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

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