“I MEAN IT’S CRAZY, IT’S UNFORTUNATE, AND WE HAVE NOTICED MORE CALLERS IDENTIFYING FENTANYL AS THEIR DRUG OF CHOICE”
Fentanyl gives the lie to American Medicine’s cure for American Medicine’s opioid crisis
by Clark Miller
Published May 9, 2022
In Tennessee –
“We’ve had a spike over these past couple of years where we were averaging about a thousand calls a month, we are now averaging double,” said Jackie Rodriguez, the REDLINE and Clearinghouse Coordinator.
Rodriguez says the increase could be linked to more people knowing about the REDLINE and the help they can receive, but most of it comes from a big boom in deadly drugs.
“Also due to the illicit drugs out there. Fentanyl is now being laced in a lot of drugs so I think that’s also part of it,” explained Rodriguez.
“You know, you want to be able to trust that what your getting, even if it is illicit, is what you know it is. So, fentanyl being laced, I mean it’s crazy, it’s unfortunate, and we have noticed more callers identifying fentanyl as their drug of choice,” Rodriguez said.
But not just in Tennessee,
actually everywhere these days. These post-pandemic days with dissipated stressors, near-normalcy, access to care, social reconnection, not isolation. Isolation that was fabricated without evidence as a necessary explanation for continuously surging opioid deaths before, during, now after the COVID health crisis. But that’s another story.
Fentanyl used as a drug of choice, sought after, or administered as added to other drugs as a known risk has been understood on the street and in media reports for years now.
As described in this recent post –
Fentanyl, in news headlines every day,
could easily be imagined to be perceived and understood by American consumers of American Media as much more than a psychoactive chemical powder, instead as some threatening thing, some force, with agency, malevolent intent, a terrorist organization, a foreign enemy.
Because, clearly, fentanyl is Harming America, is causing, is the explanation for something that wasn’t supposed to happen. Fentanyl is causing sustained, unrelenting – pre-pandemic, during, now post-pandemic – multiplying overdoses, more and more deaths. Its victims, as typically portrayed, are passive, uninvolved, inexplicably found to have had fentanyl enter their bloodstreams, with tragic effects. By some media accounts, the overdose victims have been poisoned, but by whom and why is not clear. By the suppliers of illicit drugs whose income depends on living consumers?
We have known for years now that fentanyl is desired, sought out and used on the street, or used by opioid users having been added to other opioids, at known risk of that presence.
The direct evidence for the intentional use and role of fentanyl in street economies of opioid use is longstanding and described, for example, here.
And as described in this August, 2020 report from San Francisco –
Many users are all-too aware of the dangers of fentanyl. KTVU visited a community of people along Willow Street on the edge of the Tenderloin over several days. They make sure someone is around to administer Narcan whenever they use fentanyl.
“I overdosed after taking two hits, two puffs off of tin foil and I was out,” said Carmen Sierra.
She said she was brought back from the brink of death three times by her friends and has saved dozens of other users herself.
“So many of my friends that live across the country have no access to this stuff, which makes their use 100 times more dangerous,” she said.
Makes their use more dangerous, she said.
Their use of fentanyl.
And described here in an April 26, 2022 ABC News piece –
Dr. Stephen Loyd, also developed an opioid addiction, but is currently in recovery. He runs a recovery center in Nashville, and told ABC News that his facility loses several patients a week due to fentanyl.
“There are not weeks that go by that we don’t,” he told ABC News.
Loyd said there is a direct link between the rise of OxyContin prescriptions in the 1990s and 2000s and the current fentanyl crisis in the country.
“These folks that are coming in with fentanyl, 98% of them got started with pain pills,” he said.
That is to say, fentanyl is the new heroin.
But that’s not the way it’s being portrayed in American media accounts, is it?
In media accounts, it’s not even fathomable, it’s “CRAZY”, inexplicable, unavoidable, unpreventable, unmanageable, untreatable, a maleficent poisoning by someone, or something.
Untreatable, in any case, by American Medicine’s lethal cures.
From the recent post –
Fentanyl is the new heroin.
That’s a big problem and explains the desperately constructed cover stories.
Because how could that be? When we know –
have it on authority of America’s top, trusted medical and public health experts with consistent assurances in American Media – that there is a widely available cure for opioid dependence that works really well, a proven medical cure that eliminates the risk of using dangerous opioids on the street, eliminates high-risk use.
Provision of that cure, medication assisted treatment (MAT) with the substitute opioids methadone and Suboxone, has increased steadily over past decades and as described in this recent post is widely available on the street, no prescription needed. The inexpensive, DIY street form, available everywhere, is used as an effective cure for problem opioid use, just as it would be if prescribed by a medical professional, we are assured by America’s addiction treatment and public health experts.
So that is a problem, isn’t it? Because the fentanyl phenomenon, representing continuously elevating levels of high-risk illicit opioid use – with daily risk of death – then becomes direct invalidation of MAT. Treatment or no, if you can procure illicit opioids, you can find Suboxone, “subs” on the street too. It’s everywhere. If MAT, available to every opioid user, prescribed or DIY, works to cure high-risk opioid use, – just by using it daily as a proven medication – to offer users escape from compulsion to regularly risk death by use of street opioids including fentanyl, then the relentlessly mounting, lethal fentanyl phenomenon gives the lie to MAT.
Fentanyl exposes the established lethal lie of MAT.
No wonder they have to keep making this stuff up! Who can blame them? There’s just too much at stake.
“Crisis is a necessary condition for a questioning of doxa, but is not in itself a sufficient condition for the production of a critical discourse.”
– Pierre Bourdieu Outline of a Theory of Practice (1972)
In Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice, heterodoxy is dissent, challenge to what “goes without saying” – the accepted, constructed doxa, “knowledge”, reality, that goes without saying precisely because it “comes without saying”, without real scrutiny, untested, unquestioned. The function of doxa is not knowledge or truth or promotion of the collective good, but to protect and serve the interests of those with the power, the cultural capital, to create it.
