign manager and West Wing strategist Kellyanne Conway, according to Buzzfeed. The pick is significant: Thanks to her frequent television appearances both now and during the campaign, Conway is one of the administration’s most visible figures. Tom Marino, Trump"s previous nominee for the position, withdrew after it was revealed he pushed for a bill that made it harder for law enforcement to crack down on opioid drug manufacturers.
As many are already aware, drug-overdose deaths have skyrocketed in recent years, driven primarily by opioids, particularly powerful synthetic opioid drugs that have tainted the US heroin supply and have led to an unprecedented number of accidental overdoses. Last year alone, it’s estimated that 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that Conway would be coordinating the opioid response effort from the White House. Of course, the position of director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, another agency that would presumably be heavily involved in the administration"s response, remains vacant since Marino withdrew his name from consideration.
The opioid crisis played heavily in Trump’s campaign rhetoric and after taking office he appointed a commission led by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to compile a report on effective strategies for combating the crisis. The committee issued more than 50 recommendations, most of which have yet to be implemented, and many likely never will be. Last month, Trump declared the opioid abuse epidemic a national public health crisis, but declined to declare it a national emergency, which would’ve allowed states to receive federal disaster relief funding.
"It is a positive sign, she is a high profile figure in the administration, showing the administration takes this seriously," opioid policy expert Andrew Kolodny of Brandeis University told BuzzFeed News.
But Kolodny noted the administration still hasn"t named a head for its Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), or released a strategy to combat the crisis (one is promised in February), or requested any money from Congress to fill the depleted national public health emergency fund — now down to $66,000 — to pay for its health emergency declaration.
Trump has asked her "to coordinate and lead the effort from the White House," Sessions said at a news conference in remarks that went beyond prepared ones from the event. Sessions also announced $12 million in grants to state and local police departments, and the opening of a new Drug Enforcement Agency field office in Louisville to combat illicit opioid use in Appalachia. He also ordered each US attorney"s office to name an opioid coordinator.
"I know that this crisis is daunting — the death rates are stunning — and it can be discouraging," Sessions said. "But we will turn the tide."
When Christie’s commission was working, Conway sat in on many of the panel"s meetings and has been heavily involved with crafting the administration"s response to the crisis. Sessions touted Conway"s communication skills at the news conference, perhaps signaling an administration push for public service announcements aimed at changing public attitudes towards opioid addiction.
"Stemming overdose deaths will take a broad interagency approach led by someone with a singular focus and extensive knowledge of the drivers of - and solutions to the epidemic," former ONDCP official Regina LaBelle told BuzzFeed. "Therefore, a Senate confirmed Director of National Drug Control Policy should lead this effort."
Calls for Trump to appoint an opioid czar have intensified in recent days. Earlier this week, Axios published a list of reasons why Trump should appoint someone to coordinate the federal government"s response to the epidemic. Axios made the case for appointing a White House drug policy coordinator, the path Trump eventually chose.
"There"s only so much money and human capacity to go around. A centralized authority figure could help make sure agencies aren"t duplicating each other"s work, and set priorities those agencies might not arrive at on their own, but which would contribute more to the broader, inter-agency effort."
However, apparently not everybody agrees on the need to appoint an opioid czar. At a congressional hearing in Baltimore on Tuesday, Christie, who headed a presidential report panel on the opioid crisis, had called the clamor for a US opioids czar "overblown." The steps needed to counter the overdose crisis are well understood, he said, starting with limiting over-prescriptions of painkillers, cutting fentanyl exports from China, and providing the overdose remedy naloxone to communities, and don"t need a czar to kick start.
A new crisis is developing in Canada and it’s not the housing bubble.
A far more sinister one, that is taking the country by storm, as a new wave of fentanyl has washed up on the shores of Canada from an unknown origin most likely China, and has made it onto city streets.
To our friends in the business district of Toronto, be - careful what you sniff - it might contain fentanyl.
