Drug Addiction: The New Stupidity

I was born in Portland, Ore., met my wife there, have relatives who live there and have visited many times over the years. But I no longer recognize the city I once loved to visit, the city with bright lights, clean streets and busy people. The last time I visited, the sidewalks and parks were jammed with homeless people, alleys strewn with garbage, and businesses boarded up. I watched the news during months of rioting in which my church and many other buildings were covered with plywood to protect them from window-smashing looters who emerged at night to raise hell.

On October 1 of this year, the New York Times published a story in which a reporter and photographer followed a Portland security guard on his rounds as he encountered drug addicts, psychotic people, overdose deaths and foiled an attempted kidnapping as a crazy woman tried to snatch a child she insisted was hers. His 911 calls were answered by a recording and were sometimes disconnected, as overwhelmed police officers struggled to keep up.

So what changed in the last few decades? Drugs. Apathy. Stupid legislation. Degradation.

Oregon, described in a PBS News Hour episode as “On the leading edge of drug decriminalization,” decriminalized marijuana in 1973,and legalized medical marijuana in 1998. In 2011, The Global Commission on Drug Policy decreed that “The global war on drugs has failed,” which gave permission for states to throw up their hands gut their drug enforcement efforts and follow Oregon’s lead, reducing penalties, legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use, opening so called “harm reduction” centers in which addicts could access naloxone for overdoses and could shoot up with clean needles without fear of arrest, and planning to use taxes on marijuana sales to fund mental health and drug treatment.

Oregon continued its “leading edge” position, passed measure 110, decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of hard drugs such as heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. Also in 2020 Oregon voters approved measure 109, the first measure in the United States that established a regulatory framework for the use of psychedelic mushrooms.

I was at university in the 1960s so yes, I experienced a thriving drug culture, and yes, I did inhale, but the harsh 3 Percent THC marijuana seeds and stems of the 1960s have evolved into something cultivated, much stronger and available legally from thousands of weed shops on street corners. The grim lessons of LSD, and other hard drugs have been forgotten by the present generation, and the tie-dyed hippies of the 1960s have been replaced by urine-stained homeless drug addicts junking up many cities such as Seattle, Portland and San Francisco.

Read the NYTimes story on Portland and you can see that the security guard treats the homeless compassionately, gives them cigarettes, works to de-escalate conflicts and problems, and one can also see that those people are not generally intent on damage. They are however, “on something” which puts them beyond the bounds of acceptable behavior. In pursuit of humane treatment, in making drug addiction an “illness” instead of a criminal act, we are losing our cities to the insane, the destructive, the addicted and the degenerate. Ordinary people have a right to walk the sidewalks without being accosted, without being hassled or screamed at, without being forced to walk in the street to avoid needle-strewn trash and human feces.

And one more thing: It doesn’t help when Oregon Public Broadcasting reported on efforts to rescind Measure 110, the headline read “Efforts to recriminalize drugs again, supporters include Oregon’s richest businessmen,” makes it into a class war where once again the “fat cats” are stepping on the little guys. It doesn’t take a fat wallet to look around and see what’s happening to our cities and to Portland, all it takes is a walk in the park with eyes open. Drug addiction is slavery. Pushers and legislators are the enablers.

Hey, Addiction is a Brain Disease and IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT!

According to a statement on the Betty Ford Foundation website, and many other sources, addiction is a brain disease, not a character flaw. This “brain disease model” may be promoted by well-meaning people who have addicted loved ones, but it’s not accurate, just a PR concept, with no scientific evidence whatsoever. But search “addiction is a brain disease” and the Internet is full of people who bought into the lie, claiming that’s the way it is. Opioid addiction, sex addiction, food addiction, Internet addiction, porn addiction, it’s the new fashion statement to be addicted to one or more things that are just too big and strong for little old you to overcome, you poor thing.

Psychiatrists dreamed up this idea to make money and to get more people under their control. First they cozied up to traditional medicine to seem more official, and while psychiatrists have medical degrees, that’s just cover for voodoo head-bump crystal-vibration nonsense that is modern psychiatry and psychopharmacology.

