Psychiatry and Pain Management’s soaring profits since 1990 were fed by a unique combination of favorable circumstances never before seen: First, they’re paid mostly by federal funds. These include Medicaid, Medicare, and tax subsidies for employer-paid healthcare. But unlike other federally subsidized industries, health industry goods and services are covered by insurance, so high costs don’t deter client use of them. Just imagine all the fine food and posh restaurants we would access if we had hunger insurance that paid for them.
Mental health and pain treaters have advantages over other industries that rely on insurance payments: Medicare and Medicaid, being federally funded, are able to spend endless public money with few restrictions on coverage, regardless of cost. For example, Medicare costs jumped after a 2008 law raised mental health reimbursement from 50% to 80%.1 Private health insurers tried to rein in rising mental health costs, but were blocked by 1996,2 2008, and 20103 parity laws that forbade mental healthcare limits, copays, deductibles, or certification requirements from being greater than for physical care. This is part of why private insurance is now so costly.
To tap into this endless money, the pain and ‘mental illness’ fields made use of another advantage: Unlike events covered by other types of insurance, an illness is an arbitrary concept. Doctors can thus broaden its definition in order to broaden their domain: It can be a subjective physical perception with no clear or treatable source. For example, chronic pain became an illness. Illnesses do not even need to be physical: Painful thoughts and feelings, and kids acting like kids, also became illnesses. This was endorsed by a 1992 law4 that granted funds for services for the ‘one quarter who will suffer from mental disorders’, and for biomedically-focused mental illness research to be done at the NIH.
So, unlike other insurers that can verify house fires, car wrecks, or death, health insurers can’t verify mental illness or pain. Unlike other MDs, psychiatrists and pain doctors can invent infinite chronic (and thus lucrative) illnesses. Each client can be labeled with many different ones; there’s no limit. And each illness can justify a doctor’s luring the patient into lifelong addiction to euphoria-giving pills.
These MDs can also pad profits by putting clients on disability: Clients will then return regularly/eternally to prove ongoing disability, to ensure that their SSD checks and food/housing/healthcare assistance continue. Since they won’t work, they’ll have the time (and health insurance) to do so. A 1984 law5 made adult disability approval hinge on subjective functional impairment instead of objective disease evidence; this made mental illness (or chronic pain) easier to get SSD for. In 1991,6 the Social Security administration made child disability also hinge on functionality instead of illness proof. Child SSI cases rose five-fold soon after, mostly for mental illness.7 So illness-creators opened doors to disability benefits as well as insurance cash; that’s convenient, since their addictive ‘meds’ make it hard to work.
Two 1990 laws8 9 specified depression, ADHD, etc.to be valid causes of disability (before then, schizophrenia was the only ‘mental illness’ considered disabling). This further eased access to SSD/SSI funds. These laws also rewarded these illnesses by making life-easing accommodations available to those who ‘have’ them. For example, Billy prefers to play video games rather than do homework. By getting him labeled ADHD, his busy parents and teachers won’t have to struggle to teach him good work habits, since he’ll now be given less schoolwork (he’ll also be drugged into submission, so he won’t need to be raised). And his label may qualify his family for SSI, Medicaid, and other benefits.
400 million addictive prescriptions are filled yearly.10 It’s caused so much addiction and overdosing, including among kids who steal their parents’ pills, that the lifespans of white Americans have dropped steadily (they use 2.5 times as many psych11 and opioid12 ‘meds’ as non-whites). Then a 2000 law13 authorized doctors to treat the addictions they caused with yet more opioids (suboxone, or prison heroin). It’s such blatant drug-dealing that this law had to be enacted to make it legal (it circumvented a 1914 law14 that criminalized the prescribing of opiates to maintain addicts’ addictions). Suboxone is often peddled at drug rehabs, where clients thus score rather than quit drugs. Since the 2008 parity law made insurers cover treatment for addiction the same as for physical illness, these rehabs make a killing.
