AMERICA’S LEADERS AND EXPERTS TAKE ON THE OPIOID CRISIS
Levels of clinical incompetence, ethical cowardice, and diminished capacity for critical thought driving policy and practice are lethal and pervasive
by Clark Miller
Published April 11, 2025
A confounding mystery, America’s opioid crisis has persistently worsened over decades, rare signs of deviation from that trend completely unexpected and dumfounding.
Even periodic downturns in fatal overdoses defeat understanding, instead come with the one assurance that top experts and media can embrace – that it’s just too uncertain, too early to draw any conclusions, to understand the “why” that might point to a way out, at least a way forward.
As it turns out the answer to that “why” is entirely clear, is just the wrong answer, is an answer that indicts trusted healthcare and media institutions and authorities as recklessly, cluelessly driving the worsening epicemic and mounting deaths.
Meanwhile, high risk opioid use continuously mounts, indicated by valid measures like incidence of opioid injection-related infectious disease and by desperate, intense naloxone campaigns necessary to moderate and mitigate mounting high risk use with increasing emergency revivals to forestall lethal overdoses, the emergency death preventions skillfully distorted as evidence of gains against underlying causes of a worsening crisis.
In North Carolina, for example, opioid overdose emergency department (ED) visits are expected to set another record high for 2023, from this NPR report.
And that concerning trend continued not for lack of distribution of public healthcare funds to provide treatments.
That included $10 million from North Carolina over two years to the Hope Alive church headed by this man, senior pastor Ronald Barnes.
The church was headquartered in a strip mall, and Barnes, it was later determined, has a criminal history involving embezzlement.
The Hope Alive program is described as a “faith-based” rehab form of treatment, a very common, universally available and effective, per top experts, form of “gold standard” addiction treatment in America – and a thing that does not exist. There is no treatment, at all, for compulsive substance use or any other behavioral health condition that is in any sense “faith-based”. Like the bizarre, counter-therapeutic prescriptions of the religious subculture Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), any such programming is established as predicting continuation or return to problem substance use at rates of 90 to 95 percent failure.
The lethal fiction of benefit provided by AA involvement for the complex psychological, social, and behavioral conditions driving compulsive problem substance use has been dispelled for decades, was never supported by a body of evidence or held to be true by competent professionals in the field.
And? As enabled by America’s working consensus of public health experts, institutions, courts, regulators, leaders, and public impressions formed by major media, the established as counter-therapeutic principles and prescriptions of the AA religious subculture are protected by construction as a form of “treatment”, in fact forming the central core of American gold standard treatment for addiction essentially universally in treatment programs including publicly funded programs.
That’s not quite all, though. You live in a country and culture in which individuals routinely are forced – in violation of constitutional protections, on threat of legal penalties, and by judges in effect making clinical decisions for choice of treatment for life-threatening conditions – to engage in the harm-predicting practices of that religious subculture established as predicting the 90 to 95 percent fail rates.
Even in a culture desensitized and habituated by numbing levels of pathological institutional, “justice”, political, and media systems of power, that core approach over decades of worsening substance use crises under expert class guidance stands out as characterizing a uniquely degraded, primitive culture.
Certainly there must be stronger signs of prospects for effective treatment in North Carolina.
From the NPR report –
Meanwhile, another kind of treatment in development could stop a fentanyl overdose before it even happens.
Chapel Hill-based Cessation Therapeutics is working on a monoclonal antibody designed specifically to prevent a fentanyl overdose. Company chief scientific officer Andy Barrett said that unlike naloxone, this treatment aims to attack fentanyl in the blood stream before it even gets to the brain.
“The brain is where it produces its toxic effects, meaning it produces its profound respiratory depression that can lead to death,” Barrett said. “That’s also where it produces its pleasurable or euphoric effects in the brain. So we stop it before it ever gets to the brain and sequester it in the bloodstream to prevent its harmful effects.” . . .
Many doctors say this kind of treatment would help but see it less as a silver bullet and more as another good tool in the fight. Big picture, they say society still needs to shift from seeing substance use disorder as a character flaw and more for the disease it is.
That makes total sense, doesn’t it?
It does, right? especially coming from experts?
