Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 11/25/17 > The pot calling the kettle black…

in blog •  7 years ago  (edited)


There are some things in life that will just cause a nauseous feeling in the pit of your stomach when you hear about them or read them. Hopefully the daily dose column I write is not one of those things, at least not on a daily basis. Today however this dose may be one of those that give you an ill feeling; it gives me one just writing it.

Earlier in the week I read a post by a gentleman from Canada named Steve Black (@steveblack). He had written an article on treatment of opioid addiction, the two schools of thought on the treatment. During a little back and forth commenting Steve suggested that I look at into the family behind the drug named OxyContin.

I finally had some time Friday afternoon to do as he suggested and the article that I came across to read was eye opening to say the least, definitely sickening as well. While I am not going to into all the details and quotes of the article I am going to touch on a couple things that really stood out and focus on those.

My comment to Steve, that prompted his suggestion, was that here in the US we are constantly bombarded with pharmaceutical advertising on television, radio, and printed media. All advertising the “benefits” of these magic pills that will change your life. “Tell your doctor you want xxxx for pain” or something similar is always the message. I said that the government allows this behavior by the pharmaceutical companies and then wonders why we have epidemic of opioid addiction and deaths throughout the United States.

Believe it or not, the current opioid addiction that is plaguing this country can be traced back to one family. Not one family of drugs, I’m talking one family as in the Sackler family.

The Sackler family has a long history in just about every aspect of the medicine field, including advertising. The Sackler family, through their privately held corporation, patented the drug OxyContin. Unless you are a reader of Forbes magazine or involved in the arts there is a good chance you may never have even heard the Sackler name. To give you an idea of their wealth let’s just say the family has accumulated more wealth than the Mellons and Rockefellers, the net worth being in the area of $13 billion USD.

Purdue Pharma is the company that the Sacklers control, while OcyContin is not responsible for the entirety of their fortune, it constitutes a substantial piece of the pie. OxyContin has generated over $35 billion in revenue for the company with its sales over the years since it first hit the market in 1995.

The article I read points out some interesting facts about the number of deaths related to the opioid epidemic and it gives the number 145 daily that are dying from this epidemic. I’m no mathematician, but my calculator is, and that comes up to 52,925 Americans dying each year at the hands of opioids. According to the Center for Disease Control only 33,000 people in America die from gunshots each year. People are always clamoring for gun control, where are those same people on this issue? Why don’t we see the protests in the streets over opioids?

Opioids have their place and there is a need for them. That “place”; being used as end of life pain control for the terminally ill with cancer and other debilitating, painful conditions. There is no risk of a patient having a long term addiction whose life expectancy is less than a week.

So how did we get to this point in time, with these staggering numbers in revenue and deaths?
We got here through greed and corruption. Pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma and the other makers of these opioid drugs have corrupted the regulatory agencies, medical doctors, and colleges of medicine in order to spread their addictive and deadly pills.

Lying about the addictive potential of these drugs for starters, then throw in that the dosing is every 12 hours when in fact over 20% of the users report the drugs wears off in roughly eight hours. Causing the patient to have withdrawal symptoms or forcing them to take additional doses. Throw in the free trips for doctors who prescribe the medicines on a regular basis. Not to mention the medical schools that allow the drug companies in to start grooming the future doctors to sell their wares. Buying the results you want on the clinical trials or not submitting trial results that didn’t meet your needs. All of these scenarios and more have gotten us to place and time we are in and it is horrific.

The majority of these opioid addictions are innocent victims who trusted their doctors to help them restore their bodies to a healthy condition, but instead of actually treating the cause, they elected to scribble out a prescription to mask the symptom which was pain. Pain doesn’t cause pain, injury or disease causes pain.

The sad reality is doctors, hospitals, and drug makers don’t make money curing patients, they make money treating them, over and over again.

Right out of high school I enrolled in a trade school to learn horseshoeing. I complete the school and went to work on my own shoeing horses for a living. Four years into my trade I developed a sore lower back. The doctor said I was having muscle spasms and he gave me a prescription for muscle relaxers. “Can I still work?” I asked. “Sure , no problem” was the answer I got from the doctor.

Two pills a day, one in the morning and one at night before bed. Two pills became three to get through the day, then four and four became six. I was not getting any better and I was becoming an addict myself. By the time I finally switched doctors, my nerve center in my lower back was protruding so badly from the swelling it looked like a had a tennis ball lodged under my skin at my lower spine.

I was too tall for that type of work and my body knew it, it was telling me I needed to find another line of work. Luckily the second doctor knew it too, and he told me flat out, “you can stop shoeing horses or you will be a cripple by the time you are 25” , I was 23 at the time, he would not write me a script for anything. He said rest was the only thing that would heal my back. I could barely walk because the pain was so bad. I had to give up that line of work; I was out of options. The doctor knew the cause and prescribed what I needed; which was rest.

He didn’t treat the symptom which was the pain. He had me take away the cause and the pain subsided. I healed up fully in fourteen months. I was very fortunate in my case; I was young and had a girl friend that I lived with who helped me through that time.

I know how easy it is to fall into the trap because I had, I was very fortunate, but I can see how others get sucked in and eaten up by pain killers, all because it is easier to treat symptoms than it is causes. The body was designed to heal itself if given the right nutrition, vitamins, minerals and rest.

