Last week the Supreme Court blocked a $6 billion bankruptcy settlement by Purdue Pharma that would protect its Sackler family owners from civil lawsuits related to opioid abuse. The history of Purdue and the harm caused by their greed should be a warning that guaranteed health insurance in the U.S. is dangerous without addressing the hazards of psychiatry and the broadening of law enforcement through mandatory treatment.
It’s impossible for a physician to respect their oath to do no harm in an environment of Capitalism and the dominant pharmaceutical industry. In such an environment, treatment will never be the result of research seeking what’s best for the person treated. All drugs, without exception, are primarily physiological, and some, due to potency, are able to more directly affect the brain, which is different from the mind/spirit/psyche.
Before the Sacklers advertised products that targeted pain in modern ways, they taught the medical world that benzodiazepines, specifically Valium, solved many problems otherwise related to different disorders. The revolution was based on the concept of psychic tension. There have been similar campaigns promoting the use of psychedelics (cycling again in 2023) and serotonin reuptake, but at the core, this is academic gibberish.
These psychiatrists, the Sacklers, used similar techniques as those involved with the Valium campaign to initiate what is now referred to as the national opioid crisis. Drugs to address pain the way their product does are prescribed based on a pain scale from 0 to 10. A score of 0 means no pain, and 10 means the worst pain. If you, for example, receive a punch card from Subway for the number of sandwiches purchased from their store, a six is identical to a neighbor’s card with the same number. However, two people claiming to have level 6 pain can reference two completely different things.
The first opioid crisis in the U.S. was prompted by medical attention soldiers received in The Civil War. This problem lasted for several decades afterward. Heroin was marketed in the early 1900s as a less addictive option to Morphine, but it isn’t less addictive. Purdue said their drug was less addictive, too, which, again, it isn’t. Hospice has guaranteed patients the legal right to pain management which increase availability.
It doesn’t make sense to focus all policy efforts on limiting the amount of Fentanyl that crosses the southern border when most consumers of pain relievers describing this as an addiction claim the problem began with a prescription.
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