Here’s why:
The number of positive tests for fentanyl in samples of heroin seized by law enforcement agencies across Canada have exploded. Health Canada’s Drug Analysis Service (DAS) revealed to CBC News that in 2012 .08% of 2,337 heroin samples tested positive for fentanyl. Fast forward to today and that number stands at 60.1% of 3,337 heroin samples, an astronomical jump visualized below.
Seems as China has turned on the fentanyl spigot in 2016 and 2017…
Over the past five-years of tests, marijuana samples seized by law enforcement agencies contained no fentanyl. But on a more interesting note, cocaine and methamphetamine seized by law enforcement agencies reported an increase. A potential health hazard for the modern day bankers in Toronto…..
The most common drugs the service tests for include marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, fentanyl, heroin, hydromorphone, oxycodone, MDMA, alprazolam and GHB.
Fentanyl was not identified in any of the marijuana samples tested over the five-year period, while cocaine and methamphetamine saw increases from 0.01 per cent to 1.8 per cent and zero per cent to 1.7 per cent, respectively. Overall, the figures are stark. In 2012, only 217 of the street drug samples tested positive for fentanyl. Just as the number of lives claimed by the deadly opioid has skyrocketed since then, so too has the number of times fentanyl has showed up in samples of illegal street drugs. As of Sept. 30, DAS found fentanyl in 4,568 samples this year – an increase of 2,005 per cent.
According to Dr. David Juurlink, head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto:
“...the exponential increase of street drugs testing positive for fentanyl over the last five years doesn’t surprise.The illicit drug supply has never been more dangerous because of the profusion of fentanyl-related compounds. This is why so many people are dying. They’re dying because the drugs they’re using contain, you know, much more opioid than they thought.”
In fact, Juurlink is right as shown below...
Dr. Michael Krausz, a professor of psychiatry specializing in addiction at the University of British Columbia, explains drug dealers “want to save money or make higher profits”, so fentanyl is mixed into drugs like heroin or cocaine to stretch their supplies.
Krausz also said drug dealers are not skilled enough to keep fentanyl doses in a survivable range while mixing it with heroin or cocaine, which is why many experts believe overdoses are occurring. Simply, the end user is not realizing what he/she is getting and ends up dead.
Juurlink said several factors sparked fentanyl’s rise:
In British Columbia, 80% of the street drugs are laced with fentanyl. Four mothers who have lost their sons to overdoses advocate for state controlled drugs.
The Globe And Mail explains: Fentanyl’s deadly path
China is a key source of illicit fentanyl coming to Canada in response to demand from prescription-painkiller addicts as well as users of street drugs, traffickers are turning to a pharmaceutical-manufacturing giant to produce deadly, black-market versions of fentanyl, according to the RCMP.
Across Canada, police are seizing illicit fentanyl from China - Three examples from 2015: A package of fentanyl declared as a muffler was stopped on its way to Calgary; a man in Brampton, Ont., was charged with importing more than 500 grams of the drug; and a parcel destined for Halifax was found to contain 514 grams, worth about $1-million.
Once the drug is in, it is processed – often in Western Canada - Because illicit fentanyl and fentanyl analogues are so potent, the white powder is cut or mixed with other drugs and fillers, before it can be sold on the street. Most of the 21 clandestine labs dismantled by police since 2013 operated in British Columbia and Alberta, according to a Globe and Mail analysis.
Bootleg fentanyl is highly lucrative - The math works like this, according to Edmonton physician Hakique Virani: A kilogram of pure fentanyl powder costs $12,500. A kilo is enough to make 1,000,000 tablets. Each tab sells for $20 in major cities, for total proceeds of $20-million. In smaller markets, the street price is as high as $80.
Fentanyl has been found in police busts all over the country - The first known fentanyl seizure in Canada was from a clandestine lab in Montreal in April, 2013. Since then, police have busted traffickers in almost every province and the Northwest Territories, for a total of 58 across the country, according to The Globe’s analysis.
