Two waves of addiction were prescribed by doctors and egged on by pharmaceutical marketing — orchestrated by the Sackler family — that insisted it was safe and a great idea.
Fascinating stuff. It's legalized drug pushing, an open invitation to print money through addiction.
Is this the way we smooth the rough edges off of the "American dream"? We're a pill-popping, pill-happy people.
Of course, now you have all the *legal* drug ads on TV showing people dancing and partying even as they take a bewildering range of drugs for everything from eczema to cancer.
The laundry list of side effects is strong there, but nobody cares. If the marketing is good enough, what's a little anal leakage in the pursuit of virtue signaling "Science."
When I worked at Frito-Lay and they came out with Wow! chips, fried in P&G's new fat replacement, Olestra (or Olean), they were about 1/3 less fat than regular chips.
In the fine print on the back of the bag, it mentioned anal leakage as a potential side effect.
Hadn't heard that Ozempic causes your ass to leak.
One of the best things when traveling abroad is watching TV and not seeing a single Pharmaceutical advertisement. Infomercials are still a thing though.
It’s been suggested that one reason the legacy media constantly fails to report truthfully on the pharmaceutical industry is the threat of losing ad revenue. Conversely if pharma ads were banned we might get better reporting on drugs before they raze a swath of social devastation.
Just an observation where marketing used here in 1st world, but then ‘banned’ - carries on elsewhere. Back in the day, Philip Morris used to hand out cigarettes to kids on the playgrounds of Indonesia, Brazil, etc.
I appreciate the doctor’s explanation and description of this part of the opioid crisis. I read the book about the Sackler family and I highly recommend it to anyone interested. It goes into much greater detail about their focus on developing pain medications.
First, people have been searching for proper pain medications forever but after WWII the focus became wide spread. The Sacklers successfully developed their own version and it became very popular.
I think the doctor’s explanation of the addiction part becoming so much a part of Western society is likely pretty accurate. The next generation of Sacklers developed their own version marketing machine and while doing so, according to the book, found out pain medications especially the stronger versions were addictive. That’s the scary part. Pain medication works temporarily but the human body becomes accustomed to it and wants something stronger. And OxyContin became the drug. And it ruined much of Western society.
RFK has a point. TV is littered with drug commercials. It’s out of hand and some changes need to be made. The pharma marketing machines have a firm grip on our society at the moment much like the cigarette companies of the 50s. That’s the challenge.
I'll go one further. Pharma companies are responsible almost solely for the rise of "Fake News." If RFK gets Pharma ads off of TV, almost all of your "Opinion shows" on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc... they die overnight. All of the ad money comes from Pharma.
Professional sports franchises will collapse in value, and athlete salaries will drop through the floor. I think very few of us realize just how much money in in our system from this industry. Bernie Sanders might even have to sell a house or two.
I think you need to learn some history. Fake news goes back WAY before Big Pharma and TV, probably back to cave paintings. For a more recent (but still old) example, see the era of Yellow Journalism.
So be angry with drug companies, but don't make up stories.
Pulitzer was a master of it. I do know my history. I specifically called out the "Opinion shows" as one of the results. The news desk at even CNN going back just 20 years was in fact just people reading off stories without spin or stupidity. Today any quasi-celebrity can get a job as a "news anchor." See Michael Strahan.
We might be arguing semantics. But I still think your complaint needs to be more generalized, and not blame a long term problem on recent drug company nonsense.
Pharma ad spend on network and cable shows is an insurance plan. If any of the outlets decide to run an expose on the drug industry, big pharma just has to threaten to pull their ads if the story isn't spiked.
These articles are excellent. And The Brady Bunch? How did you even find that? My physician husband is always talking about patients whose lives aren’t perfect wanting antidepressants. I have ‘circle’ friends and family all around me on them to cope with their horrible lives filled with nice homes, plenty of money to live, healthy families, and abundant free time. They don’t understand why they aren’t ’happy’ every moment of the day. Do those next. Actually, you probably have a long list of medication pushed on doctors. Remember Vioxx?
