HOW THEY KEEP LYING TO YOU ABOUT THE WORSENING OPIOID CRISIS
Desperate protection from what must be avoided at any cost – the unthinkable illumination of truths in a worsening, medical/media-fueled crisis – requires a persistent consensus of lies
by Clark Miller
Published December 9, 2024
From a recent, representative media account of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) large, $344 million randomized study of America’s expert gold standard treatments for high-risk opioid use and the crisis –
The prominent image of a naloxone unit accompanying the headline is a digital Freudian slip, as should be apparent. Or will be.
“Community Intervention”
Huh! So there was one intervention, a single selected gold standard treatment approach adopted by the intervention communities (or locales) in the study?
Ha. Funny. We know better. And lives are at stake over the distinction, as we’ll see.
Some casual readers, not questioning the careless headline, could come to believe the very next lie in that headline, that an intervention
“did not lower opioid deaths”
And it’s not just the Scripps News Service. No less authoritative sources than the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), the NIH, and medical media conveyed the same message.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. From the Scripps News account –
A research study mandated by the federal government to look at how carrying out evidence-based public health strategies could lower opioid-related deaths did not find a significant reduction in the communities that were examined, according to data published Sunday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
Launched in 2019, the National Institute of Health’s Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEALing) Communities Study was the largest addiction prevention and treatment implementation study conducted, according to the agency.
Researchers worked with coalitions in 67 communities across Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York and Ohio, which NIH said were four of the states hit hardest by the opioid crisis.
The community interventions included a focus on increasing opioid education and naloxone distribution, enhancing access to medication for opioid use disorder and safer opioid prescribing and dispensing, according to the study. There was also a series of communication campaigns to help reduce stigma and increase the demand for evidence-based practices, NIH said.
The communities were randomly assigned to receive the interventions or be studied as a control group.
However, the communities that received the interventions did not show a statistical difference in the overall rate of opioid-related deaths in comparison to those that didn’t, researchers said.
Okay, that’s right, there were two main interventions in the control communities.
1. Increased capacity for and provision of America’s expert gold standard substitute opioid (MAT, MOUD) dispensing to high-risk opioid users, and
2. Targeted distribution, training, and support for community, layperson use of the potentially fatal opioid overdose reversing drug naloxone (Narcan).
And it turns out that, indisputably, intervention 2. worked, worked remarkably, dramatically well, as can be affirmed by an online search and review of the many accounts of consistent, year-by-year increases in opioid OD reversals including in the NIH study communities and states.
That intervention, of highly targeted, community, intensive Narcan campaigns,
Did Impact Opioid-Related Overdose Death Rates Over Evaluation Period
indisputably, incontrovertibly, exposing the lie messaged consistently in official accounts of the study outcomes
Those reported outcomes are described in detail in recent posts here, here, and here including these states and locales –
Chicago – upcoming post
Maryland – upcoming post
For example,
The magnitudes of reported naloxone reversals in these locales, increasing year-by-year, literally leave no prevented opioid overdose deaths in the locations to possibly be accounted for by or attributed to other factors, factors like America’s gold standard MAT substitute opioid treatment, or rehab, or “addiction treatment”.
The prevented deaths are all accounted for by Narcan saves, accounted for many times over.
To dispute that requires supporting with evidence the argument that increasingly over recent years, thousands more each year of potentially fatal opioid ODs were not prevented in those years by successful, targeted provision of naloxone as described in the many locales.
There is no question or uncertainty
regarding how to understand the sudden, recent fatal opioid OD decrease, correlated with Narcan campaigns. The question is how to understand that the drops were so much smaller in magnitude, when over the same period of the naloxone campaigns, provision of expert, gold standard treatments in all locales was also increasing.
Here are the answers from our esteemed public health, medical, and addictions experts, as conveyed in the Scripps News account we started with –
The research group believes the COVID-19 pandemic, which hit right after the study began, and the increased presence of fentanyl in the illicit drug market impacted the effectiveness of the interventions — both of which were factors that could not have been predicted.
Now that’s interesting, in multiple ways.
Because this NIH $344 million study is a randomized design.