Bottom line: China is flooding North America with fentanyl through shipping routes into Canada. The opioid crisis is far from over and its about to kick into hyperdrive. The one question we ask: how will bankers in Toronto and or on Wall Street deal with the very real possibility their blackmarket stimulants could contain fentanyl?
Unbeknownst to many, the Sackler Family, with assets of $13 billion, the nation’s 19th wealthiest family is one the top players in philanthropy. You can find the Sackler Gallery in the Smithsonian museum in Washington, D.C. or visit the Sackler wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Sackler’s even have a museum at Harvard, Guggenheim, and dozen of universities around the country. If it’s art— the Sackler family has it.
Participating in the art game takes money and a lot of it. So, where does the Sackler money come from?
According to Forbes, the “Sacklers continue to reap hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the businesses in 2016– some $700 million last year, by Forbes’ calculations - from an estimated $3 billion in Purdue Pharma revenues plus at least $1.5 billion in sales from their foreign companies”.
Forbes outlines a brief history lesson of how the Sackler family got started in the world of medicine-
The family fortune began in 1952 when three doctors — Arthur (d. 1987), Mortimer (d. 2010) and Raymond Sackler — purchased Purdue, then a small and struggling New York drug manufacturer. The company spent decades selling products like earwax remover and laxatives before moving into pain medications by the late 1980s. To create OxyContin, Purdue married oxycodone, a generic painkiller, with a time-release mechanism to combat abuse by spreading the drug’s effects over a half-day.
The FDA approved the medication in 1995 and it soon took off. By 2003 OxyContin sales hit $1.6 billion as the drug helped drive a huge nationwide spike in opioid prescribing. At its peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet — nearly enough for every American to have a bottle.
Now opioid prescriptions are declining amid increased scrutiny over drug addiction, down 12% since 2012 according to data from healthcare information firm IMS Health. OxyContin (which is also beginning to face competition from authorized generics while fighting to protect its patents over tamper-proof, extended-release oxycodone) saw prescriptions fall 17%.
It wasn’t until the 1980’s, as explained by Forbes, the Sackler family through their family-owned drug company called Purdue Pharma created OxyContin. Then in 1995, the FDA approved the medication and sales exploded. Sales hit $1.6 billion in 2003, as a nationwide spike in opioids was seen. By the peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescription for opioid painkillers, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet. Good times for the Sacklers from 1996- 2012, as the family drug business exploded.
According to The New Yorker, Oxycontin ” has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue” since 1995. OxyContin’s sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin, which makes it highly addictive.
The New Yorker further says Purdue used marketing techniques to deceive the American public of the drug’s true addictive characteristics.
Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.” Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.
Oddly enough, around the time OxyContin was approved, prescription opioid deaths across the United States surged. Fast forward to more relevant times, where heroin and fentanyl deaths are exploding.
Diving into the opioid crisis onto the streets of Baltimore. It’s very common to see local citizens shooting up heroin on city streets. In this video, I asked a man how did this addiction start? Guess what he said?... It all started with legal painkillers, such as OxyContin.
As a few parasitical elites make billions flooding America’s streets with opioids. We the every day American citizen have to deal with the consequences, as President Trump outlined in yesterday’s opioid crisis speech:
Bottomline: It’s time for the American people to learn the truth about the opioid crisis and the very few elites who have profited. The question You should ask: why did our government allow this to happen?
A new study reveals that opioid-related deaths in Colorado decreased by nearly 7 percent in the two years after the state legalized cannabis.
Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,
Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi is telling all when it comes to placing blame for the nation’s opioid crisis. He says drug distributors pumped opioids into communities in the United States knowing that people were dying and that the US government is helping.
