That's how they fill privatized prisons with non-violent offenders...make that money!
And banks like Wells Fargo can launder money for drug cartels...make that money!
It's how the CIA is able to fund the covert shit we'll never know about...make that money!
It's why illegal drugs--which kill fewer people per year than even FOOD does--will never be legalized--not even marijuana, even though it is actually beneficial to your health: it prevents/treats cancer by shrinking tumors (Google it...or look down the right side of this blog in the word collage and click on "cannabis" for a list of several articles from legitimate medical authorities touting all the medical benefits of cannabis), it's a very potent anti-oxidant, it relieves pain, nausea, treats glaucoma, eases chemotherapy symptoms.
Legal drugs like alcohol (75,000 US deaths, 2.5 million world wide deaths each year) and tobacco (443,000 US deaths, 6 million world wide deaths per year) and prescription drugs (100,000 to 200,000 US deaths per year) will continue to remain legal and earn their "pushers" billions of dollars. Medical malpractice (which includes incorrectly prescribing drugs) kills 1,000,000 people per year in the US and the food we eat kills: 30,000 people from obesity each year; 72,000 from diabetes each year; 600,000 from heart disease each year. The total number from those evil illegal drugs on which we wage war is 17,000 US deaths each year. And the number of deaths per year attributed to marijuana has been 0 for half a century.
Is this war on drugs--which itself costs law enforcement billions of dollars and the US and Mexico over 1 million deaths per year--really in our best interests? As with every tragic criminal endeavor, if you follow the money, you will reveal what really motivates such a purposefully futile endeavor as the drug war fail. The failure of prohibition has destroyed hundreds of millions of more lives than it has or will ever save.
The US political system has been broken for over a century. Our once democratic republic is nothing more than a fascist oligarchy in which the aristocracy (top 1%) chooses its own members--none of whom have any capability to govern--from whom we think we pick those who pretend to represent our (the 99%) interests, when the only interests they preserve are their own. The robber barons are more devious and stronger and richer than ever, and impose upon us a fake morality based on nothing and tell us that in the land of the free, we are not free to make our own decisions regarding our health and well-being, so that when we get caught stepping out of their arbitrarily drawn lines, we'll end up in their privatized prison system, where we lose what remained of our constitutional rights but still remain a source of profit for them.
Corruption reigns supreme in every single layer/level of government, from local school boards and neighborhood associations to the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government. It's disgusting and pitiful. And we the people are now inmates in a police state, subject to: indefinite detention without a trial; surrender of assets and property; torture; and execution if we wind up on the radar of the US Gestapo--the FBI, DHS, NSA, TSA, DEA and any other "acronymed" branch of the military enforcing the sinister will of the police state.
Pharmaceutical painkillers are now responsible for more deaths in the United States than heroin and cocaine combined.
These pharmaceuticals are responsible for more than 15,000 deaths conservatively in 2008 alone. With no sign of slowing down, the painkiller industry is becoming wildly popular among Americans — as a result, so is the high rate of painkiller abuse.
Classified as dangerous by the U.S. government, cannabis (even in THC-free form, or free of psychoactive effects) has been identified as a powerful pain reliever in more than 80 peer-reviewed studies.
You may be aware of the fact that marijuana is usually quite high in THC (delta-9 tetrahydrocannabinol), which is the compound responsible for the psychoactive effect of cannabis.
In contrast, it is also low in CBD (cannabidiol) content. Both THC and CBD are known as cannabinoids, however, which interacts with your body in a very unique way.
In fact, cannabinoids are key when it comes to pain relief. While this information alone is enough to shatter the traditional beliefs on government marijuana regulation, the relationship between CBD and THC is even more revealing.
What you may not be familiar with is how CBD has been shown to block the effect of THC in the nervous system. This allows for marijuana to be used with little or no psychoactive effects. Hemp, on the other hand, is high in CBD and low in THC. This is due to the fact that it is bred to maximize its fiber, seeds, and oil. Of course these key properties are what it is most commonly used for.
Trials Indicate Cannabis as an Effective Treatment for Chronic Pain
In a 2011 study published in the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, researchers examined the effects of cannabinoids on chronic pain and proper sleep. What they found in their trials challenges federal government claims that cannabis has ‘no accepted medical use’. The researchers conducted 18 trials using cannabinoids in the treatment of chronic pain, and found that cannabinoids demonstrated a significant painkilling effect as well as noticeable improvements in sleep in 15 of trials. Compared, to placebo, the cannabinoids were extremely effective.