They like to use diabetes, as an example of why drug abusers are so helpless. “It’s something that happens to your body, you can’t do anything about it, it’s not a moral failing, and it requires a drug for the rest of your life.” A drug which — just like all those street drugs out there — were produced by BigPharma.

So if you are drug addicted, it’s not your fault, you can’t help it, it’s your body’s fault, probably something you got from your parents via their DNA. And did I say “IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!”

Along with this brain disease model is the hint of a protected class of citizens who are not responsible for their condition. Drug addicts – I can see it coming – are not responsible for their condition and need care at public expense for the rest of their life, because, after all, it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT THEIR FAULT.

Well, I beg to differ. Anytime something you do – like knocking over liquor stores to feed your heroin habit, or injecting opioids or cooking meth in your spare room and screaming at people who aren’t there — you are killing yourself, endangering people around you and filling your neighborhood with crazy, amped up psychos who break into houses and shoot people who they think are going to kill them. THAT IS YOUR FAULT YOU JERK!

It’s not your body, it’s the choices and you’ve made them. The choices that led you down back alleys where needles litter the street, and now you – and all the “brain disease model apologists for drugs and drug abusers” are determined to “reduce the stigma” and engage in “harm reduction” where you don’t get arrested for creating all this chaos, but instead you are swaddled into the caring arms of psychiatrists who will put you on methadone maintenance at public expense, or some of the new psychedelic drugs which means all those people who actually work at real jobs, creating useful products and services for society will pay for your treatment for the rest of your useless and non-productive life.

You can’t change your body, but you can change your mind. If you listen to the psychs they don’t give you a ghost of a chance to dig yourself out and you’ll just keep using street drugs, psych drugs, all kinds of deadly crap, until you overdose and die, and the psychs will shake their heads sadly and say they need more money to treat poor sorry-ass drug addicts like you who need sympathy and drugs to live. Oh, and let’s get rid of the “stigma” of addiction, because after all it’s a brain disease and IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT!

One thing about sympathy? It’s deadly. It’s an agreement from others that you are a sad little nobody. It will suck the life out of you, kill your own ability to push through obstacles. It makes a basically good spiritual being think they get love and help only when they are pathetic.

The psychs won’t tell you this, but you are a basically good spiritual being, who’s been through hell and back. You are tough, you’re still here and you can change your life. It’s not destiny that determines your future, it’s the choices you make. So stop whining and get busy cleaning up. It’s not easy, the drugs make you a slave and you have to do courageous things to break those chains and escape.

And forget about suicide, death doesn’t help. You come back the same spirit you were, with the same temptations, same vices, the same choices in front of you. Different body, different DNA, and it’s not the body that will make or break you. It’s not a chemical imbalance or some phony brain disease, it’s those stupid choices you make.

So stop blaming your body, your parents, the horrible and evil and terrible society that drives you to drink or use meth or some other crap you snort, eat, inject, smoke or cram up your ass. If you want to be a slave there are lots of others out there who will be happy to make you one. You can commiserate, share needles, give each other AIDS and hepatitis and die in some piss-stinking alley feeling really sorry for yourself. Or you can get well you sorry-ass addict and start helping other people — that’s the way out.

How Stigma Helps

Stigma can be a good thing. A course I am taking at Harvard (online and free with no certificate) on opioid addiction has as its main goal the removal of stigma from addiction. Well, addiction today means you are a low life, a bum, a guy who can’t cope, who is unproductive, criminal and all sorts of other bad stuff. Perhaps you know someone addicted to something and you like them. Well, that’s fine, help them if you can, but a stigma means something is wrong, and stigmas are a sort of warning to keep lots of people from dropping in to see if it’s fun or not. 

Addiction is now being applied to all kinds of innocuous things, like “I’m addicted to sugar,” or “I’m addicted to romance novels.” Just means you are too weak to diet or start a real relationship. OK that’s harsh, but that’s what stigma is all about. Become an addict of heroin or meth or some pharmaceutical opioid and you will lose your old friends and make new ones, like the guys in the slammer, the bail bondsman, the dealers, and other low-lifes like yourself who don’t have the guts to get a job, pay the bills, start a family and stick with them to help them live a good life too.