The things is docs have NO ability to push back at patients who ask for meds period 🤷♀️ thank God I’m not in psych so anytime a pt asks me for psych meds I say they have to go see psych however the pts themselves are the ones who have the agency. Of course pharmaceutical companies are going to try and sell drugs - literally their job. The mass psych meding of America is so cray. Humans have been miserable from the beginning of time (some great misery quotes in Jason pargin’s im getting nervous about this black box of doom) but now it’s seen as pathologic. Now I do think Valium is the best drug ever invented. You don’t have to take it everyday like an ssri so it’s not something your ABSOLUTELY going to be dependent on like your body will with ssri but it can prevent you from harming yourself or having a break down on those horrible horrible nights that come around in a humans life.
Why do you say doctors have no ability to pushback? I think that lets them off the hook.
My experience (most recent regarding cortisone for knee issues) has been different - my PCP pushes back. I guess I could shop around for different doctors, but you're paying for honest, hopefully impartial advice.
Sometimes there may be concerns among doctors to sugarcoat their communication. How many doctors stood up to their patients becoming more and more obese and strongly urged changes? Many didn't because they feared (or knew) that many patients would go find a new doctor who wouldn't talk about them being fat.
Same with "I think I need antidepressants." Maybe the GLP-1s are just right--patients come in asking for them, doc says hell yes.
I get withdrawal off of a single dose due to my genetics. I was given it twice, both times just to make me high before surgery, and the withdrawal was terrible. Nobody told me this was possible, I had to figure it out. My daughter went through 6 months of withdrawal after just 2 weeks on one. This is why I recognized what was happening when I had withdrawal and started to research. Short term use can cause addiction.
In a previous life I worked in Big Pharma as a contractor. The things I saw were enough for me to avoid anything unless I feel my life is in danger, and by danger, I mean, I think I might die only at that moment.
One of the coolest departments are the ones that take the drugs that fail for their intention, and are re-purposed for "new diseases." Diseases likely caused by... hmm... looks up history of products made by Big Pharma. This is of course how we got the little blue pill!
History has shown that women are more susceptible to advertising and coercion to radical ideas than men. History shows that it was women more than men who initially gravitated to Socialism and Nazism. It was accomplished thru advertising campaigns by the party elite. Older men were skeptical at first but listened to the women in their lives, which wasn’t unusual because women were the caregivers and masters of the home, while the men worked to support the family. Edward Bernays, wrote a book called Propaganda that used the phenomenon to help governments and corporations sell their ideas and products to the world thru advertising. Much of those ads were targeted towards women to make things that were not “normal” and “needed” to become “must haves”. His own daughter thought he was the most evil man that had ever been born because of his manipulation of women thru advertising.
We try but master manipulators like Clinton and Obama come along and play upon their susceptibility with promises of easier lives at the expense of others.
Bernays had great success using his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories with social manipulation techniques (which he rebranded as PR), just like the Frankfurt Group did mixing psychology with Marxism. They seemed to think propaganda reframed as therapeutics was needed for guiding the ‘herd.’
Going through pharmacy school in the early eighties, we were taught that benzodiazepines were the “safe” “non-addictive” alternative to the horrible barbiturates. Then in early practice in the nineties we were sent a pain treatment “reference” text sponsored by Purdue Pharma that touted long-acting opioids (OxyContin happened to be a convenient example) as a “non-addictive” chronic pain treatment with no dosage ceiling.
Matt - you need to keep faith that you can find the good studies among the chaff. To discard every study as biased/wrong leads to a place where only skepticism remains. It's a lousy place to from which to make important decisions.
Physician inpatient prescibing went back and forth during my years in nursing. When I started in the early '80's there was a certain class of patients getting admitted for "pain" that was clearly drug seeking. (Usually months postop ortho, after getting hooked. Pre DRG days) Then as we moved through the '80s it became almost impossible to get standing and/or PRN orders for even terminal patients. Then as we rolled into the '90s it started to loosen up again. By 1993 I was in the OR so didn't see what was going on out in the units. Clearly Physicians as a community lost the plot to manage patients and just gave-up.
Whenever Bivens pushes a narrative, I push back. Here, Biven's narrative is that people are helpless idiots, without agency, women especially, and are easily manipulated by evil capitalist advertising. Doctors, too, cannot resist the capitalist advertising machine. People just need to bite the bullet, toughen up, and learn to deal with life. You have cancer? No opioids for you, they're too addictive, and besides, it makes that Jew Sackler family too damn wealthy.
Greg, our author didn’t use examples of cancer or hospice patients. The tranquilizer ads were targeted at young healthy women. We all accept drug use to relive that type of physical pain. Thanks for the straw man though.