Most importantly, there were no adverse effects.
Another study, performed in 2002, reached similar conclusions. Finding cannabis to aid in pain relief as well as quality of sleep, researchers from the McGill University Health Centre stated in summary that cannabis can be used as an effective way of improving pain, mood, and sleep in some patients with chronic pain.
There are many forms of the cannabis plant, many without mind-altering properties, many of which can be utilized without adverse reactions, as detailed in the peer-reviewed research. It is also quite clear that the painkiller industry simply cannot continue to wreak havoc on the lives of many, and a natural alternative must soon emerge to prevent another 15,000 plus deaths this year.
Why is the federal government refusing to admit the medicinal properties of cannabis and the unique ability of this substance to curb pain, insomnia, and impaired mood? This is only one example of how the government decides what is and what is not good for your health.
By Kevin Gray, The Fix
Posted on December 26, 2011
For the first time in nearly a century, automobile accidents are no longer the nation’s leading cause of accidental deaths, according to a major report released Tuesday by the National Center for Health Statistics.
The new number one killer is drugs—not smack, crystal meth or any other stepped-on menace sold in urban alleyways or trailer parks—but bright, shiny pills prescribed by doctors, approved by the government, manufactured by pharmaceutical companies and sold to the consumer as “medicine.”
Yet of the billions of legit pills Americans pop every year for medical conditions serious and otherwise, the vast majority of lives are claimed by only a select few classes—painkillers, sedatives and stimulants—that all share a common characteristic: they promote abuse, dependence and addiction.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg of the prescription drug abuse problem,” says Dr. Margaret Warner, the federal report’s lead author. “The take-home here is, this should be a wake-up call.” Some 41,000 Americans died from what the report refers to as “poisonings” in 2008, compared with 38,000 traffic deaths. That tally marks a 90 percent increase in poisonings and a 15 percent decrease in car accidents since 1999.
Nearly nine out of ten of those poisonings were caused by prescription drug overdoses, with the chief culprit being opiate-based pain relievers such as Vicodin (hydrocodone), OxyContin and Percocet (oxycodone), codeine, morphine—and let’s not forget Actiq (fentanyl), the infamous berry-flavored lollipop that is 100 times stronger than morphine and—like most opiate analgesics—so overprescribed that only about 10% of its sales come from its original indication to treat cancer pain.
These legal opiates accounted for 40 percent, or 15,000, of the fatalities, up from 25 percent, or 4,000, in 1999. Deaths by painkiller now outpace the combined nationwide number of deaths by cocaine (5,100) and heroin (3,000); these fatal overdoses often involve mixing painkillers with other prescription drugs—for example, Klonopin, Xanax, Valium or another benzodiazepines, which are the second most lethal class.
Other report findings: Three quarters of the poisoning are unintentional—likely the result of overdoses rather than drug interactions or allergic reactions—and some 13 percent are suicides. The five states with the highest oxy-type drug death rates (per 100,000 of the population) were New Mexico (30.8), West Virginia (27.6), Alaska (24.2), Nevada (21.0), and Utah (20.8).The most likely to die: white men, American Indians and Native Alaskans, usually between the ages of 45 to 54.
Warner’s death report is but the latest in a disturbing accumulation of evidence, ranging from scientific surveys to celebrity deaths, that underscore what we already know about our painkiller nation: pill mills and doctor shoppers are not just creating a land of bathroom-cabinet addicts—their bodies are packing morgues.
With our surging “oxy addiction” showing no signs of letting up, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention this year officially named it an “epidemic.” President Obama has repeatedly invoked prescription drug abuse as the nation’s leading drug problem responsible not only for a rising number of overdoses and deaths but also ratcheting up the incidence of break-ins and burglaries of pharmacies.