It’s easy to get hooked, it requires some character to stay clean and build something you could be proud of. So stigma is a group’s way of warning off others from what the addict has become. But we’ve gone all warm and fuzzy, and nothing is anybody’s fault. Criminals are the product of a bad childhood. Druggies probably have a problem with some drug-enjoying DNA that they can’t help. Alcoholics probably got it from their parents.

There might even be a grain a truth in some of that, but that’s not the point. You don’t have to let your parents dictate your life. You don’t have to let your DNA decide what you will do. You don’t have to do the same things to others that have been done to you. If you do, you may find apologists for your actions. They might give you sympathy, hand you a dollar out of the window of their Volvo, listen to your hard-luck story and agree it is “The Man” who drove you to this low state of existence. It’s all because of the fat cats who get rich and made you do it, it wasn’t your fault you were just a “Poor Weak Creature” who has lost his way.

Grow up! Stop being such a wimp. If you do pull yourself out of the swamp, you will get genuine admiration, not sympathy, from people around you who can recognize that you’ve done something difficult.

Some guys screw around on their wife, take off for the Caribbean with a bimbo and then come back and go into rehab. Rehab is fine, but it’s also a big excuse. It says I’m too weak to be good to my family, I took some drugs and it’s the drugs’ fault, I’m not responsible for what I did, it was the drugs that did it. So if you did something like that, just realize you did it. It WAS you. Then you can start getting straight with yourself and your family without hiding behind addiction.

If there were no stigma to addiction, whee, we could all get addicted and talk about it endlessly to our friends and share stories about how troubled we are, and nobody would think the lesser of us. We’d blame the weather or our brains or genetics or the dealers or who our friends are. They’d all be worried about us overdosing and would tuck us in at night and say prayers to keep us safe from the nasty drugs that overwhelmed our tender souls and carried us to addiction land. If there were a stigma, for example, friends might dump us, people would tell us to get a job as we tried to cage money along the stop lights, or lock us up when we try to stick up a liquor store.

Parents tell kids stuff that will help them, but kids don’t listen. “Just say no, wash your hands before you eat, don’t drive drunk, don’t screw around with sex until after marriage,” all that stuff was for your own good and you thought it was stupid, and they were stupid for saying it. They probably disapproved of your friends who drank or had babies in high school, or who smoked pot and tried to keep you away from them. But no, you ignored them or did just the opposite. They were Republican so the kidsregistered Democratic or Peace and Freedom just to show how independent they were as they used the family car to go to rallies for Che Guevara or somebody wearing a beret.

So Stigma helps keep people out of trouble. Goths wear their stigmata proudly to display how bad they are and if you accepted them they might just scream and disappear, like a vampire in the sun.

Well, I don’t think addicts are whole people. I might feel sorry for them but accept them in my home, hang out with them at coffee shop, party with them, I don’t think so. I might try to get them into Narconon, or give them an assist, but I’m not going to friend them, listen to their troubles or loan them money until they show some guts and straighten up. Maybe it’s hard to do. Tough. Parents, teachers, friends, everybody warned them about drugs and they said fuck you and took them anyway because they wanted to get high and broke and destitute so life would stop being so boring.

So don’t expect everybody to feel sorry for you or look at you the same way. You crossed the line and you know it, and stigmata goes right along with that. You’ve fallen and you damn well better get yourself upright and straight again or you won’t have any friends or family left. And other friends, seeing the stigma of you as a basket case, in rehab and in and out of jail for theft and using and dealing might think twice before they decide to follow in your footsteps. That’s why there’s a stigma for drug abuse. It’s there for a good reason, and no college course is going to eliminate it.

Stupid People and Good Advice

All our social programs are aimed to salvage people who had no good sense and didn’t listen to sensible advice. There are some people who arrive with disabilities or are retarded or psychotic, but I’m talking about ordinary people, the ones in your neighborhood, going to school, and so on.

