Opioid Abuse

This is what is bothering me about the opioid addiction crisis: Once again, we're in a situation where an industry produced and promoted a very harmful substance, fought at every step attempts to control the sale of that substance. They got lots of legislators on their side. But once it was irrefutable that their product was harming people by the stadium-full, they washed their hands of it. They blame everyone else, but not themselves.

We've been down this road before: Tetraethyl lead in motor fuel. Leaded paint. Tobacco. Freon.

I'm not buying it. The pharma companies like to distance themselves from profiteers like Shkreli and Bresch, but those two vultures are bit players. Hell, even Bresch's dad, who is a senator, can see that the opioid crisis was driven by the greed of the pharmaceutical companies:

Senator Manchin is not persuaded [by Big Pharma's protestations of innocense].

“Look at the amount of pills they shipped into certain parts of our state and the pill mills that sprouted up and everyone trying to hide behind thinking it was legal. It was awful. Absolutely awful,” he said. “I believe it was business driven. It was a business model. Those who have done extremely well on that and been rewarded very highly for that have looked at it as a legal business plan like any other business plan.”

Unlike the cartel leaders, these drug pushers claim to be legitimately rich from what they have been selling.

While the classical drug lords have always had to worry about either being arrested or killed by rivals, the "respectable" pushers of addictive drugs get to live quietly with no fear of being shot or being arrested. Because that's what being rich and buying politicians can get you.

Meanwhile, expect more of the same from the Feds: "We need tougher drug laws"-- (heroin's been illegal for almost a century). Treatment centers won't be funded, because the standard right-wing response to drug addiction is "so die, already". It always has been.