Warner and her colleagues at the agency, which is overseen by the CDC, are at pains to draw comparisons between oxy-type drug deaths and those from auto accidents, because they hope that the same comprehensive approach that helped cut traffic deaths in half during the previous decade can save just as many lives on the drug front. Auto fatalities fell following a concerted government focus on national highway safety, resulting in car safety improvements as well as a wide range of regulatory, legal, and public health measures. Seat belt laws were enforced; drunk driving laws became stricter. The fact that alcohol—yet another legal intoxicant—is responsible for close to 40% of all traffic fatalities indicates how difficult it is to apply policy to substance abuse and get significant results. Still, drunk driving is playing a smaller and smaller role in automobile fatalities, falling by close to 40% since 1982.
You need to look at policy, laws, individual behavior, community behavior and health care provider behavior,” says Dr. Chris Jones, a consulting pharmacist with the CDC. One of the most innovative interventions includes building a database on patients who abuse painkillers and identifying doctors who overprescribe (or do so without examining the patient or his medical history). So far, five states have adopted specific pill-mill laws to flush out such doctors. “We’re looking at these laws to evaluate them and for guidance on policy,” says Jones.
That includes sharing information from state medical licensing boards and pharmacy licensing boards to monitor prescribers and set thresholds for how many pills are hitting the street and why.
The Drug Enforcement Administration launched an annual National Prescription Take-Back Event; the third drug dump, in October, collected 188 tons of old pills nationwide. The agency also operates 26 Tactical Diversion Squads—agents specializing in identifying wholesale traffickers and suppliers of black-market pharmaceuticals.
Some 48 states have adopted prescription monitoring programs (PMPs), which typically encourage (rather than require) doctors to record the data of every controlled drug prescribed, but only 37 are currently operational. In 2011, Florida implemented its PMP after its Tea Party governor reversed his controversial opposition to the surveillance tool, and the Sunshine State has already seen an exodus of pill mills to Georgia, which still has no PMP.
These federal and state campaigns come not a moment too soon, either. Painkillers have become the most common drug taken by adults between the ages of 20 to 59. The trends in sales, deaths and abuse treatment admissions for oxy and the like have all risen fourfold or more since 1999, according to a new state-by-state study. In 2009, for the first time, emergency-room visits resulting from prescription drug ODs topped 1 million, with some 343,000 due to opiate analgesics like oxy, 363,000 due to benzodiazepines and other sedatives, and 22,000 due to stimulants. (For a ranking of the top 10 drugs whose use or abuse led to overdose deaths or survival in ER visits in 2009, see the list at the end of the article.)
In 2010, enough prescription painkillers were sold nationwide to keep every American medicated around the clock for an entire month. Some 12 million Americans admitted that they were using painkillers without a prescription, and at least 14% of these nonmedical users met the criteria for abuse or dependence. In one recent survey, more than 5 million Americans reported using them to get high—in a single month period. The majority of those people say they obtained (or stole) them from friends or their family.
Jones does see one bright spot in the otherwise grim report. Methadone, which is used as a pain reliever as well as to treat opioid dependency, had been on the uptick for nearly a decade—from about 800 deaths in 1999 to about 5,500 in 2007. But for reasons not yet clear, that number dropped by remarkable 600 deaths in 2008. “For many years it had been the most common opioid in overdose deaths,” says Jones. “We don’t know if it’s just that people have shifted to these other drugs of what. But it’s promising. We’ve have to wait and see what we find when we look at 2009.”
In terms of the big picture, however, the fact that prescription drugs have overtaken automobiles as the nation’s leading cause of accidental deaths marks a deeper societal transformation. One of the most defining developments in twentieth-century America was motorization; as more people bought more cars and drove more miles, more accidents, injuries and deaths were the inevitable result until government intervention bent the curve.
The 21st century is shaping up to be about, among other things, the pharmaceuticalization of America, as lifelong prescription drug use starting in early childhood becomes the norm.
How will pill popping transform our lives? Certain things are predictable: The drug industry will develop and sell more and more chemicals targeted at the brain, which remains medical science’s “black box”; that will result in treatments to enhance the performance of mood, cognition, attention, memory and other mental functions that will have become, in due course, “medical conditions.” Any pill that promises to make you smarter or happier invites abuse, and some will be as addictive as Oxy or the “morphine popsicle.” But with the enforcement of effective policies—the seat belts and DUI laws of pharmaceuticalization—the drug industry’s off-label marketing and the medical profession’s overprescribing could be dramatically curtailed.
Given the current state of corporate influence over politics, these reforms are anything but predictable. What's at stake is nothing less than the nation’s expanding medicine cabinet doubling as its morgue.