Because for someone using that medication and unable to get the desperately needed effects they had always gotten from fentanyl, it’s not like they would switch back to heroin, or to carfentnil, or to any other of the street drugs or combinations that could provide the relief they desperately need. And they would keep taking the medication, wouldn’t they? Just the way they keep taking the Suboxone that has cured so many of problem opioid use?
See how I did that, how annoyingly easy it was? How pathologically imbecilic the very concept is?
But wait, “Many doctors say this kind of treatment would help . . .”
We can’t discount that, from America’s designated experts on substance abuse, can we?
On the other hand, it was Many, many, many doctors, driven by their impairing deficits in intellect and ethical judgment who deferred to the clinical and safety advice of pill salesmen – of pill salesmen – to freely distribute opioids for all pain, with all longstanding evidence and indications establishing them as neither safe or effective.
That’s what generated the opioid crisis, more lethal each year – those many, many, many doctors. Remember?
At least America’s experts are on track with viewing compulsive substance use as a disease.
They are, right? A disease of the brain?
That’s why their proven, life-saving, addiction treatment medications like buprenorphine, administered to more and more diseased brains over the years and decades, have turned the opioid crisis around, saving so many lives.
That’s true, isn’t it? That lives are being saved by increasing use of the proven medications?
No, unfortunately, it’s a lie. A really big, dumb, lethal lie.
A lie so dumb and transparent that even the $350 million National Institutes of Health (NIH) study designed to cover and protect it could not, despite an army of useful idiots providing media damage control, instead revealed to reinforce the established role of expert, gold standard medical approaches as fueling the worsening crisis.
So I guess that’s why, in North Carolina, the expert plan to connect opioid overdosers to free buprenorphine – the street currency for fentanyl and other high-risk, illicit drugs – predictably led to more, instead of less, high risk use and overdose.
Now, with more expert guidance, North Carolina will expand Medicaid accessibility, so that more of the prescribed opioids fueling the crisis will be freely available to high-risk opioid users. We know how that worked out from analyses of patterns in Medicaid expansion states.
Predictably, and not well. Lethally.
It’s important to affirm, as reported widely, that a primary and successful desired outcome of Medicaid expansion has been to increase enrollment of individuals trapped in compulsive opioid use and the crisis on the rationale that state insurance paying for increased access to America’s gold standard, proven treatments for opioid use disorder (OUD) including medications for OUD (MOUD) would benefit them and predict gains against the lethal crisis.
Back to more expert medical advice, from the NPR piece.
Still, Hardenbergh also has some criticisms for harm reduction advocates who don’t leave any room for a 12-step program or treatments that incorporate faith or spiritual therapy. She said not many people mention medication assisted treatment and a spiritual-based program in the same breath.
“If we’re going to really see long-term disease remission, we need to stay open minded to all the things that work,” Hardenbergh said.
“to all the things that work”
All of the proven, gold standard treatments that experts providing advice for management of the opioid crisis know are effective. That are helping.
To reground in the real world of evidence and legitimate healthcare practice, use of the words “faith” or “spiritual” coupled with “therapy” or “treatment” – in the context of an increasingly lethal epidemic driven by compulsive behaviors and associated underlying individualized, complex, trauma-related, psychological and psychosocial forces – is an expression of impairing deficits and of reckless disregard for human life.
Ultimately, the assurance of relief from a magical higher power is little different from and not much more pathological than the assurance of freedom from chronic pain, an entirely non-medical condition, by use of a pill, or freedom from the entirely non-medical condition of compulsive substance use by use of a miracle potion.
It is the lethal, criminal pathology of America’s ruling and expert classes.
And back in North Carolina, with all the expert guidance and “all the things that work”, how are things going with the opioid crisis?
Here’s another measure, the trend in opioid overdose emergency department (ED) visits for “commonly prescribed opioids”, that is, for opioids dispensed by medical experts, by your doctor, decades now into the lethal crisis.
Let’s extract those values for doctor-prescribed opioids, to look for any trends. The way they are originally presented could unintentionally instill the impression, nothing to see here!
That almost looks like an increasing trend, in any case clearly is not a decrease over time in ED visits related to doctor-prescribed opioids, decades into the crisis.
America’s expert class gave you the opioid crisis, each and every prescription signed by a licensed medical professional.
They gave you a population poisoned by SSRIs.
They created and mismanaged a COVID epidemic, then lied about the virus coming from nature.
You thought they’ve been telling you the truth about their treatments for the opioid crisis they created?