Joe Rannazzisi is a tough and blunt former DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) deputy assistant administrator with a law degree, a pharmacy degree, and a growing rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. Congress has often been complicit in atrocities, especially when a politician profits off of the removal of the rights of others. So it should not come as a surprise that Rannazzisi is blaming Congress and the drug industry for the opioid epidemic gripping the nation.
Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread. Its quick spread was also aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
The DEA responded to the explosive report that the government is helping keep Americans addicted to opioids so that pharmaceutical companies can continue to boast big profits. The DEA says it has taken actions against far fewer opioid distributors under a new law. A Justice Department memo shows 65 doctors, pharmacies, and drug companies received suspension orders in 2011. Only six of them have gotten them this year.
“During the past seven years, we have removed approximately 900 registrations annually, preventing reckless doctors and rogue businesses from making an already troubling problem worse,” the DEA said in a written statement.
“Increasingly, our investigators initiated more than 10,000 cases and averaged more than 2,000 arrests per year.”
But Rannazzisi says this is an industry that is out of control and the DEA isn’t making a dent in this crisis.
“What they [big pharma] 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 drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die.”
The harsh reality is that the burgeoning issue of the opioid epidemic is lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry and the politicians who help fuel it, so there’s no real rush to stem the bleeding of this crisis.
“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 said.
Most of his anger is reserved for the distributors of opioid drugs. Some of them are actually multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 companies. They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use.
“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 said.
“The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream,” he added when prompted.
Rannazzisi said it’s a “fact” that the big pharmaceutical companies knew they were pumping drugs into people unnecessarily for profits and that people were dying.
In the late 1990s, opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone became a routine medical treatment for chronic pain. Drug companies assured doctors and congressional investigators that the pain medications were effective and safe. With many doctors convinced the drugs posed few risks, prescriptions skyrocketed and so did addiction.
Big pharma had a plan. It was solely a business plan. Their plan was to sell a lotta pills and make a lot of money. And they did both of those very well.
Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi is telling all when it comes to placing blame for the nation’s opioid crisis. He says drug distributors pumped opioids into communities in the United States knowing that people were dying and that the US government is helping.
Joe Rannazzisi is a tough and blunt former DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) deputy assistant administrator with a law degree, a pharmacy degree, and a growing rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. Congress has often been complicit in atrocities, especially when a politician profits off of the removal of the rights of others. So it should not come as a surprise that Rannazzisi is blaming Congress and the drug industry for the opioid epidemic gripping the nation.
Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread. Its quick spread was also aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.
The DEA responded to the explosive report that the government is helping keep Americans addicted to opioids so that pharmaceutical companies can continue to boast big profits. The DEA says it has taken actions against far fewer opioid distributors under a new law. A Justice Department memo shows 65 doctors, pharmacies, and drug companies received suspension orders in 2011. Only six of them have gotten them this year. “During the past seven years, we have removed approximately 900 registrations annually, preventing reckless doctors and rogue businesses from making an already troubling problem worse,” the DEA said in a written statement. “Increasingly, our investigators initiated more than 10,000 cases and averaged more than 2,000 arrests per year.”
But Rannazzisi says this is an industry that is out of control and the DEA isn’t making a dent in this crisis. “What they [big pharma] 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 drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die.” The harsh reality is that the burgeoning issue of the opioid epidemic is lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry and the politicians who help fuel it, so there’s no real rush to stem the bleeding of this crisis.
“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 said.
Most of his anger is reserved for the distributors of opioid drugs. Some of them are actually multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 companies. They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use.
“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 said. “The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream,” he added when prompted. Rannazzisi said it’s a “fact” that the big pharmaceutical companies knew they were pumping drugs into people unnecessarily for profits and that people were dying.
In the late 1990s, opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone became a routine medical treatment for chronic pain. Drug companies assured doctors and congressional investigators that the pain medications were effective and safe. With many doctors convinced the drugs posed few risks, prescriptions skyrocketed and so did addiction.
