MEDIA OPIOID CRISIS LIES ARE INCREASINGLY LETHAL
While opioid high-risk use and deaths predictably mount, media reports stick with the lethal lies that generated and perpetuate the crisis
by Clark Miller
Published April 2, 2023
It’s as if humans have become no longer capable of learning or thought.
The humans controlling things in any case. Or are that effectively contained by the AI managing their matrix.
As if dying America has signed over legal guardianship and power of attorney to corporate media, now making end-of-life decisions for grateful consumers terrified by dissent or even choice, American Medicine glad to provide the induced relief of hospice care. That business seems to be booming.
The programming messaging is consistent, unwavering.
“addiction medications”
There are addiction medications, of course. That goes without saying. Medications that treat addiction.
How could that be doubted?
More of those life-saving medications are being prescribed, and just in time! Because anyone paying attention knows that America’s decades-long increasingly lethal opioid crisis is out of control, has never over those decades been slowed. But certainly now it will, because the buprenorphine being increasingly dispensed is effective, it treats opioid addiction, as we will see from this helpful report. We know it will begin now to reverse and end the opioid crisis because there is a unified consensus of America’s top experts – reinforced almost daily in media reports like this one – to reassure us that “bupe” works, is established by evidence as the “fix”, for opioid addiction, the “gold standard” for treatment, a “proven” medication to save lives.
So, there can be no doubt – because of what we can learn from this report and all others on the same topic – that the opioid crisis will turn around, be moderated and defeated, as more and more lives are saved.
That’s right, isn’t it?
Of course we must remember that even though those medications were administered to the diseased brains increasingly over past years, and decades, circumstances conspired against American Medicine to interfere with the beneficial effects – somehow – so that overdoses, illness, and deaths attributable to high-risk opioid use have dramatically surged anyway, persistently. Even though “The number of U.S. health care providers certified to prescribe buprenorphine more than doubled in the past four years”. Otherwise, without those pandemic and other effects somehow blocking the effects of the anti-addiction medications, it is certain based on what we know from American health experts and media that the opioid crisis would be under control by now.
Or at least slowed?
That must be true, mustn’t it?
Of course now that COVID interruptions and disruptions have dissipated, for a year, the fabricated, COVID-related stressors gone and invalidated, there must be other factors to explain why increasing provision of the medical anti-addiction cures are associated with record-level surges in opioid related illness, overdose, and deaths. It’s inconceivable that American medicine and media would not have cogent explanations for that.
Okay, that’s enough. You get it. Or you don’t.
But never mind, let’s take a look at the helpful and reassuring news report –
Buprenorphine is an opioid that pharmacies most often sell as a tablet or a film that both dissolve under the tongue. It does not cause the same kind of high as other opioid drugs do, but it can prevent the debilitating withdrawal effects experienced with those drugs. Without that help, many people relapse into risky drug use.
Duh. Everybody knows that! It’s common knowledge.
So commonly known, so universally accepted as truth, so immune to examination, that it is essentially never understood for what it actually represents – really dumb and lethal lies, of the type that generated and perpetuate the lethal crisis.
There are bodies of evidence on the course and nature of relapse, have been for decades, and it doesn’t work like that.
Relapse to problem illicit use over the period of actual withdrawal – a couple of days or so of intense discomfort – is rare. That’s because typically users avoid it (for example by “bridging” with use of illicit Suboxone, one of the most easily obtainable opioids on the street) so they never get to the point of severe discomfort, instead make it through until they can get back on “real dope”.
Users know what going through withdrawal is like, have been dopesick multiple or many times, know that it’s uncomfortable and not lethal, make it through if they have some reason or are compelled to attempt to quit.
With or without addiction medication, they nearly always return to problem compulsive use (“relapse”), – not in the middle of the couple days of intense withdrawl but later, days, weeks, months or years later – because neither addiction medicine nor addiction treatment provide benefit, instead predict relapse.
Relapse predictably occurs for multiple reasons, most basically because effective, evidence-based treatments available for decades are not being provided. Relapse predictably occurs weeks, months, years after an attempt to stop, when a stressor – internal or external – overwhelms ability to cope, that ability never developed in the absence of real treatment that is subverted and displaced by ineffective medical fixes that rob users of, are barriers to, the key changes and developed strengths that are key to success.
“Without that help, many people relapse into risky drug use.”
With that help, medically provided to opioid users increasingly – provided to more and more users consistently and easily available in any case on the street for any user wanting to become free of opioid dependence and risk of death by simply taking a dose of the miracle cure each day – over past years and decades and established as fueling illicit economies of high-risk opioid use, America’s opioid epidemic has become more and more lethal.
Relapse is predictable because there is no treatment system in America, no conceptualization of treatment and prevention and no workforce to provide that treatment to address the actual causes of compulsive substance use: the retained inner sources of emotional pain and distress, deficits in self-regulation, thinking distortions, other effects almost always stemming from adverse experiences early in life. Those vulnerabilities predictably triggered through life by circumstances and – without having been addressed by use of the indicated, evidence-based treatment for problem substance use, psychotherapy – generating overpowering need to escape that pain, discomfort by some means.
The problem user knows the means, knows how to get it, knows no other escape, never having been provided the means to self-manage and regulate, never having been helped to rework the inner psychic material driving the vulnerability.
The Suboxone that, used as prescribed, dulls discomfort and holds off withdrawal symptoms doesn’t manage that pain, but does become currency for pills or heroin, now fentanyl that does – real dope for real pain.
A Suboxone patient interviewed for the news piece –
Purk knows Suboxone is not a miracle cure. She has taken the medication for years, and twice relapsed into misusing pain pills. But she has avoided a relapse since spring, and she said the medication helps.
“the medication helps”
helps to . . . avoid relapse?
to . . .