I'm not sure how far you are taking this point. Are you saying, Bivens said it, therefore bad? Surely you are not saying that there was no opioid crisis.
I have discussions with my siblings about why alcoholics and drug addicts exist. Are these people just weak and that's why they are addicted, or is it there but for the grace of God go I?
It seems that you are squarely in the they are weak camp.
I'm seeing a lot of assumptions here about stuff I wasn't opining on. I don't view addiction as a question of weakness or strength. Everyone is potentially an addict because of the way the brain works. MDs are experts and do understand the addiction potential of various medications. They understand the benefits and the risks of particular medications, and should work with their patients to chart a path through whatever physical or mental health problem they have, and that includes managing and monitoring the use of potentially addictive medications like opioids and benzos.
Here, Bivens just presents yet another iteration of the standard leftist caricature of capitalism that I've seen repeated over and over again through the decades, that capitalism uses advertising to entrap the gullible, helpless masses into consuming worthless products, all to make greedy corporations wealthy. The masses, of course, have no agency. That's why they need a benighted government of elites to guide them.
💯 THANK YOU - tied for my least fav thing in the entire 🌎 is lack of pt accountability ——- you come to the doc for meds!!! There’s no reason otherwise to be there!!! And btw there’s no doc that has succumb to the capitalist advertising machine - but medicine has become a fast food restaurant where if a pt complains you get fired and you have to give them what they want, you can’t insist they try lifestyle/behavioral before medication. The philosophy on meds has changed so much for people seeing meds as performance enhancers rather than shortest duration of time lowest effective dose that I truly believe all meds should be OTC. Total BS that grown ass adults putting something in their own mouth can sue someone else over it. And who are docs to argue with a pt if they say they’re in pain - and it’s also not our job to deal with your addiction problem. Sounds super fun getting between a crack addict (hormones/ssris/adderral/hydroxyzine) and their drugs - no thanks, ive got a bunch more pts to see and you have to take accountability for yourself. Where oh where did accountability go to. No one’s expected to take ownership of their body or what they put in their mouths anymore 😭 and the gov being involved in healthcare means the prices are way inflated and hospitals and insurance companies run the show so docs cant have their own practices and the liability suits omgggg no pt accountability. Really makes people gross.
What about when they prescribe them when we are not in pain and never were? Has happened to me several times. My mom had a nurse berating her for not using a morphine pump after her surgery and my mom was not in pain. My mom got very angry with the nurse. I do take accountability and never took the medication, nor did my mother, but I see both sides to these arguments.
Painkillers fog my head and make me frustrated. I insisted pain meds be taken out of my feed after an appendectomy. “Bet you want those pain meds now,” the nurse moaned later. “No,” I said. “It hurts but it’s tolerable. When I left they gave me a prescription for twenty oxys, “Just in case.” I ripped the thing up in front of them. They were more worried about pain management than stopping me having to go through withdrawal.
Most people have a very low pain tolerance now because they have been popping pills their whole lives and have trouble making their own endogenous pain killers. I also had my babies without any drugs as women have since the dawn of time. Learning to tolerate some pain is an important life skill. One of my babies had a difficult presentation so I understand why women do it, but they rarely know the true risks.
Of course you are correct, but omitted an influence on doctors that is immutably effective where advertising fails: bribes/payolla/ etc
Those trips to Bimini for the doctors that prescribed xyz meds were legendary.
Of course, today those trips and bribes are more surreptitious (swiss numbered accts?)
anyhooo....you're right...personal responsibility - ESPECIALLY over what you put in your body (or take out of it) is paramount, and mandates (yes, I'm talking about COVID and other vaccines) do NOT belong in the hands of the state.
Thank you. I sense this same antipathy in Matt Taibbi towards a certain group. Or maybe just America in general, not sure. He’s always been a skeptic and I like that, it’s why I’ve supported him from the beginning. However, he’s demonstrating signs of not quite Tucker, but Kelly perhaps. It’s an odd phenomenon we’re seeing in a certain group of alternative media.
People need to be taught that their doctors do not know all and learn to do their own research. Very few do, male or female. I did a deep dive before having babies and all 3 were born at home when I discovered it was statistically safer for mother and baby. How many women have the background to read the research and push back? I agree with you overall, but see more nuance here.