Meaning, of course, that the control communities and intervention communities were selected randomly precisely in order to prevent counfounding, differential effects on outcomes by factors like the COVID history or whatever new iteration of potent opioid or opiod drug combinations were in the economies of high-risk use. That’s the point of randomization, and that bizarre, futile, impaired rationalization is something we would expect astute undergraduate students in a science program to be able to identify and dismantle, perhaps as an assignment or class project. It is easily imagined, coming from an apt student, or anyone actually, with the capacity for critical thought:
So, we reviewed this study and found that explanations for lack of beneficial effects due to the MOUD medical opioid treatment approach were not valid because the control and intervention communities were randomized. There was no evidence provided suggesting that compared to control communities, the intervention communities were differentially more impacted by COVID effects or by the drug supply, those effects expected to affect intervention and control communities in similar ways due to randomization.
I do understand that this is tedious, and that it is necessary. We are examining the behaviors, diminished capacities, and traits of members of America’s expert class and media, traits that are driving increasingly lethal substance use, mental health, and other public health crises.
And there’s more, it’s this.
We know exactly why, despite the thousands of potentially fatal opioid overdoses that were being reversed, prevented by community naloxone saves in control communities, and despite increased provision of the “proven”, gold standard expert approaches, there was overall, on balance, no reduction in opioid overdose deaths.
Those reversals are happening in desperate, highly targeted, and successful campaigns precisely because opioid high-risk use continues to persistently increase, making the campaigns necessary as a new form of harm reduction, reducing established harm of expert, gold standard treatments driving substance use epidemics. The same surging naloxone reversals that are thankfully saving lives and reducing deaths are hiding mounting nonfatal overdoses (= high-risk opioid use) as the reversals increasingly occur in community settings where they are not reported, are hidden.
It turns out, as explained and established here in multiple posts, that precisely as in the avoidable – avoidable if not for the cowardice and gross incompetence of American Media – generation of the opioid crisis as we know it enabled by fabrications by America’s medical/research/media collusion, there has never, not ever, been a legitimate body of research evidence to confidently establish, let alone strongly support, the use of substitute opioids (bupe or methadone) as treatments or as beneficial for opioid dependence.
Instead, all lines of diverse evidence point to what should be obvious – the runaway dispensing of opioids that are routinely used with other, illicit opioids (methadone), and/or serve as consumable, commodity and currency in street economies of illicit high-risk opioid use (bupe) have in fact fueled the lethal epidemic.
The most potent ways in which the “miracle” doctor-dispensed pills and other magic potions predict failure is to instill in compulsive substance users the belief that passive interventions to adjust brain chemistry are “treatments”, are addressing a generic neurobiological block or deficit or disease of the brain that explains addiction, instead lethally instilling passivity, dependence and lies, and robbing compulsive substance users of the necessary factor established as central to stopping problem use, self-efficacy, the shift to belief in one’s own competence, autonomy, strength, and effective use of resources with inner psychological change to do away with the compulsion to escape distressing inner states by use of chemicals.
It could and should suffice to simply acknowledge the obvious – that over decades of increasing provision of expert gold standard cures to diseased brains, more and more high-risk use and deaths have occurred. Effective treatments and public health responses are not supposed to have those outcomes.
And the obvious point made here, that the only explanation for lack of any differences in opioid overdose deaths between intervention and control communities in the massive NIH study – despite those deaths undeniably reduced, dramatically, by naloxone saves and despite increases in provision of those gold standard, “proven” cures – is the obvious, that the naloxone saves were not enough to keep up with the increased overdose deaths predictably caused by those expert treatments.
Just one more point – here is the final paragraph from the Scripps News piece –
Despite the lackluster results of the study, its director Dr. Redonna Chandler said it was “an incredible feat for implementation science” and showed communities can effectively implement evidence-based practices when given the tools.
We owe it to Americans trapped in American Medicine’s increasingly lethal substance use crises to correct those implicit and explicit lies. Let’s do that.
Despite the lethal results of the study, its director Dr. Redonna Chandler claimed it was “an incredible feat for implementation science” regarding the successful, dramatic, life-saving naloxone campaigns that moderated continuously worsening high-risk opioid use and fatal overdoses driven by the medical MOUD dispensing of substitute opioid drugs.
There.