Mental health treaters capitalized on all these favors to become our most costly healthcare sector15 and a major cause of healthcare becoming our government’s top expense and top tax subsidy. Costs of other government programs also spiked, due to mental health, pain, and addiction treaters baiting and trapping millions into reliance on Social Security and other benefits. Since 2016, Congress has had to divert funds from the SS retirement to the SS disability trust fund,16 since the latter couldn’t keep up with all its mental illness and chronic pain claimants (its main recipients17). Businesses cut full-time workers in order to avoid paying their costly healthcare as is required by law. This drove yet more people to seek federal benefits. Nearly a fourth of Americans are on Medicaid now.
Psych drug and opioid prescribers are bankrupting us and exploding our debt. We spend more on healthcare and its addictive pills than all other nations, yet are still pounded by propaganda about “millions suffering needlessly from untreated mental illness.” Things will only get worse; many more mental health laws are on the way. 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Deja Vu
Something similar actually did occur before: The British East India Company, aided by England’s parliament which invested in it, bailed it out, and made laws giving it monopolies, dominated trade in the East in the 1700s. It helped spread British colonialism there. In the 1800s, it profited greatly by growing opium in India and selling it in China. This hurt China’s economy by siphoning its silver and turning industrious Chinese people into idle, unproductive addicts. Its emperor finally halted opium imports after his son (China’s prince) died of an overdose (as did our “Prince”). The BEIC reacted by conquering, with British assistance, all Chinese ports and nearby areas, in order to ensure continued opium selling. This began what China calls its “century of humiliation” in which a great empire was brought to its knees and subjugated by England, France, and Japan.27
Are we at the start of our own lost century, with psych pill and opioid dispensers taking on the BEIC’s role? Like our drug-dealing doctors, it succeeded largely due to close alliance and support from its government every step of the way. The only difference is: Our own healers and leaders are killing us!
“It was John’s mother, Linda, who was dying in the hospital: since returning to civilization, she has been taking large doses of Soma daily, which has caused respiratory failure. When Linda dies, John mourns his passing, which causes misunderstanding of the present Deltas, as they are conditioned from an early age to be accustomed to death. Faced with their ignorant reactions to his misfortune, John becomes angry then violent. Shortly after, he tries to dissuade the Deltas from taking their daily Soma ration at the end of the working day, that an official comes to bring them. He throws, with Watson’s help, all the rations out the window, imposing on them freedom by delivering them from this drug that he considers responsible for his mother’s death. But the Deltas consider it a sacrilege: they start attacking them without even knowing how to fight. The police, with gas masks, is called for help. It intervenes using Soma in the form of gas and a tape recorder broadcasting words of appeasement. The Deltas calmed, the sergeant asks John, Helmholtz and Bernard to follow them, the latter two being present at the time of the fight.”
Summary of chapter 15 of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” (1932), french Wikipedia.
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Guess I’ll have to reread Brave New World, probably for the 1st time since high school. I had envisioned Soma as a psychedelic, but it sounds more like an “antidepressant.”
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Yes. Great book. Very insightful. A great exercise is to read Huxley along with Orwell and C.S. Lewis’ “That Hideous Strength.” Another great book in this category is Neil Postman’s “Amusing Ourselves to Death.” These books help to explain why Thomas Szasz’ criticism of the “Therapeutic State” was so prescient. I would also recommend Jonah Goldberg’s “Suicide of the West” to provide some context for the kinds of things that we are seeing today.
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Dr. Frost from That Hideous Strength is the perfect shrink. Remember his famous soliloquy about how all our thoughts, feelings, and choices are nothing but random brain chemicals? Lewis was ahead of his time.
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Definitely an “antidepressant.”
“A Gramme is better than a Damn!”
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Soma (Carisoprodol) actually metabolizes into a benzodiazepine.
“Carisoprodol itself has a half-life of approximately 2.4 hours. Meprobamate is considered an active metabolite and also has anti-anxiety effects, much like a benzodiazepine. But, from a toxicity standpoint, it more closely resembles the sedative properties of barbiturates.”
“Carisoprodol itself has a half-life of approximately 2.4 hours. Meprobamate [a metabolite of Soma] is considered an active metabolite and also has anti-anxiety effects, much like a benzodiazepine. But, from a toxicity standpoint, it more closely resembles the sedative properties of barbiturates.”