It sure as hell isn't personal responsibility when doctors lie to patients through a 3rd party.
And it isnt a childs personal responsibility when parents ask doctors to prescribe dangerous medication to their kids.
But at the end of the day I do agree that less damage will be done overall if a culture shift occurs, where doctors become unemployed for pushing like drug dealers and other doctors profit immensely from making drugs the 2nd or 3rd option.
The narrative is actually that advertising campaigns influence sales. Do you really think they don't? If not, why do drug companies and others have multi-million dollar ad budgets?
Before there was Big Pharma promoting opiiod toxins there was Edward Bernays, teaching the tobacco industrial complexes how to get get women to smoke cigarettes "they didn't used to" shortening the lives of millions of women and consigning them to horrible deaths which, of course, were very profitable for the medical industrial complexes and Wall Street. They were/are so clever they convinced women that having some "mostly crappy BS" job was freedom and better than than being a mother and homemaker so they could move the decent jobs millions of men had offshore and the women of the working class now needed to work. Somehow they structured society so the children needed a BS college debt education to get in the door for a job. Yes, that includes journalism "is it better NOW your in debt and lost years of your lifetime earnings?" The priesthood is nothing compared to tricks the ruling classes play today. Quadrillions of OH so clever derivative weapons of mass financial destruction hanging over our heads as the Oracle of Omaha used to say. We're on the eve of destruction!
I would love to see a deep dive just like this about the origins of statins and how they became so ubiquitous even though there is plenty of evidence that their usage does not actually work as promised. It would be a great story to read for sure.
My doctor tried to push statins on me, so I started to research. It turns out that in women over 50, having higher cholesterol (not extremely high) is associated with lower all cause mortality. This research was done in Korea on millions of women because all their health records are public. The same is true of carrying extra weight after age 50, it appears to be protective to dwell in the overweight and mildly obese BMI categories. Statins show great benefit to people with extremely high cholesterol. The levels considered healthy were dropped to increase drug sales. Overdiagnosed in an excellent book by an epidemiologist at Dartmouth that does a deep dive into this and many other issues like blood pressure medication.
Wouldn't a fair and just legal system provide for disgorgement of the vast fortune amassed by the Sackler family on the backs of human death, misery and grief? We are surrounded by fraud, abuse, theft and greed in the new United States of Grift under the felonious Democrat Party.
Regarding the irrelevant, mindless, and offensive virtue signaling insertion by Dr. Bivens, wrt: "carpet bombing Viet Nam"... No question that the Vietnamese civilian population (and the militaries on both sides) suffered greatly, but I served at the height of the war as a grunt infantryman there up in Eye Corps, and easily could see that the rural people were profoundly and unjustifiably terrorized by the communist revolutionary forces. And that the vast and ill-considered American firepower was misdirected more often than not! In the ensuing five decades I made it my life's work to personally try to undo as much of the catastrophe as possible; did a post-doc in 1990-91 evaluating the state of recovery of worst agent orange defoliated regions; and have since then contributed to confs and symposia both inside and outside the Socialist Republic of VN: most recently in Hanoi in late 2025 (and also lived full-time in the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic for five years); and I have extensive first hand family experience with the disastrous consequences befalling those on the losing side. Of whom 200,000 "boat people" died at sea, and maybe a number even greater that that not surviving their incommunicado displacement to the re-education camps (i.e., the SRVN gulags). The self-congratulatory US "antiwar movement" has never faced up to —or even ever realized— the awful downsides of their political victory on the homefront!
Centuries before the Sackler's, opium in the form of Laudanum was pushed on women. Legitimate pain patients who were able to function with opioids are not treated like your average street junkie. and cutoff from a legitimate therapeutic. This created a whole new crisis of functional members of society turning to street fentanyl, kratom and other dangerous medications.. How sad that our medical professionals are not allowed to use their clinical judgment to treat pain patients.
"But this wasn’t a specifically American phenomenon. It was a Western capitalism phenomenon; a feature of free market-steered medical decision-making."
Hmm, so the point seems to be some people in a capitalist system are incentivized to take advantage of other people. We need a nanny state to protect us from the vultures? Capitalism is excellent at providing goods and services to people. Enlisting capitalism comes with the responsibility of consumers to be savvy (caveat emptor). Some people will not be savvy and they will thus be vulnerable to those more motivated and more capable. Should all of us be deprived of the benefits of capitalism because some of us are perpetually naive?
This gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as the government starts regulating, there is an implied safety to anything they allow. People stop taking responsibility for their actions. With the snake oil salesmen, everyone knew they were suspect. Now we have people who are just as bad, but they are cloaked in approval.
It’s not like anti-capitalists have been any more philanthropic with truth-bending and propaganda. By the time Covid-era government deceit shakes-out they’ll make the Sackler clan look like Saint Francis of Assisi.
Maybe medical care could have priorities other than profit. I mean, can we obviate the need for government regulation in the area sufficient to allow a free market? The pooch, in this case, seems pre-screwed.
One of the precepts I apply is "if something is made to be more difficult or more expensive, less will be innovated and produced". Government regulation and taxation are a couple obvious potential culprits when it comes to reducing innovation and production.
Assume the incentive to innovate and produce is reduced by 25% below what it would have been without the reduction. We'd still have innovation and production, but 25% of what would have been made available would not exist. Which new procedures, medications, medical devices, ... would not be innovated or produced? At least some of our most vital medical advancements would not appear or its arrival would be significantly delayed making it to our medical marketplace of options hence adversely impacting those who would have otherwise benefitted.
I am not advocating a wild west in the medical sphere, but, in my opinion, we need to be extremely careful and judicious when constructing barriers to innovation and production.
Of late I sense in Matt Taibi this strange phenomenon rising of being, what should I call it, anti American. Or better put heading in that direction. Not that he hasn’t always been a healthy skeptic. For which I’m grateful and have said as much over the years. It’s why I’ve supported him from inception.
However, Matt Bevins in this article exudes this same anti American antipathy I’m sensing from Matt Taibi among others. This time it’s cloaked in condemnation of Pharma, condemnation it heartily deserves I should say. And it receives it in this well written article. But it doesn’t stop at Pharmaceutical companies and their, bwah, evil owners in this article, does it. Or is that just me.
It feels like there’s a concerted effort of late to denigrate, mock, alienate and generally demonize America and its leaders. It feels orchestrated, definitely not organic.
I’m not saying America doesn’t deserve serious lambasting, it often does. But there’s a malignant undertone to a lot of the criticism lately from sources you wouldn’t normally expect. It feels spiteful and peevish, premeditated and planned.
I get the feeling its spreading tentacles are not an accident either.
Aside from all that, here’s John Cleese with a very good take on behaviorism:
I meant to respond to your original comment in this thread. You and I could be twins. I have this sense that folks are afraid of embracing the America of the Revolution. It is easy to find fault. Much harder to embrace our country even with its faults. Kinda like religion. But I do think that is important. To believe in something - country, philosophy, whatever.
I don't know the answer, just that my skepticism gets in the way of what matters.
Don’t lose your skepticism. Healthy skepticism is good. Eventually though we have to choose whose banner we march under. If you’re looking for perfection in anything, you’ll flip flop and flounder. I suggest making a decision based on sound skepticism and rigorous testing. But make a decision.
By the way, personally I don’t see life as wholly political, ideological or idealistic choices. Though it is in many ways. I see it as a spiritual choice, a spiritual battle to be fought and won. So God being the banner under which I choose to march, headed by totally imperfect human beings, yes, but ones I perceive he put there to lead. But that’s me.
On another note. Have you seen Andrew Scott recite Edith Sampson’s “One of Five”? If not here’s the link:
Fascinating stuff. It's legalized drug pushing, an open invitation to print money through addiction.
Is this the way we smooth the rough edges off of the "American dream"? We're a pill-popping, pill-happy people.
Of course, now you have all the *legal* drug ads on TV showing people dancing and partying even as they take a bewildering range of drugs for everything from eczema to cancer.
Just wait til when the butcher's bill is presented for the weight loss drugs.
The laundry list of side effects is strong there, but nobody cares. If the marketing is good enough, what's a little anal leakage in the pursuit of virtue signaling "Science."
When I worked at Frito-Lay and they came out with Wow! chips, fried in P&G's new fat replacement, Olestra (or Olean), they were about 1/3 less fat than regular chips.
In the fine print on the back of the bag, it mentioned anal leakage as a potential side effect.
Hadn't heard that Ozempic causes your ass to leak.
I thought every drug had that as a side effect...
And, of course, no drug interactions!