The Top 10 Most Dangerous Rx Drugs in America
This list of brand name and generic drugs was compiled from the Drug Abuse Warning Network's (DAWN's) database of emergency room visits in 2009, including drug poisonings that lead to both deaths and survivals.
Xanax (alprazolam) 112,552 (benzodiazepine class)
OxyContin (and other oxycodone drugs) 105,214 (opiate class)
Vicodin (and other hydrocodone drugs) 86,258 (opiate class)
How many people do you know who regularly use a prescription medication? If your social group is like most Americans', the answer is most. Sixty-five percent of the country takes a prescription drug these days. In 2005 alone, we spent $250 billion on them.
I recently caught up with Melody Petersen, author of Our Daily Meds, an in-depth look at the pharmaceutical companies that have taken the reins of our faltering health care system by cleverly hawking every kind of drug imaginable. We discussed how this powerful industry has our health in its hands.
Daniela Perdomo: Your book includes some staggering stats. For example, 100,000 Americans die each year from prescription drugs — that’s 270 per day, or, as you put it, more than twice as many who are killed in car accidents each day. Could you elaborate on this? Are these people abusing their prescription drugs or is this a sign of prescription meds gone bad?
Melody Petersen: The study estimating that 100,000 Americans die each year from their prescriptions looked only at deaths from known side effects. That is, those deaths didn’t happen because the doctor made a mistake and prescribed the wrong drug, or the pharmacist made a mistake in filling the prescription, or the patient accidentally took too much. Unfortunately, thousands of patients die from such mistakes too, but this study looked only at deaths where our present medical system wouldn’t fault anyone. Tens of thousands of people are dying every year from drugs they took just as the doctor directed. This shows you how dangerous medications are.
DP: You write about a growing market for drugs for children. You say we know little about the long-term effects of prescription meds on kids. Let’s talk particularly about depression medications and ADHD meds, which seem to be what kids are mostly prescribed.
MP: In recent years, sales of drugs for children have been the industry’s fastest growing business. Doctors now prescribe pills to children for all kinds of conditions — from high cholesterol to anxiety. The market for ADHD drugs has long been a big opportunity for the industry. More recently, the companies have had their sales reps urge doctors to prescribe antidepressants, antipsychotics and other psychiatric meds to children. The result: our kids take more of those medicines than children in other countries. For example, a study last year found that American children take three times more attention deficit medications and antidepressants than children in Europe.
DP: Could you tell me how the prescription med industry is in bed with doctors? MP: The industry spends hundreds of millions of dollars on physicians every year. In one survey, 9 out of 10 doctors said they had recently taken something of value from the drug industry. And some of those doctors take hundreds of thousands of dollars each year from the industry. The drug companies pay doctors to be their so-called consultants. They also pay them to sit on corporate advisory boards and to give lectures to other doctors. They pay for up to 80 percent of the continuing medical education that doctors need to maintain their licenses. If you ask a doctor if this is a problem, they will more than likely tell you no. But the studies show that even a small gift will sway doctors to write a prescription for a certain drug. The truth is that doctors are no longer independent gatekeepers who keep us safe from drugs we don’t need. Far too many of them are financially tied to the industry. They are writing the prescriptions that their financial backers want them to write.
DP: We are the only developed country that doesn't control prescription drug prices. Could you tell me what that means, practically, for consumers? MP: It means that the drug companies can charge whatever they want to — even for drugs that don’t work very well. One drug costs $400,000 a year. Some cancer drugs now cost $50,000, even though on average, they give the patient just a few weeks extra to live. It’s clear that the drugs aren’t worth these extreme prices, but the companies are taking advantage of patients who are desperate for a cure. The industry’s unlimited hikes in prices have helped make health insurance unaffordable. This is also why wages of American workers have stagnated. When health premiums rise, employers must get the extra money from somewhere, and employee raises are one of the first things to go.
DP: You write about how companies are more interested in developing 'lifestyle drugs for rich Americans' rather than discovering cures for diseases that affect the majority of the world, like malaria. How many cholesterol drugs do we need? Sex drive meds? Hair loss meds? MP: The answer is that we really don’t need many of those kinds of drugs, those lifestyle drugs that don’t save or lengthen lives. But the drug companies have discovered there are billions of dollars to be made by selling pills to Americans who worry about getting old, but are otherwise healthy. It’s so easy to fall for the marketers’ claim that a little pill will enhance our lives and keep us young forever.
