IN MAINE TOO: OPIOID CRISIS CONTINUES TO WORSEN WITHOUT PANDEMIC STRESSORS AND WITH INCREASED PROVISION OF THE MEDICAL CURE -EXPERTS CELEBRATE SUCCESS
As in West Virginia, New Jersey, and elsewhere – predictably high-risk opioid use and overdose still surging post-abatement of the pandemic stressors fabricated as causes, while provision of the medical cure and other treatments expanded
by Clark Miller
Published July 17, 2022
Anomalously, freakishly – an opioid crisis headline in American media gets it half right:
National leaders cited Maine as a leader in responding to the opioid crisis during a state summit dedicated to the topic Monday, an accolade that came against the grim backdrop of rising overdose deaths.
Maine saw a 9 percent increase in overdose deaths in the first five months of 2022 compared with the same period last year, according to the state’s monthly overdose report, which showed three-quarters of those deaths involved fentanyl. It could foreshadow a new high after Maine saw over 600 people die from overdoses last year. U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show Maine was in the top 10 states for drug overdoses in 2020.
. . .
But national leaders say the state’s data-driven focus and efforts to provide multi-pronged support to people in recovery helped shape its own policies and could help other states tackle the issue.
“And that leadership, what you’re seeing and living every single day here in Maine, is what we will want to try to replicate all over the country,” said Rahul Gupta, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy under President Joe Biden.
In an interview, Gupta said he was specifically struck by Maine’s tracking of nonfatal and fatal overdoses. It demonstrated the need to revamp how the country tracks overdoses, something he called for in an article in late June. He also highlighted the state’s mobile recovery team and treatment for incarcerated people, as well as efforts to provide housing, childcare, jobs and food security support that helped shape his office’s drug control strategy, he said.
Indeed, Maine has significantly increased provision of the addictive, diverted, misused substitute opioids – primarily Suboxone in medication assisted treatment programs ( MAT) established as worsening the opioid crisis by serving as commodity and currency in economies of illicit street opioid use – beginning 2019, along with traditional addiction treatment services, the standard American “treatment” established as at best providing no benefit, predicting harm.
That celebrated multi-year “Expansion of MAT”, increased provision of the invalidated, sham treatment approaches is described here.
So the headline does at least provide a hint
of a significant problem underlying all the Expert/Media lies driving increasingly lethal substance use epidemics generated and worsened by American medical practice and traditional cronyism-system treatment.
Right.
“despite worsening crisis”
Okay, you’re right – Despite worsening crisis that continued to worsen while provision of American Medicine’s proven cure along with other traditional supports and “treatment” were increasingly available.
Better?
There’s more, you say? Why are you doing this? Okay, okay – Despite worsening crisis and while provision of American Medicine’s proven cure along with other traditional supports and “treatment” were increasingly available, the proven cure – a widely diverted and abused opioid – accessible by a phone call, or on the street, everywhere, essentially in unlimited supply.
Right. But, that’s why we have trusted experts and a watchdog media, to dig for facts, understanding, explanations, and assure that, above all, truth and the public health are protected. If there were not reasonable, reassuring explanations for why things are going the way they are and why $billions and billions in public healthcare funds should continue to be spent on these treatment approaches, we’d know, from the experts and from American media.
What? WHAT? Okay, okay – Despite worsening crisis and while provision of American Medicine’s proven cure along with other traditional supports and “treatment” were increasingly available, the proven cure – a widely diverted and abused opioid – accessible by a phone call, or on the street, everywhere, essentially in unlimited supply. And the “treatment” a criminal sham, cronyism system that has never provided benefit, instead predicts harm.
WHAT! ALRIGHT! Despite worsening crisis and while provision of American Medicine’s proven cure along with other traditional supports and “treatment” were increasingly available, the proven cure – a widely diverted and abused opioid – accessible by a phone call, or on the street, everywhere, essentially in unlimited supply. And the “treatment” a criminal sham, cronyism system that has never provided benefit, instead predicts harm. And despite those fabricated pandemic stressors – stressors that without evidence or logic became distracting rationalizations of a continuously worsening, more lethal opioid crisis the more diseased brains were administered the medical cure – despite THOSE bogus stressors dissipating, moderating, abating. And despite the fact that those Experts holding up as a model for continued use of $billions more in public healthcare funds the invalidated, lethal “treatment” approaches that for decades have been generating increasingly lethal opioid, alcohol, meth and other substance use epidemics – THOSE experts – are of the same Expert/Medical/Media class that spun evidence, fabricated lies, and allowed their cowardice and abdication of responsibility to truth, nonmaleficence, and the public good to generate an opioid crisis by promotion of contraindicated medical treatment for an entirely non-medical problem.
Right.
Fair point.
The accurate, credible, un-cowardly headline would read:
EXPERTS CELEBRATE CONTINUED USE OF $BILLIONS IN PUBLIC HEALTHCARE FUNDS FOR INVALIDATED TREATMENT APPROACHES ESTABLISHED AS FUELING INCREASINGLY LETHAL DRUG CRISES WHILE FABRICATED EXPLANATIONS FOR INEFFECTIVENESS DISAPPEAR POST-PANDEMIC
That’s the headline.
“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.