One member of the Sackler family penned an article in a medical journal about tobacco companies in 1979. Saying that the tobacco companies used “weasel-worded warnings” with regard to the warnings on cigarette packages. He went on to say the warnings were “insufficient” and that “hazard to health should be more specific.”
He didn’t stop there either; he blasted the newspapers and magazines for running tobacco advertising saying that the publishers “must square with their own consciences their contribution to our own national mortality”

Well given what we know today on how the Sackler owned company , Purdue Pharma, has lied, misled and caused thousands of deaths with their OxyContin pills, I would say Arthur Sackler is the epitome of the saying, “the pot calling the kettle black”.
Just my thoughts, you can read the full article I read here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain

Until next time,
@sultnpapper
#theunmentionables

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wow very amazing post @sultnpapper
if you can visit to my post

Mann this is sick, what people could do for money :s

at the end, you tried the pill?

The pills the doctor had me on were called "Percocet", they were in fact pain killers, that combined the same active ingredient as OxyContin with acetaminophen. They had addictive properties as well.

Wow. That's so true. They say that money reveals the heart of the person who owns it. Thanks for sharing. Vertu good food for thought.

Thanks for stopping by, reading and commenting. It makes you wonder how people can sleep at night when they knowingly are causing such problems for unsuspecting people, and that the government will allow this behavior from companies. I would be willing to wager that the Sackler name or Purdue Pharma would show up on several congressional members list of campaign donors very far back in American politics.

This reminds me of the scripture from Matthew 7 verse 3 that says:
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?
Human beings have an amazing ability to justify anything they do. we can easily spot out the wrong in other people, but when it comes to ourselves we can just as easily justify it. If we see someone else do it we condemn it, but when we do it we have good reason for it. Unfortunately justifying our actions becomes a habit, and the more we do it the easier it becomes. Eventually it is part of our nature and we don't even realize we're doing it. though often times it seems like someone is getting away with something, but the fact of life is that every sin has a price. Eventually we will have to pay our debts.

There is a saying I heard that goes: " evil thrives when good men sit around and do nothing!" Unfortunately the Good Men of this world seem to have been distracted by the complexity around them. Eventually hopefully sooner than later the good man of this world will wake up and realize what has happened while they were distracted.

I can list 50 reason as to why this country is so far lost, those 50 being the States that make up the United States of America. #51 is the District of Columbia.
The 50 states sold their souls to #51, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened, all it takes is to go back and read the TRUE history of this country, not the history that is taught under the supervision of #51 and the department of education.
The complexity is by design, and the ignorant people that we are is also by design.
The distractions are not by accident, they are by design as well.
Dumb down the masses, create distraction, and rob the country blind: that has been the plan and it is being exected perfectly.

Your right. With trump in office, their plans hit a stumbling block. They never imagined he'd win. He's not perfect, but he's definitely stirring up the nest. I heard it said that the 2018 elections are more important than ever. This is probably the worst time for Americans to be asleep. Trump needs all the support he can get. He's been fight battles on all sides.
More Americans are starting to realize there's something wrong.. Our media has been great at hiding the truth from its people yeah little by little the people are realizing the media is full of crap.

Trust me on this, Trump isn't there by accident , Hollywood is the pipeline by which the rulers of the country let you know what is in store. If people paid more attention to the messages they are sending from their screens and programs people would have a better grasp on what the rulers are planning.
Case in point is Trump, I don't know the episode number but I'm sure it could be googled, The Simpsons had an episode with Trump winning the presidential election about 10 or 12 years ago. The details and accuracy of the episode are not a coincidence.
He was run and elected by the rulers as a false hope, which he will be, stay tuned for more gridlock and disappointment out of Washington.

This post has received a 0.14 % upvote from @drotto thanks to: @dreamingirwin.

Wow I certainly had not heard of the Sackler family before I read this. Can't say I'm surprised.... I'm only hearing about this pain killer problem recently from e.g Jon Oliver, and funnily enough even Trump brought it up as a problem. I really hope something can get done about it. Also it is interesting how little people know about the empire behind it (could just be me, dunno)

Well we can thank @steveblack for this information, had he not planted the seed in my mind to look into it, I would not have gone looking and been able to share it. I highly suggest using the link and reading the article for yourself. Like you, I had never heard of the Sackler family, but after reading the article, I know that their mentality is, donate a fraction of the loot and people won't care how you came across the money in the first place. Otherwise the name would be famous like other murderers, Charles Manson is one that comes to mind, since that piece of crap just punched his ticket to hell this week past.

Drug testing is often corrupted, btw. My ex-sister-in-law supervised such trials, and was often told to look the other way, rather than scrap an on-gong trial, when the participants did things that contaminated the findings. She ended up black-listed for not sitting quietly and saying nothing.

I take oxycodin, or rather, I have some which I hate taking. My back is so screwed up, it can't be fixed anymore. Still I keep trying, and I just can't bring myself to to take meds to the extent that I get hooked. The side-effects are worse than the pain, as far as I am concerned. I think people who do get addicted know what they're doing, and choose the painkiller over the pain. They may have little choice because they have to keep functioning, but addiction doesn't sneak up on them by surprise.

Some doctors are just plain lazy. Or so overworked that they don't give a crap about finding the real problem. Just give a pill and make the patient get out of the office ASAP. That's the way it goes - and I think this says a lot about the people becoming doctors these days. I blame the cost of the schooling, and the elitist mentality of the schools that don't let good people in. So, in the end, doctors are people who are in it for the money and not the love of medicine. Explains why they are so willing to prescribe for kickbacks.

Luckily for me, my back problem was able to heal, because it was just nerve damage. It is human nature to try to avoid pain or relieve it any away you can, so "pills over pain" seems like the easy choice for most. Most people aren't aware of the consequences that may happen, and that is from not being given the whole story about the meds they are taking.