Although the media tends to present a hopeless picture of opioid addiction, studies suggest that most people eventually recover
When a family member, spouse or other loved one develops an opioid addiction — whether to pain relievers like Vicodin or to heroin — few people know what to do. Faced with someone who appears to be driving heedlessly into the abyss, families often fight, freeze or flee, unable to figure out how to help.
Read on at fivethirtyeight.com…
This opioid epidemic is bizarre on so many levels, that it is difficult to believe.
First of all, why does oxycodone (the active ingredient in oxycontin) even exist? It is an opioid. It works just like morphine and heroine. So why is it even legal, if those other two aren’t? They are essentially the same thing.
The answer to this question is, that pharmaceutical corporations are making profit off of it. And furthermore, once a person gets hooked on this stuff, then they sell them substitutes like methadone or buprenorphine, prescribed in abundance by addiction specialists. Any person, who has dealt with an addiction doctor will tell you, that these doctors have no intention of helping anyone beat their addiction. All they do is push substitute drugs for pharmaceuticals, and their intention is to have an addict buy substitute drugs from pharmaceutical companies for the rest of their life.
Opioid drugs are dangerous, and they are especially dangerous when they are illegal. So why are some of them even legal?
To give an analogy here: let’s say ‘Corporation XYZ’ decides that motor vehicles are too dangerous for us and they work to get rid of them. But the letter of the law would not say “all motor vehicles are banned”, but it would say something like “vehicles powered by engines fueled by gasoline or diesel or ethanol or biodiesel etc.” So, Corporation XYZ can go out, hire a chemist, that makes an insignificant alteration to the gasoline molecule, patent it, and then have lobbyists work to approve this version of gasoline as the only legal fuel for motor vehicles. And all of a sudden every car owner is forced to buy this cosmetically altered gasoline from Corporation XYZ at $100 per gallon. Corporation XYZ has managed to push their cosmetically altered gasoline through the legislation process, so now we all have to buy his hyper-priced gasoline, or we can walk to work.
This is what happened with opioids. Morphine is a very effective pain killer, at least as effective as oxycodone, and just as addictive. Heroin is even more effective, and just as addictive. But if morphine was unregulated, and producers were forced to compete on free market, then the market price of morphine would today would ne next to nothing, every addict would be able to support their addiction for $20 a month. The entire production process of morphine, from sowing seeds to pills on the pharmacy shelf, is about as complicated as production of sugar. Large scale production of morphine with modern technology would make its price go down to the level of sugar (which also used to be extremely expensive).
But the pharmaceutical corporations don’t want that, do they? They want to keep the prices high, so they can reap the high profits off of patients with a lot of pain and then, when they get addicted, from addicts.
And, of course, it is the pharmaceutical industry who set this situation up, and it is they who are watching massive profits pouring into their coffers.
It is not too difficult to curb this opioid epidemic. You simply ban all opioids and actually enforce the ban. Initially there would be a panic among addicts, most of them would switch to heroin or something like that, and eventually they would end up using one of the substitutes, be it methadone or buprenorphine or whatever it may be. But with no opioids around for new addicts to get hooked on, there would be no new users. So the pharmaceutical corporations don’t want that. They want this illegal trade to continue. They want doctors to overprescribe oxycodone, so that people can get hooked and then live as slaves to pharmaceutical companies for the rest of their lives.