Safe #Painkiller (0 #Deaths) - #BigPharma Opiate (165,000 Deaths)

What Can We Say About a System that Criminalizes a Safe Painkiller (0 Deaths) and Promotes Big Pharma Opiates that Have Killed 165,000 Americans?

 

by Charles Hugh Smith

 

Set your mindset to objective and come with me to the little-known but plucky nation of Lower Slobovia. The residents of Lower Slobovia have two choices when they are suffering from chronic pain:

1. A natural, non-addictive medication that they can grow themselves that has never caused a single fatality due to overdose, adverse reactions or mixing with other drugs (polypharmacy), or

2. synthetic opiates manufactured by pharmaceutical corporations that are highly addictive, trigger multiple adverse reactions, manifest dangerous polypharmaceutical attributes and have killed over 165,000 people in the past 15 years– 28 times the nation’s5,790 combat deaths in recent military conflicts.

The corporations manufacturing and distributing the synthetic opiates as “safe” hid the truth about their medications from doctors, patients and the media: ‘You Want a Description of Hell?’ Oxycontin’s 12-Hour Problem (via John F.) OxyContin’s stunning success masked a fundamental problem: The drug wears off hours early in many people, a Los Angeles Times investigation found. OxyContin is a chemical cousin of heroin, and when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

So take a guess which class of drugs is perfectly legal and widely promoted by Lower Slobovia’s healthcare system, and which one is classified as a restricted Schedule 1 drug by the nation’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), i.e. as dangerous as heroin?

 

I suspect you saw this coming, right? The natural painkiller that never killed a single soul and can be grown at home is criminalized, while the drugs that have already killed 165,000 people (a number that grossly understates the total number of deaths at least partly attributable to synthetic opiates) and addicted and/or harmed millions of other users is perfectly legal, declared “safe” by the pushers (oops, I mean pharmaceutical manufacturers) and the government, and distributed in the tens of millions of doses by the “healthcare” system.

Lower Slobovia’s DEA, the corporate manufacturers of the killer-opiates and its healthcare system that slavishly distributes millions of the killer pills should be immediately escorted to

Devil’s Island and left to rot, right? And the insane laws reversed so the killer corporate synthetic opiates are declared Schedule 1 and heavily criminalized, and the natural nobody-dies painkiller legalized and distributed, right?

Isn’t this obvious? Yes, I realize cannabis and opiates are not apples to apples, but you get the point–the drugs that have killed more than 165,000 people and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of others should be on Lower Slobovia DEA’s Schedule 1 of criminalized drugs instead of being passed out like candy by its “healthcare” system– a distribtion that has reaped tens of billions of dollars in sales and profits for the pharmaceutical sector.

If you need some official statement to accept the obvious, well then, here you go: Could Medical Cannabis Break the Painkiller Epidemic? (Scientific American, September 2016 issue) A body of research suggests yes, but scientists are having to fight red tape to study whether medical marijuana could substitute for opioid drugs.

The U.S. “is in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic,” according to the Department of Health and Human Services. Prescription opioid overdoses killed more than 165,000 Americans between 1999 and 2014, and the health and social costs of abusing such drugs are estimated to be as much as $55 billion a year. The problem has led experts to scramble for a less dangerous alternative for pain relief–and some research points to medical marijuana.

Published in 2014, the study revealed an intriguing trend: between 1999 and 2010, states that permitted medical marijuana had an average of almost 25 percent fewer opioid overdose deaths each year than states where cannabis remained illegal.

So when will the citizens of Lower Slobovia wake up to the criminality of their government in favoring killer corporate opiates over safe natural painkillers, the criminality of the pharmaceutical racketeers who hid the truth from doctors and patients, and the complicity of a “healthcare” industry that has been happy to pass out deadly drugs like candy–at a profit, of course.

As you might have guessed, there is no Lower Slobovia. There is only the U.S.A., a nation “in the midst of an unprecedented opioid epidemic,” a nation blind to the lethality of its Destruction Enforcement Agency (DEA), its corporate pushers and its government-funded and enforced “healthcare” system.

Disclosure: I am not a user of either recreational or medicinal cannabis or any corporate opiate. I just think it’s time we finally confront the terrible, needless cost in human lives and suffering from our nation’s insane, benighted drug laws and our needlessly costly, destructive but oh-so-profitable “healthcare” system.