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Evans W's avatar

Thank you Dr Matt Bivons for writing this and Matt Taibbi for publishing it.

As someone who’s been in recovery for many years now and who once had a $400 a day opioid (dilaudid) habit, I can tell you firsthand that our country has never seen an epidemic this massive or destructive. If there was another country shelling the United States and killing 100,000+ citizens a year I can assure you there would be an all out scorched earth campaign against them by the US military and the public would be arm in arm in full support. But addiction is messy, shameful and still stigmatized and as a result, doesn't get the funding and priority from Washington. Since the prescription crackdown that started some years ago, the Chinese and the Mexican cartels have ramped up importing tons of poisonous fentanyl and now xylazine into our country doing irreparable damage to our communities and loved ones. Clearly we have a huge demand side in the US and I'm not downplaying that, but we desperately need to ramp up our interdiction efforts.

The Sackler family, the board of directors at Pfizer and any other executives who've been complicit in fueling and profiting from this epidemic should all be on death row right now awaiting lethal injection. These psychopaths and the companies they run are worse than war criminals….they are the modern day mass murderers and should be treated as such. If we sent these people to prison or life or to be put to death, I can promise you things in the board room, marketing departments and sales conferences would get different quick.

The families that have lost loved ones to these drugs are simply ignored by our politicians because they receive so much money from the big pharma lobbyist and its easy to stigmatize the person who's become addicted. It’s truly criminal.

Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Leighton Woodhouse have some great articles concerning how we address the demand and treatment/recovery side of this and are all worth reading over on the Public substack .

Its clear to me that addiction must be addressed from all sides but unfortunately as a society we are falling short. Lets hope something changes so that we can turn the tide of this tragedy that continues to grow and break our hearts.

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Bill Rice, Jr.'s avatar

What gets me is a journalist can write a best-selling book ("Dope Sick") about oxycontin and the villainous Purdue Pharmacy owners - a book that's made into a popular TV series - and everyone agrees Big Pharma is very bad and we celebrate the few people who tried to expose this travesty.

But no journalist at a corporate-owned newspaper can write a book about Covid vaccines that have killed far more than 80,000 citizens and have "injured" millions. I mean, it's the same companies committing crimes against humanity.

Basically, we can trust these companies about Covid vaccines (or remdesivir, aka "Run, Death is Near!"), but we all agree these pharmaceutical companies are/were evil when they were peddling dangerous pain killers and making a killing off of those mass deaths.

I don't get it.

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