If someone wanted to kill 300,000 Americans
and get away with it, they could not have accomplished it more effectively than
our government has accomplished it with the opioid epidemic.
If someone— let's say good old Uncle
Sam—wanted to kill 300,000 Americans, they would go about it as detailed in
this step-by-step guide. This also just so happens to be precisely how
our government did go about it.
Step 1 – In 1996, Uncle Sam would award a 17-year government patent
monopoly to Purdue Pharma to be the exclusive supplier of OxyContin,
an addictive and potentially deadly opioid painkiller. This would ensure that they had a massive
multi-billion-dollar profit incentive to get as many people addicted as
possible without any generic competition to keep this profit motive in check.
Step 2 – To further fuel the use of OxyContin,
Uncle Sam would cover the cost of it through Medicaid and Social Security
Disability Insurance (SSDI). This
would ensure that there were billions of dollars available to fund the purchase
of massive quantities of the addictive and potentially deadly substance.
Step 3- For further assurance more people
become dependent on opioids, Uncle Sam would enact growth-retardant public
policies such as mountains of regulation and exorbitant taxation,
exacerbating the link between depression, poverty, and opioid
dependence.
Step 4 – Uncle Sam would make pain the
“fifth vital sign” and financially penalize any hospital that got poor
reviews or ratings for not adequately treating pain, encouraging hospitals
to hand out opioids like candy.
Step 5 – Uncle Sam would ban medical
marijuana, depriving those in pain of a viable non-opioid alternative.
Step 6 – Uncle Sam would allow doctors
to be sued for medical malpractice for not adequately treating pain, ensuring
they prescribed even more opioids.
Step 7 – Uncle Sam would then move many
opioid painkillers to Schedule 2, which would prohibit refills. This would
ensure that doctors prescribed a 30-day supply for patients that needed a
3-days’ supply, just to “keep the patient from having to come back to get a
new prescription if they need it.”
Step 8 – Uncle Sam would then allow the profit motive of the
patent monopoly, the free
money of Medicaid and SSDI, the “fifth vital sign,” and the fear of being sued
for medical malpractice to continue to fuel an increase in OxyContin
prescriptions until the year 2010, leaving many millions of Americans addicted
to opioids.
After having created a sufficiently massive
pool of addicted individuals, it would then be time to turn the “prescription
epidemic” into an “overdose epidemic” and drive the death rate up into the
stratosphere.
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