Source: https://www.pharmacytimes.com/contributor/jeffrey-fudin/2014/09/the-perfect-storm-opioid-risks-and-the-holy-trinity
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Dr. K, I’m off the drugs. But I still live on disability. Long term drug use has indeed disabled me.
Sad how many of us thought these drugs would EN-able us. Helping us to function better, form better relationships, find work. Like the snake oil selling medicine men from the 19th century with “Dr. Fortunano’s Miracle Elixir” that made folks feel great from whiskey and worse crap as “secret ingredients.” Mainstream psychiatry is a menace to society.
We need to do two things.
1. Educate the public. All the chronic sickness and disability are hard to hide. They escalate even as “mental health services” become more readily available and it’s getting hard for the quacks to fool everybody all the time.
2. Petition to change three things.
A. Ban legal bribery/chronyism aka “campaign contributions” by any but private individuals. Bribery creates conflict of interest and makes justice a commodity to be bought or sold. Why else do you think the Cures Bill passed unanimously? We have the finest elected officials money can buy. 😛
B. Ban involuntary confinement of law abiding citizens. If the person is guilty of violent crimes he/she is a criminal. Prison sentences are limited. Once you have paid your debt to society you can go free. With psychiatry your prison sentence is totally dependent on the whim of your warden who gets paid for cramming the prison. Neither merciful nor just!
C. Ban false advertising. No commercials for psych drugs. People will still be desperate for these poisons and need help tapering off even if they are able and willing to go drug free. If doctors must sell these toxins to desperate people they should call them neuroleptics, SSRI’s, and tranquilizers. Don’t lie about a “proven chemical imbalance.” Every regular here knows that’s a dirty lie and there are no tests to prove it. The APA secretly acknowledges this and are laughing up their sleeves at this “metaphor” they have foisted on the gullible public. Tell the patient they’re addictive and dangerous emotional pain killers that work by shutting down parts of the brain and central nervous system.
If I can ever earn a livelihood I am going to NOT buy insurance. The fine is less expensive if you’re poor anyhow. As an uninsured person they have less motive to imprison or drug/shock you since there’s no $$$$ to milk from your Medicaid/insurance.
I’m afraid of all doctors now because of their sneaky concealment of the damage and death they KNOW happens all the time. Not anti-science but medical professionals are unworthy of my trust because they lie.
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End corporate personhood. Multi-nationals have become the new mob with their ability to buy politicians off. When governments are owned by multi-national CEOs, people as a whole lose.
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Exactly. See 2A above.
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This should be the #1 objective for anyone who believes democracy matters in the USA!
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“Our own healers and leaders are killing us!” Traitors within, it is very disgusting. Gosh, and I was drugged up for knowing in my gut that the wrong people were in charge of our government, just after 9/11/2001, and that they’d take this country to the brink of WWIII. Gosh, I was right about the leaders.
But I didn’t realize the majority within the medical community had chosen to become complete hypocrites and traitors to the majority of Americans. And the worse the hypocrisy gets, the more I think the psychotomimetic Jesus “voice” that proclaimed “all the doctors are going to hell” knew more than I did, back in 2009.
It’s shameful, really, shameful. But I still believe some doctors would be wise enough to be decent. Thanks for being one of the, unfortunately too few, doctors speaking out against the massive in scope medical harm of the American people, Lawrence.
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Dear MIA editors,
Please consider having another blogger besides Lawrence write about chronic pain. His hypothesis that chronic pain is merely an “invented” diagnosis (the second recent blog perpetuating this idea) ignores the realities and disability that goes along with chronic pain. See the multiple commenters expressing the need for a more nuanced perspective, the concerns about the misinformation being spread, and his lack of consideration of our first hand perspectives in his replies in to the last post. It is also a slap in the face to imply to those of us whose chronic pain was caused or exacerbated by psychotropic drugs that our pain is not real. I tried to not get too involved last time, but I do not understand why someone who has no experience with chronic pain either as a treatment provider or individual who has dealt with disabling chronic pain (no, his minor back pain incident doesn’t qualify) is being given this kind of platform.
