“I think I understand, fear is like a wilderness, stepping-stones or sinking sand.”

— Joni Mitchell

 

The truth behind the war on drugs is that big pharma clearly doesn’t give a fuck about our health and safety. And our political leaders, through a combination of willful ignorance, greed, & apathy, don’t either. I’ve long intuited this but after watching the brilliant & insightful documentary by Alex Gibney, The Crime of the Century, any doubts I may have had, have completely disappeared.

A little over 20 years ago, Purdue Pharma realized that if they could develop a market for their powerful opioid drugs that were restricted for use by cancer patients nearing the end of their lives, the potential for huge profits existed. So, they got busy developing a sales campaign to break through doctors’ fears of their patients dying from opioid overdoses.

 

They built their promotion campaign on supposed testimonials & evidence from doctors that didn’t even exist, and pain became the enemy. Patients had the right to enjoy pain-free lives not only on their death beds but from everyday chronic pain due to back problems, headaches, you name it. Arthur Sackler was the key figure in the Sackler family that owned Purdue Pharma & he micromanaged down to the smallest details, this campaign of subversion & deceit.

 

Sackler was successful in bribing a medical officer at the FDA, Curtis Wright, to vouch for the safety & efficacy of Purdue’s powerful new opioid, Oxycontin, which is a time-released drug. Moreover, Purdue assured doctors & patients that the likelihood of addiction was less than 1%. Armed with this fraudulent testimony and approval by the FDA, Purdue unleashed an army of sales reps to spread their pack of lies, and Purdue’s profits steadily grew to the point where they became the largest & wealthiest drug manufacturers in America.

 

Along with their profits, the death counts due to overdoses also grew. The Sacklers knew that if they could persuade doctors to write ever higher doses of Oxycontin prescriptions, patients would become addicted & would become steady customers for life. Purdue also knew that once people became addicted, they would pay the increasing prices for the drug & salesmen were pressured to keep on pushing doctors to not only increase the dosage levels, but to also expand the number of patients they could get hooked on Oxycontin.

 

The poor and often injured miners of small Appalachian mining towns were among the first targets of this heartless, greedy, & indifferent corporation. In fact, the popularity of Oxycontin in these communities grew to the point where it was dubbed, Hillbilly Heroin. Many miners become seriously injured on the job & therefore they became the lab rats so-to-speak, for Purdue. And their teenage children became curious about this wonder drug that obviously made their fathers feel so good. Appalachian teenagers began dying in ever greater numbers due to their experimentation with Oxycontin.

 

Of course, this alarming & drastic increase in teenage deaths couldn’t ever have reached such mindboggling levels were it not for the collusion of government officials along the way. Here is a brief overview of some of the more prominent colluders in this dark tale of death and destruction.

 

• Senator Chris Dodd defended Purdue Pharma (it’s the addict’s fault)

  

• Dodd received campaign donations ten times higher than other politicians from Purdue
• Enter Rudy Giuliani on Purdue’s side

  

• Two of the government’s top prosecutors blocked the requirement for Purdue’s top executives to testify in court
• The Dept. of Justice manufactured a press release to make the deal between Purdue & the government for its crimes look tough i.e., a $600 million fine (after making tens of billions in profits)
• After the settlement, Purdue doubled down on its manufacture & sales of Oxycontin
• Purdue made $3 billion the first year after their settlement in 2007
• The “Prosecution Memo” was buried by the Justice Dept.
• 2013 enter Fentanyl, 100 times more powerful than heroin
• Other drug manufacturers followed Purdue’s model after they saw the relative slap on the wrist for Purdue’s crimes
• DEA investigators became suspicious when they saw opioid orders jump from a few thousand to tens of thousands suddenly
• The DEA had the power to file an “Immediate Suspension of Registration” which could shut down a drug manufacturer overnight for suspicious activity
• DEA lawyer/enforcer, Linden Barber, used this power more than any other DEA lawyers

  

• Enter Jamie Gorelick, the Deputy Attorney General (second most powerful law official in

  

  the U.S.) to represent Cardinal Drug Manufacturing, one of the top four manufacturers

• She was appointed by Bill Clinton (look her up for some of her other infamous clients)
• Purdue, Cardinal, & the other drug manufacturers didn’t like the DEA’s ability to shut them down overnight, so they joined together in a campaign of bribery targeting key politicians
• A bill was written up that slightly changed the language of the law allowing the DEA to shut a company down (Immediate Suspension of Registration) & not a single congressman or President Obama uttered a peep of objection
• Cardinal hired the former DEA lawyer/enforcer, Linden Barber, who had left the DEA & opened his own practice defending drug manufacturers
• Barber, knowing the DEA’s weak spots from having worked for it for years, crafted the language of the new law that gutted its power in the war against the corrupt drug manufacturers
• Trump’s pick for drug czar, Tom Marino, was forced to withdraw from accepting the post because of his bill that blocked federal agents from going after big pharma firms

Well as I said, that was just an overview of justice in America regarding the righteous War on Drugs. Over half a million American citizens have died from opioid overdoses in the past 20 years but nothing must impede the holy pursuit of profits by the corporate cockroaches!

