THE SOOTHING, LETHAL LIES OF AMERICA’S PUBLIC HEALTH/ACADEMIA/MEDIA COLLUSION
Desperate, intensive campaigns of emergency revivals necessary to reduce fatal opioid overdose trends are celebrated as progress while high-risk opioid use persistently worsens
by Clark Miller
Published January 9, 2026
The news from one of America’s University research centers in collaboration with the state of Virginia’s public health system could hardly be more encouraging. And a relief.
The enormous costs of the opioid crisis can be reversed, drastically reduced by simply “scaling up the care” that we know is already working, the “research-backed opioid care”.
From Virginia Commonwealth University’s (VCU) “Opioid Cost Data Tool” webpage –
The VCU release expanded on the benefits that will be realized with the scaling up of “Lifesaving Opioid Care”, explaining how families and the economy in general will benefit.
Drug overdoses have been Virginia’s leading cause of unnatural deaths since 2013, and new data from Virginia Commonwealth University is highlighting the high cost in human and economic terms.
This month, VCU’s Center on Society and Health partnered with the Virginia Department of Health to release a third round of data via the updated Virginia Opioid Cost Data Tool, which now provides visual, geographic insights into opioid-related deaths.
Among takeaways from the newly analyzed 2023 data:
- 70% of drug-related deaths in Virginia were preventable in 2023, and evidence-based opioid care could help prevent more.
- Harm reduction centers across the state reversed as many as 2,085 overdoses.
- Evidence-based opioid care could save Virginia communities $5.2 billion, up from $3.5 billion in 2021.
Experts emphasize that these opioid overdose statistics demonstrate both the progress of harm reduction and the continued urgency of investing in evidence-based solutions to save lives and reduce economic losses.
“We know evidence-based opioid care saves lives and is worth the investment,” said Derek Chapman, Ph.D., director of the Center on Society and Health and a professor at VCU’s School of Public Health. “In 2023, more overdoses were reversed than the number of fatal overdoses that year, thanks to comprehensive harm reduction efforts. And we need to keep more people alive and help them live well, so they have the chance to recover through any path that is right for them.”
[emphasis added]
Media have picked up on the excitement. Here’s a CBS affiliate’s headline expressing the appropriate, necessary messaging.
Do you see now?
Do you see?
Experts, with their Research, have determined that we can quickly reverse and start to end this painful, costly opioid crisis, if we are willing to invest more public healthcare funds in “Recovery”, in “evidence-based opioid care”, known to dramatically reduce deaths due to opioid overdose, and thereby to result in more high-risk opioid users accessing the “recovery” and “treatment” parts that lead them to become gainfully employed and productive, avoid assocated health costs, and resume their roles as effective, protective parents to their kids.
With $5.2 billion to recoup, how much in public funds are you going to deprive those experts of that could be invested in their known-to-be-effective evidence-based recovery care?
It’s just that …
That none of that – none – is remotely grounded in any meaningful way in reality, in evidence, in the real forces driving a worsening, expert-driven epidemic.
It is, literally, pathologically deceptive and lethally ungrounded.
Let’s consider.
When VCU and Virginia’s Dept. of Health report that,“In 2023, more overdoses were reversed than the number of fatal overdoses that year, thanks to comprehensive harm reduction efforts”, they are referring, of course, to the dramatic, successful effects in reducing opioid overdose deaths by intensive campaigns to effectively distribute the potentially fatal OD reversing drug naloxone (Narcan). That rescue drug (and similar formulations) is the only intervention that reverses, prevents, an otherwise fatal opioid overdose. In fact, in Virginia (in selected locales where naloxone campaigns occurred and not others) and other U.S. locales, pre-pandemic fatal opioid ODs had already been dramatically reduced due to those successful naloxone campaigns.
Here’s some critical, fabrication-correcting information left out of VCU’s promotional materials.
As elsewhere and everywhere, consistently, the evidence is direct and unassailable, without need for statistical analysis or hypothesis testing: every credible report of a naloxone unit used to reverse a potentially fatal opioid overdose is, on its face, a life saved, an opioid crisis death prevented.
And across diverse locations and U.S. states, consistently, the magnitude of increases of those saves, year-to-year – even when estimates of saves are reduced by half or more to account for individuals who experience multiple instances of reversals – more than account for reductions in opioid overdose deaths. See, for example, here, and the posts linked to at that source for 23 various, diverse U.S. locales.
That leaves no reduced deaths to be attributed to the expert “treatments” including opioid crisis medical cures that are established as driving a worsening epidemic and require protective lies fabricated by compromised “experts” and media servants to distract attention from their lethality.
This is, the evidence leaves no support to attribute beneficial effects to VCU’s “evidence-based solutions” or “evidence-based opioid care” other than the incontrovertibly established effects of those emergency naloxone reversals.
That brings us to the New Opioid Crisis,
generated by lethal failure of the “Research-Baked Opioid Care” that is going to save untold lives and $billions once “scaled up”.
Again, the context is that now and increasingly, associated with intensive, widespread, successful naloxone campaigns that have saturated communities with rescue units, in the hands of peer high-risk users, passers-by, laypersons, and others more proximate to overdoses, serial saves are becoming more and more common, a way of life for high-risk users. That news has slipped into major media reports, here for example and here, its import only to be buried to protect against the unallowable disruptions and threats posed by truths revealed.
And for context: the truth that naloxone campaigns are established as the only factor and as fully accounting for all recent drops in opioid overdose deaths, no other factors supported by evidence as significantly contributing.
And the truth that the desperate need for those emergency campaigns has arisen precisely due to the lethal failure of American experts’ gold standard medical treatments and failure of nonmedical “addiction treatment” to reduce high-risk opioid use, persistently increasing while naloxone campaigns reduce fatal outcomes of that high-risk use.
The New Opioid Crisis, fully arrived and largely hidden until described here and here, is driven by the increasingly impaired functioning of overdosing opioid users due to cumulative effects of hypoxia (brain oxygen deprivation) with each naloxone reversal, with predictable effects in their capacity to avoid return to high-risk opioid use.
While expert treatments generate harm, the sole, emergency moderator of the lethality of those failed systems, naloxone, ultimately acts to render those serially “saved” less and less capable of engaging in actual evidence-based treatments, more and more vulnerable to impulsive, compulsive, high-risk substance use.
In plain language and as increasingly described for American communities, (here, here, and here for example) the desperately needed, intensive, successful campaigns that have flooded locales with naloxone are having foreboding collateral effects. Rather than – as for high-risk users diagnosed with HIBI – being hospitalized, placed in a care facility, or incapacitated, opioid overdose survivors are being revived to walk away, access opioids again, overdose and be revived again.
In hard-hit Virginia for a population desperate for relief and hope, soothing, lethal lies from trusted institutions.