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Lowrence is ours. A fundamental advance in medicine is to have been able to distinguish a symptom of a disease: that a disease can have several symptoms and that a symptom can cover several diseases.
That is why a real doctor will never tell you “you have the fever disease” but “you have the flu”.
Defining chronic pain as a disease, arbitrarily grouping symptoms into disease without etiology is an intellectual swindle, quackery, a retreat to the pre-scientific area. This is deeply dangerous and leads millions of people to addiction, under the rule of legal and respectable drug traffickers (like The British East India Company).
At no place Lowrence denies chronic pain as a symptom, he denies it only as a disease.
In this respect, he is right not to be complacent, not only with doctors, but also with patients who harbor false hopes, misconceptions and misrepresentations. It’s hard, but we have to wean ourselves off of that too.
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Please read his previous blog (and the comments, especially towards the end). He is in fact quite dismissive of the severity of chronic pain symptoms and the idea that they can be severely disabling. He was telling people that chronic pain is something that 84% of the population has and gives general cookie cutter advice in his responses (e.g., I just needed to do some walking and that fixed my minor back pain episode) that suggests he thinks everyone’s pain is on the same (managable) level. He also said in response to what he would say to someone dealing with chronic pain and coming off opioids, “..and you will realize that most (but not all) of your emotional and physical incessant pain was caused by your opioid dependence rather than some newly-invented MTD, and what you are left with is tolerable” As another poster commented, he actually has no idea whether that is true and is resistant to the concept to the idea that the person went on opioids in the first place because they already had pain they couldn’t tolerate!
When you say “Lawrence is ours” you do not speak for me, and I suspect several other commenters on the last post who have lived experience with chronic pain. It would be helpful if you would actually listen to us, and not just give general platitudes about chronic pain, especially if you have not experienced this yourself (BTW- I am not complacent with doctors. I have long ago given up expecting them to help me and really don’t care about whether my pain is described in terms of a disease, as I really just care about how I am functioning. And no, I have never taken opioids and i know several others who are seeking alternative approaches).
I am asking MIA to consider having people with actual lived experience with chronic pain write blogs rather than someone who has shown to have a very poor understanding/empathy towards the realities and disability that goes along with chronic pain. I thought one of the goals of MIA was to give voices to people with lived experience. Having one blogger (Lawrence) without any experience (who doesn’t seem to listen to the those who have experience) dominate this conversation doesn’t agree with this goal, IMHO.
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Surviving and thriving, thanks for commenting. I agree. People need treatment for chronic pain. It’s not just drugs that have risks and side effects, herbs and supplements have risks too. Some studies estimate as many as 50% of suicides are by people with chronic pain. We will never know the true number because not everybody leaves a suicide note.
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I live with chronic pain and fatigue but opt out of pain killers. Overuse of these can really take a toll on you in the long run.
My own ME problem is iatrogenic. It’s my punishment for taking the short cut to happiness. I wanted to have a happy, productive life.
I was nervous and unhappy so I thought something was wrong with me since I wasn’t out going, upbeat, and vivacious all the time like other girls at college. Took anafranil and it ruined my life. Had a bad reaction and got blamed/punished for 25 years till I escaped.
On my trip through Psychiatric Neverland I got weirder than ever. The damn drugs made me withdrawn, suicidal, and moodier than ever. Never had a family or career. Probably never will.
Like Pinocchio taken in by the Fox and the Cat or Little Red Ridinghood by the Wolf I got suckered by con men posing as doctors. Worse than ordinary thieves since they won’t just steal your money, but your health, your reputation, and your sanity. That last is pretty ironic. 😛
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Surviving and Thriving, I agree 100% with you on this matter and you stated it well “I do not understand why someone who has no experience with chronic pain either as a treatment provider or individual who has dealt with disabling chronic pain (no, his minor back pain incident doesn’t qualify) is being given this kind of platform.”