You are so right!
Weird how the wars we fight also follow the tried and tested marketing campaigns. We’re a dumb society.
One of the best things when traveling abroad is watching TV and not seeing a single Pharmaceutical advertisement. Infomercials are still a thing though.
It’s been suggested that one reason the legacy media constantly fails to report truthfully on the pharmaceutical industry is the threat of losing ad revenue. Conversely if pharma ads were banned we might get better reporting on drugs before they raze a swath of social devastation.
"Suggested??" LOL Cui bono never fails
I think New Zealand is the only other country that allows such drug advertising.
Joe Camel still lives in the 3rd world.
You say that like it's a bad thing.....
Just an observation where marketing used here in 1st world, but then ‘banned’ - carries on elsewhere. Back in the day, Philip Morris used to hand out cigarettes to kids on the playgrounds of Indonesia, Brazil, etc.
Inspired by this article, I am going to pitch a TV ad: Uncle Willie and the Girl Boss.
Glad "Mother's Little Helper" was mentioned later in the article as it started playing nonstop in my head around paragraph three.
Great piece, Dr. B!
Doctor, please, some more of these
Outside the door, she took four more
Me too!
Those ads almost always feature somebody doing something athletic, but the actor has clearly never actually done the activity. Drives me nuts.
Big girls need love too.
Fat bottomed girls
You make the rockin' world go 'round
Librium and valium then. Today the chicks all get SSRIs. Same game different drugs. Same Dame issues.
I appreciate the doctor’s explanation and description of this part of the opioid crisis. I read the book about the Sackler family and I highly recommend it to anyone interested. It goes into much greater detail about their focus on developing pain medications.
First, people have been searching for proper pain medications forever but after WWII the focus became wide spread. The Sacklers successfully developed their own version and it became very popular.
I think the doctor’s explanation of the addiction part becoming so much a part of Western society is likely pretty accurate. The next generation of Sacklers developed their own version marketing machine and while doing so, according to the book, found out pain medications especially the stronger versions were addictive. That’s the scary part. Pain medication works temporarily but the human body becomes accustomed to it and wants something stronger. And OxyContin became the drug. And it ruined much of Western society.
RFK has a point. TV is littered with drug commercials. It’s out of hand and some changes need to be made. The pharma marketing machines have a firm grip on our society at the moment much like the cigarette companies of the 50s. That’s the challenge.
I'll go one further. Pharma companies are responsible almost solely for the rise of "Fake News." If RFK gets Pharma ads off of TV, almost all of your "Opinion shows" on CNN, FOX, MSNBC, etc... they die overnight. All of the ad money comes from Pharma.
Professional sports franchises will collapse in value, and athlete salaries will drop through the floor. I think very few of us realize just how much money in in our system from this industry. Bernie Sanders might even have to sell a house or two.
I think you need to learn some history. Fake news goes back WAY before Big Pharma and TV, probably back to cave paintings. For a more recent (but still old) example, see the era of Yellow Journalism.
So be angry with drug companies, but don't make up stories.
Precisely.
I bring up the fact that every news agency knew factually that the gulf of Tonkin attack was fake to my older relatives, and they get VERY quiet.
Pulitzer was a master of it. I do know my history. I specifically called out the "Opinion shows" as one of the results. The news desk at even CNN going back just 20 years was in fact just people reading off stories without spin or stupidity. Today any quasi-celebrity can get a job as a "news anchor." See Michael Strahan.
We might be arguing semantics. But I still think your complaint needs to be more generalized, and not blame a long term problem on recent drug company nonsense.
True. But back then, yellow journalism became something society realized was a bad thing. Today's version is fake news. Still a bad thing.
Even though back in the day I cast a vote for Bernie, he lost me forever with his bogus and biased presentation aimed at opposing RFK’s confirmation.
Pharma ad spend on network and cable shows is an insurance plan. If any of the outlets decide to run an expose on the drug industry, big pharma just has to threaten to pull their ads if the story isn't spiked.
"RFK has a point."
Which explains the constant character assassination of RFK by the media...
I would now like to ammend previous request to only be notified of articles by Matt Taibbi to include all Matts.