Say no to drugs is good advice, but Nancy Reagan’s motto was widely mocked by druggies, pushers, growers, smugglers, the media and assorted smart-asses. And now thousands of people are dead of overdoses, millions of dollars are spent for maintenance drugs like methadone to keep people off worse drugs, parks are littered with needles, pharmaceutical companies who invented all the street drugs out there are now inventing new ways to divert addicts from street drugs to pharmaceuticals, and so on. And the psychs tell us addiction is a lifelong brain disease so too bad, if you got hooked even once, you have to be on BigPharma’s drugs for the rest of your life.

Say no to drugs is good advice and doing so will substantially improve the survival of self, family, group and mankind. But it was more fun to make fun of the slogan because drugs are, you know, pretty fun and profitable and after your first high which you spend the rest of your short life chasing, you see things you ordinarily wouldn’t such as people nodding away in the parks and alleys, shooting up on the subways and under bridges, crap blowing in the wind from homeless camps, crazy assholes on psychiatric meds shooting up schools and churches, addicts robbing liquor stores and gas stations or giving blow jobs to pay for their next fix.

So the things that mother told you such as “wait till you find the right person before you have sex,” was also pretty stupid especially when you were thinking with inflamed sexual equipment. So nothing like stalkers, AIDS, abortions, former partners killing current partners, beatings, rapes, broken marriages and half of all kids in the US born to single parents, (which means mothers) which means they didn’t give a shit and had sex with a loser who just wanted sex, and had enough sex to get pregnant and then got abandoned because the guy didn’t love them and so then they have to work and raise a kid too, or go on welfare, and hundreds of welfare mothers sitting in housing projects watching TV waiting for the baby daddy to come in at night for a roll in the hay. And the boys have no role model so they follow the corner drug dealer, and the girls follow their mothers and become the next generation of public housing tv watchers.

A recent survey said that 55percent of married men had affairs with at least five people and 50 percent of women admitted affairs with one man. And now just to help out the cheating and lying, there are social media sites to hook up married people who get bored. And instead of Playboy there is online porno to really get the juices pumping.

It was really stupid to think that anybody would follow grandma’s advice. “Save your money,” she would say, “so you can pay for things instead of using credit.” But she was stupid and old, and while banks used to pay interest, they now charge fees to save your money, and you get free shit with credit cards, but if you miss a payment or go late, the interest rate shoots up to 36 percent with fees on top of that, and even federal workers with good salaries and great benefits live paycheck to paycheck and go on food stamps after a 30-day government shutdown. And while you’re struggling to pay the rent, another “free” credit card offer arrives. So in 2016 nearly a million people filed for bankruptcy, and twice that filed in the 2008 economic plunge.

Doesn’t it kind of piss you off? Part of it is the “go with the flow” mentality. If other people are doing it, I should do it too. Lemmings off the cliff. Part of it is the “If it feels good, do it.” You can blame the CIA for that one. They experimented on college kids with LSD, and idiots like Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey spread the drugs across the country, and drugs and sex and rock ‘n roll was all that mattered. It felt good to toss away your tired old rules and just go for it….

And here we are today, blaming others for our sorry state, checking the “sad face” in our doctor’s office and sitting with the nice psychiatrist who tells us the latest hokum brain disease bullshit and hooks us up with the most expensive psycho pharmaceutical that the insurance company will pay for. “I have PTSD” we whine, or “I’m ADHD so you’ll have to excuse me,” or “I have Tourette’s Syndrome so if I start shouting ‘YOU JERKS ALL GO TO HELL YOU ARE SO STUPID YOU MAKE MY HEAD HURT!’” please forgive me.

Psychologists Settle Torture Lawsuit

Two psychologists, James Mitchell and John 'Bruce' Jessen, who were paid $81 million dollars by the CIA to develop methods of "enhanced interrogation," settled a lawsuit brought by the ACLU on behalf of three torture victims, one of whom died
https://www.aclu.org/cases/salim-v-mitchell-lawsuit-against-psychologists-behind-cia-torture-program The plaintiffs accused the two psychologists of "torture; cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment; nonconsensual human experimentation; and war crimes," according to a report on NPR. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/17/544183178/psychologists-behind-cia-enhanced-interrogation-program-settle-detainees-lawsuit. Today, the American Psychological Association said the settlement does not absolve the two defendants of their responsibility for violating professional ethics. The two psychologists denied culpability and settlement details were confidential.