When I found the MIA site a few months ago I found it to be very informative and validating until I read psychiatrist Dr. Kelmenson’s recent blogs. He compares someone who needs pain medication to control debilitating pain to someone being gluttonous about fine food and posh restaurants – are you kidding?! The pain and suffering of many legitimate physical ailments or illnesses can be invisible or not verifiable, such as post-surgical neuralgia (or any kind of neuralgia) RSD, IBS, musculoskeletal pain from trauma or wear and tear, fibromyalgia, chronic dizziness or migraine headaches to name just a few. A recent investigative report on W5 was about people who developed such intense pain after undergoing laser eye surgery it drove them to thoughts of suicide. Yet when their eyes were examined in the usual manner by slit lamp nothing showed up so the person’s pain was deemed to be “in their head”. Only recently when a high powered in-vivo confocal microscope was used to examine their eyes did the truncated and damaged nerves show up.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/w5/w5-investigates-a-rare-but-painful-side-effect-of-laser-eye-surgery-1.4141117
I find the two posts by Dr. K to be very disconcerting and a real disservice to people who are living with chronic pain. It is disappointing that MIA posts this type of blog.
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I must agree with Lawrence that I don’t accept pain as an illness.
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The real issue is whether you consider chronic disabling pain that significantly impedes normal functioning (e.g., ability to work) a disability worthy of help/accommodation. Or do you think it is appropriate to suggest that people with chronic pain are just lazy, gluttonous individuals as Lawrence has done multiple times?
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I have no problem with people suffering from real chronic pain getting disability or accommodation. However, after working for more than fifteen years in medical and psychiatric hospitals I’ve seen a lot of interesting things happen surrounding the treatment of pain and not all of them are necessarily good. That’s my humble opinion. I also suspect that it’s easier for doctors to put people on opioids or other addictive pain killers than it is for them to work to help their patients find alternatives that may work as well or almost as well. The day of the country doctor who sat down with people and actually investigated what was going on in their lives is long gone. You have doctors rushing in for a person’s appointment, entering information on her or his computer, dashing off a script and telling them to fill it as they rush out the door. And of course you have the drug companies sending out their reps to the doctors’ offices pushing all of the drugs that they can. The well being of the drug reps relies on how many drugs that they can push and on how many scripts the doctors write for their drugs. They can lose their jobs if they don’t make quotas set by management. So they push and the doctors prescribe like crazy.
Last year I had two major surgeries. I didn’t have any pain at all, surprisingly. I took absolutely no pain meds while in the hospital, none. But when both of the surgeons got ready to send me home they gave me a big fat prescription for opioids and demanded that I agree to fill them before they’d let me go home. I don’t know how they were going to enforce such a demand since they certainly didn’t go home with me. But both of them pushed the opioids on me. I filled the first prescription and lied and said that I’d fill the second one. I was amazed at how quickly both of them pushed the drugs without even asking me if I was experiencing any pain.
When I awoke in Recovery after the second surgery I was feeling fine, no pain and able to function well. The nurse asked me if I wanted a pain shot and I told her that I didn’t have any pain. She kept pushing the shot and finally told me that she knew that the surgeons used pain blocks on people and then when the block wore off the person writhed in pain in their beds. Well, I certainly didn’t want to writhe so I accepted the shot even though I had no pain. Stupid me. In less than two minutes I began feeling very badly. The nurse sent me to the second recovery room for One Day Surgery where the young nurse noticed that I was obviously very uncomfortable and immediately took my blood pressure and my blood oxygen level. My blood pressure was plummeting and my oxygen levels were in the low 80’s. She informed me that I wasn’t going home and she was calling a doctor. When he arrived he asked me if I’d been given a shot and I said yes and he asked me if I knew what it was. When I said no he said that I’d been given fentanyl! Granted, it was my fault for letting that nurse talk me into taking the shot in the first place, I should have listened to my gut. My point is that I think that too many people are too quick to jump to the drugs when it comes to pain.
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I meant to say that surgeons used nerve blocks on people during surgery, not pain blocks.
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My pain is created by the “meds” for an unsubstantiated illness. Getting better now, very slowly. I prefer magnesium, potassium, and vitamin B12 to pain killers. My body is deficient in those (medical tests) so supplements treat the problem not just the pain itself.
