Ex-DEA agent: Opioid crisis fueled by drug industry and Congress
(Worthy News) - In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed -- that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes.
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 -- 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. [ Source: 60 Minutes (Read More...) ]
Why is there a market for opiods?
Why do so many people feel the need to take such strong medicine for their pain and sufferings?
Seems like just more propaganda to me.
Sure many members of the AMA (American Medical Association) are just drug pushers. We all know that, don't we?
And the Pharmaceutical reps the middle men in this whole mess. Who needs a cartel when we have big Pharma.
But the real issue is not that people are addicted to opioids. Anyone with serious chronic intractable pain knows getting or being addicted means nothing in the face of real debilitating pain, diseases, and injuries (i.e. to spinal cords, burn victims, amputees, etc).
Why do so many people need that class of drugs to endure?
That's the question.
Because making it now legal in more and more States (and nations) to euthanize someone in such horrible pain isn't the solution for everyone. Some people believe in God, and that He doesn't approve of we humans playing God with our own lives or others. Maybe if convicted of captial crimes but most euthanized people haven't, at least, not in the USA.
This whole "war" on opioids seems to me to be just another attempt to cull our human populations here in the USA, with 60 minutes playing the fool.
The "epidemic" is because those who have such serious pain, are NOT getting proper treatment. Psychoanalysis never will replace pain meds completely. Not all can be treated by hypnosis, or hypnotics. That's what Psychotropics used to be called, before the common man had access to Physician Desk References (up until mid 80's).
When our PCP's and specialists start prescribing opiods properly, when they start treating pain properly (using all the non-opioid options), when the lay person can afford to take their kid to the doctor because that broken arm hasn't been healing well and the kids still in too much pain, stuff like that, the illicit market for opiods need not be an option anymore. When $20 can do what a doctor has not the mercy to, then, let's discuss this again.
When the AMA puts Compassion on their curriculum, then, let's discuss this again.
Meanwhile, people are stroking out, dying, incoherent, from pain, while Trump declares war on opioids.
Idiots, all of them. Some of us don't have another 30 years to waste waiting for progress to make it into our AMA.
Thank you for sharing this.