DP: Could you tell me about drugs that are developed for one use but used for another. How often does this happen? MP: It is a common sales tactic in the industry to have sales reps push doctors to prescribe a drug for many uses and patient conditions. The drug companies do this even though it is illegal to promote a drug for anything other than the condition the FDA has approved it for. I detail in my book how a lackluster drug for epilepsy – a drug called Neurontin -- was sold by a company for just about any condition that affects the brain. The company’s sales representatives pushed doctors to prescribe Neurontin for children with attention problems, for adults with mania, for just about anyone with restless legs. They did this even though they had no scientific evidence that it helped people with these conditions. This is a very dangerous corporate fraud.
DP: How often are ailments created simply to fit a drug already created? MP: The industry has proven that it is not beyond creating new diseases when it wants to expand the use of a drug. For example, I wrote in my book about how the company Pharmacia created the disease of overactive bladder to expand sales of a drug for incontinence. We don’t know how often this is done because few companies are willing to tell the public how their marketers work behind the scenes.
DP: What do we prescribe drugs for that other countries don’t? In other words, what ailments do Americans suffer from that other nations don’t? MP: The drug companies have made Americans believe that almost anything should be treated with a pill. Women can ask their doctors for a drug that will diminish their facial hair. Parents can ask for a stimulant to keep their children calm and focused. Even people who are shy are now told they have a disease that needs to be medicated. This is far less prevalent in other countries because the drug companies don’t have as much power elsewhere. The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two developed countries in the world that allow the drug companies to aggressively advertise prescription drugs to consumers.
DP: Why do we rush to prescribe? Have we always been this way or was there a shift at some point? MP:The prescriptions are driven by the promotional efforts of the industry. Today, the companies start promoting a drug years before it even goes to the FDA for approval. Some drugs have promotional campaigns funded by more than a billion dollars. It was around 1980 when the big drug companies learned that they could make far more profit by focusing their efforts on marketing rather than on the truly hard work of scientific research and finding new drugs.
DP: American life expectancy is low compared to other developed nations. What are they doing right? We’re not the only ones with prescription drug companies within our borders. MP: In America, if you’re lucky enough to have health insurance, you can easily get too much medicine, too much health care. Many Americans don’t understand that all of health care has risks and that too much of it can actually shorten your life. Is this one of the reasons why we’re falling fast in the world rankings on life expectancy? No one knows for sure. But it’s obvious that all that money we spend on prescriptions and doctors is not giving us an advantage.
DP: From a consumer/patient standpoint, are certain drug manufacturers better than others? MP:No. There is not an ethically minded shining star. All the companies operate in a similar way. Fraud is rampant in this industry because there is so much money involved.
DP: How will the health care bill affect prescription drug use and the med industry?
MP: The drug companies and their lobbyists won big under the new health care law. The companies will get millions of new customers. At the same time, Congress agreed with the industry’s lobbyists that there should be no limits on how much they can charge for medicines. We needed to make health insurance available to all Americans, but there should have been stronger cost controls and promotional limits in the law. Now, even more people will be at risk of getting dangerous and expensive drugs that they don’t need.
DP: What do you make of theories that someday very soon we’ll all be on smart drugs. Realistic? Already here? MP: I recently spoke to a college student who told me he used Adderall, a drug for ADHD, to enhance his studies. He didn’t have a prescription for the drug. He got the pills from friends. He knew this was dangerous and illegal, but he did it anyway. People no longer understand that every drug comes with risks. Adderall, for example, comes with a label warning that using it without a prescription can lead to addiction, and in rare cases, death. The marketers have made us believe that we can do just about anything with the help of a pill.
DP: What is the biggest issue relating to prescription drugs that the mainstream media misses? MP: Overall, the biggest problem is that the news media is not objective when reporting on medicines. Much of the news coverage on prescription drugs exaggerates their potential benefits and glosses over their risks. Many news stories about new drugs don’t even mention the side effects. People are getting distorted information on prescription drugs. Many of these news stories are little more than press releases that come straight out of the drug companies’ marketing departments.