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Hi Surviving and Thriving. We’re definitely open to publishing blogs by people with lived experience of chronic pain. If you’d like to write one, or know someone that might, feel free to get in touch via our contact page.
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Very well written. I liked the bit about how “an illness is an arbitrary concept” – because psychiatric diagnoses really do not point to a verifiable cause. And I also liked how you segued into the Opium Wars, explained neatly in just one paragraph!
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Very informative commentary. I know MIA is a mental health website so I understand an article emphasizing how psychiatric drug dealing is killing Americans. And I can believe that psychiatry is the worst offender in our pill-pushing medical culture. Unfortunately, Americans are being harmed by pills given for many other diseases and non diseases. Doctors prescribe statins for people who have no heart disease under the unproven assertion that it will help them. Diseases are created (like pre-diabetes and pre-hypertension) and then pills are prescribed to treat these conditions. Thresholds for having a disease are lowered so more people can be prescribed drugs. And pharmaceutical-sponsored studies over-emphasize the benefits of the pills they sell. To stop abuse of psychiatric medications, we may need to pass laws and create regulations that address the abuse of all medications.
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Marie, thanks! This is something I’ve been sounding the alarm about ever since my father’s reaction to Lipitor. It’s not just psych meds, it’s western medicine’s almost exclusive focus on matching symptoms to drugs rather than matching symptoms to diseases, and pharma making sure there’s a pill for everyone and everything.
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Agreed. The entire medical establishment needs to be regulated so that they can’t widen the nets of “illness” to catch more people for themselves and the drug companies. Doctors of all specialties are being led by the nose by drug reps and drug companies and it’s disgusting. We are becoming an ill society at the creation of the drug companies and their shills that we call doctors.
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Why is everyone’s post here in italics? It seems someone forgot to close a tag. For shame!
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Barack Obama was a disappointment for many people, not just because he persecuted more whistleblowers than any previous president in history, but because he was in the pocket of multi-national corporations. He appointed a man with drug company ties to head the FDA for one thing. My point, get the money out of politics. American politics stinks to high heaven of corruption. It is not only psychiatrists who are taking drug company blood money, politicians are taking this blood money, too.
Next we need to oppose the mental health movement because it is not a health movement at all, it is actually a medicalization movement, and medicalization is making people physically ill. The country is paying bundles on treating people who are not sick, and through doing so, it is paying bundles by making them physically sick. All this insurance you speak of, the pressure to dole it out, and bankrupt the country, that pressure is coming from the mental health movement. We don’t need a mental health movement at all, what we need is a health movement. Create a physical health movement, and mental health will take care of itself. You just have to realize, the mental health movement is a physical ill health movement to realize where the problem resides.
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The religion that isn’t a religion, psychiatry.
“The country is paying bundles on treating people who are not sick”
You are mistaken
The country is paying bundles on treating people who are made sick by drugs called medicines.
The last sin is lack of compassion wrote Szasz, won’t you help the people that are suffering with medicines(not drugs)? https://books.google.ca/books?id=2pduB22E43oC&lpg=PA3&ots=EQpUS8Md5L&dq=Szasz%20last%20sin%20lack%20of%20compassion&pg=PA3#v=onepage&q=Szasz%20last%20sin%20lack%20of%20compassion&f=false
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The country is paying bundles for treating people who aren’t sick with drugs that will make them sick, and ultimately cost much more money.
These drugs used to control disobedient, rebellious, and non-compliant populations of people are not medicinal in the slightest. They are social control drugs. Chemical restraints. They cause conditions, in fact, that may require real medicine, and can be deadly. Dr. Peter Breggin uses the term neurotoxins to describe their actions, and that works with me as well.
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The US is also paying much more than any other country to treat people that are sick. Which also costs money. How do you explain that? Part of the answer could be that the US has the global reserve currency.
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Money not really being the main issue, for now.