The Game of Life: Science Spirits and Psychiatrists

Science works, we can see its products all about us. Science predicted a total eclipse of the sun traveling across the United States today, and it happened, exactly as predicted.

Scientific principles when applied to the things of this world operate predictably to produce intended results. Psychiatry, sociology, psychology, and the other social sciences, however, that purport to deal with man do not work. The war on poverty, with billions of dollars and the best minds attempting to make a difference, and poverty is still with us, and according to some, is growing even in this recent time of affluence and prosperity. Mental illness, homelessness, crime has not diminished in spite of the efforts of the best most well-intentioned practitioners. And soldiers, armed with modern technology capable of wiping out the inhabitants of earth, are still afflicted with the neuroses, psychoses, and aberrations that have plagued men since the beginning of the race.

So while science has brought human beings from disease and a struggle for survival to the stars, social sciences are still back in Neanderthal times, struggling to deal with basic tenets of humanity. Psychiatry has rushed to redefine itself as a science, a branch of medicine, taking its place beside surgery as a scientific discipline. But to see clearly the incursions of psychiatry into the halls of science, you must hear what some of its early advocates said.

In 1940, John Rawling Rees, a cofounder of the World Federation of Mental Health said "Since the last world war we have done much to infiltrate the various social organizations throughout the country … we have made a useful attack upon a number of professions. The two easiest of them naturally are the teaching profession and the church."

Another cofounder of the WFMH, G. Brock Chisholm, called for psychiatrists to free "the race from its crippling burden of good and evil." http://www.cchrstl.org/documents/religion.pdf . Religion is burdened with its own troubles and conflicts, but when psychiatry usurped religion, it did away with the idea of man as a spirit. The word psychology, for example, means the "study of the soul or spirit." But psychology redefined mankind as bereft of spirit, a collection of amino acids, flesh, bone and stimulus-response reactions. Men were very much like dogs, the theory goes, and you could punish them to make them obey, stimulus-response style, because there was nobody else home.

So if you apply science to a subject like human beings, and remove the most essential portion of humans – a spiritual nature – science won't work. It is as if you tried to study water by analyzing a dry lake, or studying hydrogen and not oxygen. But science is science, and squishy stuff like spirits gets tossed on the rubbish heap. Spirits do not compute in a science that admits only matter. So psychiatrists have to explain mental illness – not as a degradation of the spirit, but as a chemical imbalance, which they can address with very profitable pharmaceuticals.

In the way of analogy, let's take a video game. The essential elements are the computer and its game program, a screen, keyboard, electricity, etc. Perhaps it’s a multi-player game that connects others over the internet. So plug the computer in, turn it on, click on the game, and what happens? Nothing. It needs a player. The player is outside the game. He or she cannot directly enter the game. The game is made up of electrical circuits, which by analogy are nerves, a program, which by analogy is the brain, and the various computer displays and devices such as a screen, mouse, joystick, keyboard, etc. which by analogy is the human body. But it needs a player. So to play this game, the player selects an avatar, an electrical entity that will represent the player on the screen and which the player can control to participate in the game. The player, let us say, chooses to interface with the game, take up the avatar and enter the game. 

A spirit, by analogy enters the game by inhabiting a body, learning to run it by use of the program/brain and its neurons in order to enter the game called "Life on Earth." A game player may be beset by distractions. Dinner, its history in the game, the degree of competitiveness, time constraints, weaknesses and strengths, and so on. Might a spirit also have a history, strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, time constraints, distractions, etc.? If a scientist were to analyze only the avatar and not the player, the brain and not the spirit, the computer program and not the user of that program, might not the scientist come up with wildly varying results, unpredictable results?

Obviously a program can have errors in it. Computer code is often full of errors, and brains can have errors too. But what about the player, the spirit? Does science address the spirit? No it does not. Science deals with matter energy space and time, and spirit does not inhabit that realm. The player does not inhabit the video game, the spirit does not inhabit the physical universe, it only interfaces with it through an avatar/body to play the game called "Life on Earth."