Big pharma had a plan. It was solely a business plan. Their plan was to sell a lotta pills and make a lot of money. And they did both of those very well.
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Author: Mac Slavo
Views: Read by 16 people
Date: October 16th, 2017
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In his September 2017 paper entitled "Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry into the Decline of the U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate", Alan B. Krueger of Princeton University explores the dramatic fall in labor force participation in the U.S. from 1997 to 2017.
As Statista"s Martin Armstrong shows in the infographic below, over the last twenty years, the rate has fallen the most for the under 20"s, with the share of 16 to 17 year olds in work dropping by 18.4 and 16.2 percentage points for men and women, respectively.
You will find more statistics at Statista
As Krueger reports, last year, Italy was the only OECD country which had a lower participation rate of prime age men than the United States. One of the reasons posited by the research is the opioid crisis currently ravaging the country. Labor force participation rates have fallen more in areas where more opioid pain medication is prescribed. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the amount of opioids prescribed in 2015 was three times higher than it was in 1999.
As noted in the paper, while the direction of causality is not clear, a 2017 report by David Mericle entitled "The Opioid Epidemic and the U.S. Economy" states that “the opioid epidemic is intertwined with the story of declining prime-age participation, especially for men, and this reinforces our doubts about a rebound in the participation rate.”
But as we pointed out previously, after spending months, or maybe even years, running very complicated regressions that your simple mind could never possibly understand, Krueger would like for you to believe that it"s the growing opioid epidemic that is forcing men to sit on their couches all day rather than look for work. Here"s a summary of his findings from the Brookings Institute:
The increase in opioid prescriptions from 1999 to 2015 could account for about 20 percent of the observed decline in men’s labor force participation (LFP) during that same period.
In “Where have all the workers gone? An inquiry into the decline of the U.S. labor force participation rate” (PDF), Princeton University’s Alan Krueger examines the labor force implications of the opioid epidemic on a local and national level.
Among other findings, the research suggests that:
- Regional variation in opioid prescription rates across the U.S. is due in large part to differences in medical practices, rather than varying health conditions. Pain medication is more widely used in counties where health care professionals prescribe greater quantities of opioid medication, with a 10 percent increase in opioid prescriptions per capita is associated with a 2 percent increase in the share of individuals who report taking a pain medication on any given day. When accounting for individuals’ disability status, self-reported health, and demographic characteristics, the effect is cut roughly in half, but remains statistically significant.
- Over the last 15 years, LFP fell more in counties where more opioids were prescribed. Krueger reaches this conclusion by linking 2015 county-level opioid prescription rates to individual level labor force data in 1999-2001 and 2014-16. For more on the relationship between prescription rates and labor force participation rate on the county-level.
Krueger also provided this very helpful map proving that opioid abuse is highly correlated to unemployment. Of course, it couldn"t possibly be the case that opioid abuse is the result of high unemployment and the associated depression that goes along with it...no, the opioid abuse definitely came first.
So, what is Krueger"s solution to help reverse the seemingly perpetual decline in labor force participation rates? If you guessed "Obamacare" then you"re absolutely right...and unfortunately, no, that is not a joke...here is the excerpt from page 38 of Krueger"s paper:
Third, addressing the decades-long slide in labor force participation by prime age men should be a national priority. This group expresses low levels of SWB and reports finding relatively little meaning in their daily activities. Because nearly half of this group reported being in poor health, it may be possible for expanded health insurance coverage and preventative care under the Affordable Care Act to positively affect the health of prime age men going forward.
And while we would never presume to be smart enough to question the very thorough, impartial research of a Princeton economist, we do wonder whether it"s in any way relevant that labor force participation rates seemingly started to decline in 1965...
...at exactly the same time that welfare spending started to surge?
It"s probably just a coincidence.
America’s opioid crisis is accelerating and could kill nearly ‘half a million people’ over the next decade.
