This too, shall pass… as all crises do.
Big Pharma (once again, Purdue—though they are by no means the only purveyors of pain pills) just recently announced they are officially backing off on opioid production. I react to this as if it was a positive move, though by no means am I ready to suggest backslapping and cigars. Medical professionals are now conceding pain is an unhappy byproduct of illness and injury. We need to accept it and look for alternative methods of relief. In the eighties and nineties, the position taken was that pain, responsibly managed, could be eradicated. This is noble in thought, faulty in practice. This approach, in hindsight, comes across as modern medicine’s concession to not being able to eliminate death. If we can’t keep you alive forever, we can at least triumph over physical pain. Right-hearted, wrong-headed. On a bad day, this approach can be viewed as arrogant and naïve. On a good day, it reveals profound compassion and care. Humans aren’t as bad as I’d have you believe.
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Opiates are the only substance that offer salvation and slavery in equal parts. A substance with the potential to swap one manner of pain for another. They offer the promise of relief from physical suffering, in exchange for the opportunity to exact emotional and mental agony.
Opiates are a substance that saves lives, providing food and shelter for countless millions born and raised in primitive agrarian societies. It can be argued the development of opioids came about only to keep Afghani peasants off the payroll. But, Big Pharma cannot preserve the effect and erase the pleasure, and therefore cannot insure the safety of all exposed to it from its most virulent side effect. Like it or not, opiates and all its imitators cannot be separated from its true self by mankind’s intervention or manipulation. It is a force of nature.
Human beings, try as we might, cannot conquer nature. We cannot conquer our own nature. People like to get fucked up, and will continue to do so no matter how hard we try to prevent it. While most of us do so in moderation, there will always be a percentage of us that, for whatever reason, will not have the capability to moderate. Mother Nature will do what She’s always done: thin the herd. Monuments will crumble. Levies will break. Wells will run dry. Addicts and alcoholics will find an early grave. This we will never control. This we can never control, try as we might.
But try, we do. Try and try and try, as well we should.
In our era, human response to these natures have been divided between combat and compassion. Education and eradication. Rehab or remand. When it comes to junkies and opioid addicts our society finds itself in a conundrum. With a life expectancy of ten years from the first taste of that sweet milk o’ the poppy, and a recidivism rate of over 80% for opiate/opioid addicts within 90 days of leaving rehab, we point to treatment as our best weapon in this war, yet mutter under our breath “Why bother?” Understandable. The casualty rate of this addiction is something only the purveyors of tobacco and booze would find acceptable. But panic serves no one.
The Press wants you to see a dealer on every corner, an irresponsible physician in every clinic, a Big Pharma executive who owns a crematory. The Press wants you to see a junkie in every house. They want to put an Opioid boogeyman under your bed. The rationale for such is their proclaimed duty to increase public awareness. How does “Hillbilly Heroin” and “One Nation, Overdosed” serve to elevate awareness? Sensationalism is not service. It is distraction, not information. This approach may serve in gaining the attention of the lowest common denominator or cause the comfortably unaffected to shake their heads at the sorry state of the nation—Damn kids!—but in truth its no better than scoring a chuckle or two on “open mic night.” They will offer stories of tragedy. Ruined lives coming to a wretched end or a life in prison. The orphaned and displaced children will be displayed. The will offer clips of dusty Mexican villages and cartel thugs sporting AKs. Mounds of packaged heroin and piles of pills will be put on display, with a stern DEA man posing next to it. Drink it in, folks. There will be stories of triumph, the single mom who struggled through treatment, got her kids back and is now reclaiming he life as a barrista. They won’t tell you her chances of being strung out again within a few months is over 80%.
Our government will promise: This, too, shall pass. Build a wall, jack up the DEA funding, promise to clamp down on Big Pharma and monitor physicians. Treatment, programs, education… They’d also reassure us that they’ve faced up to such crises in the past and resolved it with extreme prejudice, but their track record would suggest otherwise.
This, too, shall pass.
Information will help. Education will help. Treatment will help. Arresting thugs and dealers will help. Shaming Big Pharma will help (for a little while, anyway.) Compelling physicians to reign in prescriptions will help. They will all have an impact. The death rate will inevitably drop. But the biggest impact on the present crisis will come from . . . you guessed it! . . . Nature! Over less time than you’ll dare to believe, this epidemic will recede, level off, and we will accept a new “normal” with relief—and the assured determination to never let such things get this bad again. This resolution will be rooted in that facet of nature mankind can never control, that good ol’ Human Nature. The dealers—cartel backed or otherwise—will allow their greed to consume their market. They’ll kill off enough customers, or see them herded off to institutions—penal or medical—that the “market” will stabilize. Chances are, this market will still be better than it was fifteen years ago. They’ll have to settle with 2017/18 being a “boom time,” and adjust their projections for the next fiscal cycle.
Check out my ebook, a delightful compilation of previous— now unavailable !–posts: https://www.amazon.com/Lunacy-Death-perspective-developed-investigation-ebook/dp/B079DWFH9T/ref=redir_mobile_desktop?_encoding=UTF8&keywords=lunacy%20and%20death&qid=1520694997&ref_=mp_s_a_1_1&sr=1-1