Opioid Epidemic – Trumps’ Problem? Or Big Pharma?

Opioid abuse has been a problem for more than two decades, and yet, somehow Trump is being touted as a failure by both left and right because in his first ten months of office, he hasn’t fixed it. Even Ann Coulter is aboard the bash team.

A New York Times opinion piece would have us believe that Obama’s eight years don’t count in the fight because he did – nothing, and Bush’s eight years don’t count, Billy, Walter, huey and puey don’t count, all that matters is the fact that Trump hasn’t fixed it, and that’s what counts.

Of course, opinions and advice flies from all directions, but most of it isn’t about fixing the epidemic so much as re-medicating the addicts.

What is the “Cause”?   It’s root stems from Big Pharma and weaves to doctors and hospitals who take a spiff for every pill they dispense and are only concerned about profit, not patient. That’s it. Easy. Just stop it at the source, the drug dealer. When it comes to illegal drugs we understand that nuance completely, arrest the dealers. When it comes to prostitution, we get it! Arrest the pimps. For some reason, pundits would have us believe that the way to tend to the opioid epidemic is to subvert billions of dollars from the federal budget and use it for ‘emergency response and treatment’.

Really?

So their version of a cure is to create a new oversight committee to create federally funded facilities that will be tied to reams of bureaucracy and provide treatment which entails weaning in-house patients off the drug by giving them other drugs, medications and counseling.   In the meantime Big Pharma, doctors and hospitals will continue to dispense with unabated urgency because now they are losing money on the addicts in treatment. So they’ll push more – harder. Except they will make money on the antidotes that will be freely dispensed like hard candy at a lollipop store!

The simplistic answer is you simply knell and prostrate yourself before Big Pharma and hospital executives and ask them pretty please will they stop pushing opioids and take a 10% hit on their bottom line profits… Or maybe you get a consortium of retail executives to cut a deal whereby they provide an incentive for the money spent on opioids to revert back into retail spending by giving Big Pharma a retail spiff.

At any rate, the core problem won’t change unless you – change the core.

The reality is there are a lot of people making big bucks off the opioid crisis and simply setting up treatment does absolutely nothing for the problem.   The US has a significant ‘drug’ problem and opioids are just a part of the crisis.

As of 2013, 78.7 million Americans were on some form of psychiatric drug including 1 million children under the age of 5, of which 275,000 are infants under the age of one on prescribed medication for psychosis. The bulk of infants on psychotropic’s are on ‘anti-anxiety drugs’. How is that even possible? Who puts an infant on a psychotic medication?

Infants born to drug addicted moms.   But according to statistics that may account for roughly 24,000 births. Why would the remaining 250,000 infants require psychotic drugs? The overwhelming answer would seem to be – laziness. It is no different than adults looking for a pill to make them skinny, make them young, make them happy, make them better, healthier, sexier. Pushing the pills on children is the new easy way out when your child doesn’t seem to measure up to Mary’s or Martha’s.   Infants are prescribed ADHD drugs. And the psychiatrist is only too happy to comply because that’s another spiff in their pocket.

Today, the role of a psychiatrist is mostly to act as a pill dispensary. As a result, most psychiatric practices are a secondary specialty. With neurology or internal medicine their primary. They don’t actually treat the patient, instead they prescribe medication and then send them to a ‘real therapist’ for counseling therapy.   But how can a therapist know if their counseling is working if the patient is drugged?

And so the circle goes.

There are legitimate reasons to prescribe psychotic drugs. But if Big Pharma is only treating a few hundred thousand, the profits aren’t worth the manufacturing cost. It’s like the vaccine hysteria. Unless millions of people are required to partake, it isn’t worth the effort. It’s like the attitude parlayed by the vaccine industry in pushing vaccines for things that are relatively benign – chicken pox. “You don’t want your child to suffer do you?” Is the guilt.

So you want Trump to fix it?  

Someone has to suffer. That’s just the way it works. But turning everyone into a whimperdoodle isn’t going to cure anything.  You want to stop the opioid epidemic? STOP PRESCRIBING OPIOIDS.