The epidemic is now killing 100 people every day, fueling a public-health crisis draining the resources of the economy. Overdoes and deaths have been on the rise for decades, but in most recent times American’s prime working age males (25-54) have been ravaged by the crisis. This is a cause for concern…
Princeton professor and former Obama White House economist Alan Krueger is out with a Bookings paper titled: Where Have All the Workers Gone? An Inquiry Into The Decline Of The U.S. Labor Force Participation Rate. In the report, Krueger gives it his best to correlate the “mushrooming opioid crisis in the U.S. since the early 2000’s” in connection between the use of “pain medication and opioid prescription rates” with the declining labor force of prime age males.
According to the author’s calculations…. 47% of men age 25-54 take pain medication.
In a classic ‘bait and switch’ marketing tactic, the Federal Reserve’s transitory narrative is running out of time. To be safe, Fed officials have started countering their narrative of ‘rainbows and unicorns’ with talk of an existential threat called the opioid crisis.
“We are seeing, as I mentioned, an increase in death rates — which is extremely unusual,” Yellen said last week. That trend is “partly reflecting opioid use, and it is obviously a very serious and heartbreaking problem.”
On a per annum basis, opioid deaths are forecasted to increase 21% from 2015 33,091 to 2027 40,000. The forecast in deaths indicate the crisis is only accelerating. Should we say the blowoff top phase has started?
There are much larger trends at play and the opioid crisis is just a symptom of extreme wealth inequality in the United States.
In terms of wealth inequality, the American middle class has not earned their fair share of wages & salaries as % GDP in decades. The trend exemplifies the cry of the bottom 90% of Americans who have turned to opioids to escape the physical and or figurative pain of not being able to achieve the American Dream.
In Baltimore, a city with a population 621k and of that 63% are African American. JPM reports nearly 129k Africans Americans in the inner city have a net worth of zero. Yes, JPM said it correctly… ZERO.
Many in Baltimore’s inner city have escaped the physical and mental pain with the use of opioids. With-in these areas of limited opportunity and a city that is outright shrinking— the area has an abundance of methadone clinics. Last month, we exposed America’s largest methadone clinic residing on the east side of Baltimore, where the homicide rate is doubled of Chicago’s.
Diving further down the rabbit hole. I’m going to share with you raw footage of inside the opioid crisis destroying America from with-in. As always, the mainstream media is not allowed to share this with you, because it destroys the narrative that everything is awesome.
In the first interview, Alastair Williamson interviews Anthony ‘Tonyluck’, a prime age male at the end of the bracket (53) and former heroin addict in Baltimore’s east side. Anthony’s interview consists of socio-economic topics coming straight from the source that is not censored like mainstream media. At the end of the interview, he makes a great point of how the we can conquer countries through war, but we can’t win the war on our city streets.
About 120 feet to the left of Anthony’s interview, we spotted a prime age male who actually collapsed from opioid use during the interview. After the interview was over, I was able to film a snapshot of one reason why America’s productivity is being drained. FYI, the location is just blocks away from America’s largest methadone clinic.
Down the street, I stumbled across ‘Cashland’, a prime working age male, who is a current heroin user. He talks about his history of addiction and how methadone clinics keep you in a perpetual state of addiction. Half way through the interview he says “the system is setup for us to fail”. Throughout the interview, ‘Cashland’ is shooting up heroin. You’re hearing it right from the source of what is happening in the opioid crisis. At the end of interview, ‘Cashland’ passes out from the opioid injection.
The opioid crisis is a lot worse than we thought. Government and the Federal Reserve are powerless with the next leg up in the crisis underway. No matter how you see it, America is in structural decline. Officials are now diverting blame to the opioid crisis rather than their failed policies. In reality, the opioid crisis is just a a symptom of a dying empire where wealth inequality is wide through failed Central Bank monetary policies. After decades of finacialization in America, the side effects are finally showing its ugly head. Heed the warning….