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despondent:
Yes, having the world’s reserve currency has enabled the U.S. to spend money recklessly, expanding its debts to astronomical levels without causing inflation, despite losing its manufacturing base. And our main lender is China, which has successfully turned the tables on us (Americans had also peddled opium to China in the 1800s):
The same Chinese ports that were used to deliver opium to China in the 1800s, are not only now being used to ship us China’s manufactured goods that we depend on so much, but also to ship us Southeast Asian heroin (and recently fentanyl) since the 1960s. So China finally ended its opium epidemic in the 50s/60s through its government’s programs, since which it has thrived economically by taking over manufacturing, and turning the U.S. into a nation helplessly addicted to many of its things. We are the vulnerable ones now.
And if you go back in history to the 1700s (before China became a nation of opium addicts), the trade balance had been markedly in favor of China at that time, since China had produced much fine porcelain, tea, and silks that were very desirable in England, while England had little to sell to China – until it colonized India and was thus able to grow/sell cheap opium.
Lawrence
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It is an issue though, despondent. Put profits over people, and where do you think the mass of humanity are going to be at? Running big corporations or slaving under them and suffering because of them? Medical treatment, not health, is a business, too, and if we value profits more than human beings, in the medical field, health and welfare are going to suffer as a result. Medicine should be about healing people, and it should not be about accumulating a personal fortune at the public’s expense. A fortune that can only grow with an increase in overall misery.
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Yes, money is an issue, but it’s mostly easy money that is the main culprit here. Profits over people has been going on for a long time. Even in medicine.
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I would say it’s all relative. When corporations fund political candidates, it isn’t the populace doing so. One has to ask who is actually being represented, and whether some people have become entirely disenfranchised from supposedly representative democracy.
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Lawrence,
Everything you say is true, and you express it very eloquently.
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Corporations today, or private wealth and power, have always been the underlying mechanism.
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What? Once a gilded age, always a gilded age? I say there is something to communities, too. Even if those communities aren’t gated.
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I didn’t mean to imply it was the be-all and end-all.
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Actually both. They shell out big bucks to drug unhappy or flamboyant people. Then they shell out big bucks to treat diabetes, heart disease, and other real medical problems they created. A win win for Big Pharma.
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Interesting polemic, Dr Kelmonson. But with one major omission.
I’m going to write it in uppercase for dramatic effect. Here we go:
NOVEL PSYCHOACTIVES
The real conspiracy from China ie the revenge for the Opium Wars, has been to flood Europe with novel psychoactives. These have given rise to the so-called zombie drugs given affectionate names such as Spice and Monkey Dust and so on. Tonnes and tonnes of these novel drugs are being produced in China and shipped out to every major port in the West. They are all variations on a theme, variations of amphetamines, and ecstasy, and amphetamine. And cannabinoids. It was because of this that the UK fundamentally changed its drug laws. Going from a list-model, to a blanket model.
Also, you forgot to mention Turkey. Turkey was once the number one source of illegal heroin supplies. It was then helped to transform into the world’s number one producer of medical heroin, diamorphine.
Following the last Afghan War, the world’s number one supplier of illegal heroin is Afghanistan.
Synthetic opioids are generally more addicting and dangerous than the organic stuff. And there is a worldwide shortage of diamorphine.
Maybe it is time to help Afghanistan legitimise its opium production, as Turkey did, and become another supplier of legitimate global diamorphine…
Just to add that if used correctly and under medical supervision opium is more likely to lengthen life than shorten it.
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Are the Drug Dealers influential enough to control the government?
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They are the government, essentially. Along with the other multi-nationals.
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Help! I have been diagnosed with young onset dementia because of antipsychotics. I stopped using them but the damage is continuing. I am concerned of the fact that repeated brain damage in all other ways leads to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition in which the brain continues to deteriorate even after the cause of the damage is long gone. There’s no reason to think that a drug induced damage would somehow be immune to this; it’s caused by repeated damage, much like the scarring of skin. It probably doesn’t matter if it’s caused by an internal or external force.
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So sorry! There are some ways to delay and even sometimes reverse dementia.
Eat right, sleep enough, get physical exercise, journal, play games like Solitaire or the kids’ game Memory, memorize songs or quotes.
Other brain boosters include learning a new language, learn to play an instrument, read books, and eat fatty fish. Like sardines and salmon. And limit TV to two hours a day.
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