So what is a spirit? In physics it would be termed a true static. It has no matter, no energy, no space, no time, it has no location, no mass, none of the factors that science deals with so effectively, and yet through the avatar of the human body, it can act in the universe of matter, energy, space and time, it can play the game of life.

So what about the mind? We have them, we're pretty sure of that, but the psychiatrists refuse to believe in a spirit, and they have relegated the mind to the brain. The brain is where memory is kept, where decisions get made, where love blooms, where intention begins, where our awareness is located. That is like saying that a company's telephone system is where the company's intelligence resides. You see? According to the psychiatrists, here's no one home, no one using the telephone system, it's all material stuff, that's all that matters and by god they are going to make it explain what makes men tick.

So try an experiment. Close your eyes and get a picture of a cat. Is it a cat you know? A made up cat? A Cat with green and purple stripes? So who is looking at the cat? Are you using your eyeballs to see the cat? How about we say the mind is like the cloud in computer-speak. It's not part of the body, the computer, or the computer program, but somewhere else. We create memories and pictures and store them in the cloud, then retrieve them when we want or need to look at our album. And we don't use our bodies' eyeballs to view them. The spirit does that. Memories are not like bits of cheese stored in holes in brain molecules, but are like spiritual albums stored in the cloud. And, according to this analogy, if your computer system conks out and is replaced, you as the player are still there, and your albums in the cloud are still there, thus we get an explanation of past-life memories, which psychiatrists say are hallucinations for which prescriptions are needed. Oh, and by analogy, when your body dies, you retreat from the game for a time, get a new computer system, reinstall the programs, and continue the game. Psychiatrists say there is no cloud, there is no spirit, only body and brain which die and rot so you're doomed and depressed without some of their happy pill prescriptions.

Cheer up! If you are a spirit, you are basically good and you will never die. You are immortal and much more powerful than the psychiatrists would have you believe. They say you are deluded, need pharmaceuticals, that life is mud and so are you. You have your troubles, that's for certain. Spirits make mistakes, sometimes the cloud they use is defective and they operate on erroneous data and do harmful things. There are bugs in the computer program and so sometimes when you try to help you hurt someone. Sometimes you are flooded with bad data and shoot someone, especially if your circuits are flooded with anti-depressants, stimulants, opioids and such. But you are basically good, and helping others is basic to your nature. But spirits are immortal and can get worn out from lifetime after lifetime, and they need a refresher or a vacation.

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NEWS AND ANALYSIS

Oregon Decriminalizes Some Hard Drug Possession

Data: Oregon House Bill 2355 –  https://legiscan.com/OR/text/HB2355/2017 -- that stiffens regulations on traffic stops and racial profiling – also reduces the penalty for first offense possession of small amounts of Schedule 1 drugs such as methadone, oxycodone, heroin, ecstasy, cocaine, and methamphetamine. The bill reduces penalties from a felony to a misdemeanor.  Oregon Gov. Kate Brown's signed the bill on Aug. 15.

Pro: The bill was filed at the request of Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum, who said in a release that the bill implements anti-profiling laws and reduces penalties for lower-level drug offenders. Oregon Rep. Mitch Greenlick (D.) – who is also a pharmacist and former Kaiser Foundation vice president of researchhttps://ballotpedia.org/Mitch_Greenlick  said in a Washington Free Beacon article http://freebeacon.com/issues/oregon-reduce-hard-drug-convictions/  "We've got to treat people, not put them in prison It would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes. … This is a chronic brain disorder and it needs to be treated this way."." The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also supported the bill and said in a release https://www.aclu-or.org/en/legislation/defelonize-drug-possession-hb-2355 that the war on drugs has failed, and law enforcement money can be better spent elsewhere. It also says that minorities are unfairly targeted, and treatment, education and rehabilitation are the answers.