 

I’m going to end this essay by offering several of my personal speculations on this deadly subject that has perhaps cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars not to mention the horrific personal costs in terms of lives ruined & families destroyed.

 

If you’re near my age, you probably remember that it was President Nixon who officially launched the War on Drugs. Well, Nixon ran on a platform of promising to withdraw U.S. troops from the Vietnam war & as soon as he won, he escalated the war. Millions of young people were outraged & many of them were student protestors & hippies who smoked pot & experimented with other drugs. I submit that Nixon launched his War on Drugs as an excuse to lock up & silence many of his young critics.

Could it be that our politicians & the power elite actually don’t want to ever end this charade of a war on drugs because at its root, it’s a useful tool for helping them control us & especially black Americans? Why black Americans? Because they have been fucked over by the ruling class from the beginning of our country & they have suffered more deeply than any other segment of our society. Why do you think they are shot & killed almost daily?

 

America’s original police forces were called slave patrols & I submit that they still are. This opioid crisis we’re going through illustrates just how little the poor, the people of color, etc. matter to the status quo. To them, we are superfluous (unnecessary) especially in this age of high tech that was created with our tax dollars. And our last useful function is as prisoners where they not only profit from our incarceration but also our forced labor.

 

Another aspect of our suppression & oppression is what Edward Snowden revealed. If you watch Laura Poitras’ film, Citizen Four, about Snowden’s meeting with her & Glenn Greenwald in Hong Kong after his escape from the NSA site in Hawaii with the treasure trove of classified material, Snowden said in passing that the illegal NSA spying on all Americans is about control.

I think it was very wise of Snowden to not belabor this point because it would’ve made him look like some conspiracy nut from Alex Jonesville. Reflect on this, the massive, data collection center the government built & is operating in Utah is supposedly for helping to protect us from terrorist attacks. This is total bullshit!

 

If you watch the film, The Looming Towers which is about how 9/11 happened, it’s clear that both the C.I.A. & the F.B.I. had ample evidence about the impending attacks but because of petty rivalry, they didn’t share vital information with each other. This is the tragic & often repeated scenario in many crises the U.S. has faced. We don’t need more data or information on terrorist suspects, we need to figure out how to get around the asinine, petty egos of our so-called intelligence agencies.

Snowden and others have warned us repeatedly that the massive storage facility in Utah & elsewhere true purpose is control over the U.S. public. And if any of us become a threat in their minds, they can cherry pick data from our lives to frame us & build a legal case against us so they can shut us up by locking us up in prison.

 

In conclusion, there are other examples of how control over us is the true or bottom-line agenda of the power elite but I’ll leave that for you to explore. My objective in this essay was to highlight just how little our supposed leaders care about us. Is it any wonder that we’re just about the only “developed nation,” that doesn’t have a national health care program, so we don’t have to fear getting sick & losing our homes?

 

A key factor in controlling a nation’s population is fear and the 1% who de facto own & control America are very adept at keeping us afraid of one another i.e., FOX “news,” for example. And fear of black people is a tried-and-true technique even though white collar crime is far more deadly i.e., the opioid crisis.

 

P.S. If you’d like to get a much more thorough explanation of all this, check out this interview with the venerable, Noam Chomsky at https://chomsky.info/199804__-2/

Addendum

I finished this piece two days ago & have been wrestling  with myself as to whether I should include this. This isn’t just another political essay among the hundreds that I’ve written over the years, no, this is a subject that touched me and my family deeply. On August 31, 1975, my mom found my brother dead, lying across her bed dead with the needle he’d used to inject himself with heroin, sticking out of his arm.

 

I knew he had been shooting heroin for quite some time & had even told our mother that he was doing so but she was in denial & refused to face the truth. I beat him up, I hugged him and told him that I loved him & I even called the cops on him once all to no avail. A week or so before he died, I got a message from a friend that my brother wanted me to call him but I didn’t because I’d given up on him. I was 22 years old and my brother, Tim, was 18. My world was turned upside down. I still wrestle with guilt over Tim’s death and I’m now 70 years old.

 

This essay is about the tens if not hundreds of thousands of people who became addicted to opioids purposely by giant, pharmaceutical corporations & turned to heroin when they could no longer afford the outrageous prices for the Oxycontin pills along with the other variants. These heartless companies turned their consumers into junkies and the devastation is incalculable. And our members of Congress either couldn’t be bothered to read the bill that allowed Big Pharma to keep on manufacturing their death pills or they simply didn’t give a fuck. Tell me again about what a wonderful country we are.