MEDIA LIES DRIVE AN INCREASINGLY LETHAL OPIOID CRISIS
Well-behaved mouthpieces cowardly convey deadly absurdities while deaths mount
by Clark Miller
Published January 27, 2024
The daily lethal lies are insidious, unseen, requiring nor eliciting doubt or thought, accepted at face value, mindlessly. No less certainly “truth” than the established knowledge, doxa, that there exists something, “addiction“, that is a chronic health condition, a chronic disease. There is no questioning of that, no need, it goes without saying.
“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.
The thought of questioning those incontrovertible facts does not arise, why would anyone? Especially in times of crisis, why would anyone question Science itself? Science delivered to us competently, with integrity, intelligently, and benevolently by those qualified to do so, as in the COVID crisis.
You are assured that in a scientifically advanced society with a healthy democracy, like ours, the expert, authoritative science-based understandings we are provided are examined, verified, then explained to us by other types of experts, “science writers” and journalists capable of understanding the science, conveying the established knowledge to us via mass media, just as our democracy is intended to work.
It is a collaboration protecting the public safety and wellbeing, an entrusted public duty of America’s expert class and watchdog media.
Except . . . something went wrong along the way, got off track, so far off that the Science and established knowledge provided are not those things at all, instead lies and distortions constructed by those with the power and cultural capital to do so, creating false “knowledge” serving to protect their -not the collective – interests and their continued ability to fabricate as needed – fabricate doxa, the necessary, freely-constructed reality. Fabrications representing and driven by psychological forces including groupthink, delayed moral development, and pathological levels of diminished capacity for competence, research literacy, and critical thought.
The thoughtless (absent thought, without thought having been instrumental in their construction) fictions are pervasive, an unspoken consensus, so certainly established as truths as to be without need to cite or explain by use of evidence, are self-evident preamble, explicit or implicit in any information conveyed to a vulnerable public increasingly harmed by the opioid crisis.
The fictions predictably, completely infect and invade allowable public information ranging from scientific journal articles to pieces in popularizing media, to social media, to entertainment. Everywhere.
Like here, in a 7-paragraph marginally significant contribution to publicly disseminated information on the crisis –
The maker of an important addiction treatment medication has agreed to pay $102 million dollars to settle claims it stifled competition. Indivior makes Suboxone, which reduces drug cravings in people with opioid use disorder.
In the caption for the featured image for this instructive article from NPR, we are reminded that Suboxone is “an addiction treatment medication”.
That is, a medication prescribed by doctors that treats the medical condition, the disease, of addiction.
That cannot be doubted.
So, okay, there is the appearance that over time, with increasing provision by doctors – the qualified experts – of the proven cure for opioid use disorder (OUD), that America’s lethal opioid crisis has not reversed, or even moderated, instead deaths and related illness steadily mounting.
We know, from trusted, authoritative experts managing the opioid crisis, that there are explanations for the steadily mounting deaths while the miracle cure is increasingly provided to diseased brains.
A few years ago, for example, it was made clear – by expert consensus and uniform media confirmation – that disruptions tied to the COVID epidemic prevented the “important addiction treatment medication” from having its curative effects through the disruptions of that period, including diminished access to in-person participation in vital, supportive meetings of the religious subculture comprising an integral part of comprehensive, gold standard addiction treatment.
Continuation of the surging opioid related deaths, now fully two years past any of those disruptions, are also explainable, if we will only trust America’s top healthcare experts and what we read in the accounts of America’s watchdog media.
Back to the NPR piece,
New York Attorney General Letitia James released a statement saying Indivior “selfishly maneuvered to keep less expensive versions of a life-saving drug out of the hands of millions of Americans” as the opioid crisis grew.
That is unconscionable! And it is uplifting to have elected leaders with the intelligence, courage, and principled behavior to call out an injustice like that.
Where would we be now, if only that life-saving, gold standard drug had been in the hands of millions more?
Wait, actually? We know the answer to that! Because under Medicaid expansion, that’s just what happened, not just at low cost, but free! Opioid users greatly increased their use of the proven addiction treatment medication buprenorphine (aka Suboxone, “bupe”, or “subs” on the street) in states where it was freely, medically dispensed.
Okay, fair point – that highly correlated with that increased medical dispensing under Medicaid expansion of America’s gold standard “addiction treatment medicine” have been worsened outcomes in the lethal opioid crisis.
That is, more high-risk opioid use, more overdose, illness and deaths.
There must be explanations for that, it goes without saying. That cannot be doubted.
Alright, enough. Let’s get real, and grounded.
This is not about research or science, what you read, or about whatever the constructed experts lie to you about and their professional class of useful idiots dutifully convey.
This is about pathology in high, trusted places. Pathological levels of incompetence, of delayed moral development, of diminished capacity for research literacy, for intellectual courage, for ethical behavior, for critical thought.
This is about your culture, your sick institutions, the lethality of your esteemed and trusted authorities and sources of information.
You’ve seen it before. You see it every day.
Everywhere you look.