Con: The majority of Republicans in both House and Senate voted against the bill as well as some Democrats. Democrat Sen. Betsy Johnson said the bill was misguided and called it a "hug-a thug-policy." http://www.oregonlive.com/today/index.ssf/2017/07/oregon_bill_will_reduce_punish.html

Analysis:

1.       Statement: The war on drugs has failed: One could argue that the war wasn't lost, it was subverted by pharmaceutical firms. Bayer invented heroin as a supposedly non-addictive treatment for morphine addiction. Doctors then backed off use of addictive opioids for pain relief except in the most extreme cases. Then Purdue pharmaceuticals in 1996 marketed a timed-release tablet that the company said was a non-addictive opioid called OxyContin https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/lawsuit-pharmaceutical-companies-opioids/529020/  which came into use for all sorts of minor pains. Predictably, OxyContin acted like the opioid it was and hooked thousands of people, then spread illegally into the society and ushered in what is now officially called "The Opioid Crisis.". Similarly LSD was synthesized by a chemist at Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, was tested by the CIA at American Universities http://healthland.time.com/2012/03/23/the-legacy-of-the-cias-secret-lsd-experiments-on-america/, and spread into society pushed by Professor Timothy Leary and friends. Oregon was a leader in stopping methamphetamine use by passing a law in 2006 requiring a prescription to obtain the pseudoephedrine precursor. http://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2012/07/oregons_meth_law_praised_as_so.html  Meth busts dropped in Oregon and Mississippi which had a similar law. But other states – under heavy lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry – failed to pass similar laws, and meth use rose again, as the precursors and meth itself were smuggled in from other states and Mexico. So why would pharmaceutical firms risk association with illicit drug use, addiction, crime, degradation and death? Because now that "the war on drugs has failed," and our prisons are full, "treatment" is advocated, states like Oregon are legalizing marijuana and reducing penalties for opioid use, and billions of dollars are going to treat opioid addiction. How is opioid addiction treated? With something called Medication Assisted Treatment (MAT). https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/15/medication-assisted-treatment-what-we-know/  MAT takes people addicted to heroin, for example, and switches them to legal pharmaceutical products such as methadone, buprenorphine, https://www.samhsa.gov/medication-assisted-treatment/treatment/buprenorphine  and naltrexone https://www.samhsa.gov/medication-assisted-treatment/treatment/naltrexone. The National Institute for Drug Abuse says addiction is a chronic disease which needs long-term care https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/drugfacts/treatment-approaches-drug-addiction so the recovering addict may need these prescriptions for the rest of his or her life. And big pharma also markets another drug to use in cases of opioid overdose, called Naloxone (Also called Narcan and Evzio). http://www.webmd.com/mental-health/addiction/drug-overdose-naloxone#1 A supply should be carried by thousands of first responders, doctors, and family members of addicts or those on opioid pain relievers. The cost of a dose just jumped from $575 a dose to about $4,500 according to Wired Magazine, and has a shelf life of 18-24 months. https://www.wired.com/2017/02/575-life-saving-drug-jump-4500-blame-perverse-system/  http://www.nchrc.org/programs-and-services/naloxone-101/

2.       Statement: "[Jailing drug addicts] would be like putting them in the state penitentiary for having diabetes." See the above item on "medication assisted treatment," by pharmaceuticals. And the statement is uttered by a pharmacist. Many groups see addiction as a disease, including the American Medical Association and the American Society of Addiction Medicine https://www.centeronaddiction.org/what-addiction/addiction-disease The addict is not responsible for his addiction, says this theory, as it is changes in the brain and DNA which create addiction. It's all body, and body is what doctors treat. Even psychiatrists think addiction, depression, schizophrenia etc. are all diseases, thus the terms "mental health" and "mental illness." even though there are no scientific tests for disorders such as "oppositional defiant disorder" "ADHD" "obsessive compulsive disorder" and so on to the tune of some 300 different so-called diseases catalogued in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used by psychiatrists to bill for insurance payments. There are tests for diabetes, but psychiatric "disorders" are simply voted on by psychiatrists from time to time, so that pharmaceutical companies can get busy and invent new pills. And thus we have speed given legally to children for not sitting still, the definition of autism expanded into "autism spectrum disorder" to scoop up millions more children and put them on expensive pharmaceuticals, and mental health given parity with physical health in the Affordable Care Act, to secure the funding for all this pharma. So the war on drugs has not been lost, it has been more clearly defined as a battle between pharmaceutical profits and the peace and security of American neighborhoods and families. And that is a battle we cannot lose.

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