These articles are excellent. And The Brady Bunch? How did you even find that? My physician husband is always talking about patients whose lives aren’t perfect wanting antidepressants. I have ‘circle’ friends and family all around me on them to cope with their horrible lives filled with nice homes, plenty of money to live, healthy families, and abundant free time. They don’t understand why they aren’t ’happy’ every moment of the day. Do those next. Actually, you probably have a long list of medication pushed on doctors. Remember Vioxx?
The things is docs have NO ability to push back at patients who ask for meds period 🤷♀️ thank God I’m not in psych so anytime a pt asks me for psych meds I say they have to go see psych however the pts themselves are the ones who have the agency. Of course pharmaceutical companies are going to try and sell drugs - literally their job. The mass psych meding of America is so cray. Humans have been miserable from the beginning of time (some great misery quotes in Jason pargin’s im getting nervous about this black box of doom) but now it’s seen as pathologic. Now I do think Valium is the best drug ever invented. You don’t have to take it everyday like an ssri so it’s not something your ABSOLUTELY going to be dependent on like your body will with ssri but it can prevent you from harming yourself or having a break down on those horrible horrible nights that come around in a humans life.
Why do you say doctors have no ability to pushback? I think that lets them off the hook.
My experience (most recent regarding cortisone for knee issues) has been different - my PCP pushes back. I guess I could shop around for different doctors, but you're paying for honest, hopefully impartial advice.
Sometimes there may be concerns among doctors to sugarcoat their communication. How many doctors stood up to their patients becoming more and more obese and strongly urged changes? Many didn't because they feared (or knew) that many patients would go find a new doctor who wouldn't talk about them being fat.
Same with "I think I need antidepressants." Maybe the GLP-1s are just right--patients come in asking for them, doc says hell yes.
I get withdrawal off of a single dose due to my genetics. I was given it twice, both times just to make me high before surgery, and the withdrawal was terrible. Nobody told me this was possible, I had to figure it out. My daughter went through 6 months of withdrawal after just 2 weeks on one. This is why I recognized what was happening when I had withdrawal and started to research. Short term use can cause addiction.
In a previous life I worked in Big Pharma as a contractor. The things I saw were enough for me to avoid anything unless I feel my life is in danger, and by danger, I mean, I think I might die only at that moment.
One of the coolest departments are the ones that take the drugs that fail for their intention, and are re-purposed for "new diseases." Diseases likely caused by... hmm... looks up history of products made by Big Pharma. This is of course how we got the little blue pill!
History has shown that women are more susceptible to advertising and coercion to radical ideas than men. History shows that it was women more than men who initially gravitated to Socialism and Nazism. It was accomplished thru advertising campaigns by the party elite. Older men were skeptical at first but listened to the women in their lives, which wasn’t unusual because women were the caregivers and masters of the home, while the men worked to support the family. Edward Bernays, wrote a book called Propaganda that used the phenomenon to help governments and corporations sell their ideas and products to the world thru advertising. Much of those ads were targeted towards women to make things that were not “normal” and “needed” to become “must haves”. His own daughter thought he was the most evil man that had ever been born because of his manipulation of women thru advertising.
Hmm, does this mean we need to protect the weaker sex from "bad" ideas?
We try but master manipulators like Clinton and Obama come along and play upon their susceptibility with promises of easier lives at the expense of others.
I'm not sure I get what you're saying. Can you put a little more flesh around those bones? Sincere request. Thanks.
Bernays had great success using his uncle Sigmund Freud’s theories with social manipulation techniques (which he rebranded as PR), just like the Frankfurt Group did mixing psychology with Marxism. They seemed to think propaganda reframed as therapeutics was needed for guiding the ‘herd.’
Going through pharmacy school in the early eighties, we were taught that benzodiazepines were the “safe” “non-addictive” alternative to the horrible barbiturates. Then in early practice in the nineties we were sent a pain treatment “reference” text sponsored by Purdue Pharma that touted long-acting opioids (OxyContin happened to be a convenient example) as a “non-addictive” chronic pain treatment with no dosage ceiling.
It should be common knowledge at this point that "studies" are conclusions bought by industry.
Matt - you need to keep faith that you can find the good studies among the chaff. To discard every study as biased/wrong leads to a place where only skepticism remains. It's a lousy place to from which to make important decisions.
There are filtration systems for the good and bad ones.
I know one filtration system is if the study disseminated to scientists by the today show or good morning america, its probably a bad study.
Physician inpatient prescibing went back and forth during my years in nursing. When I started in the early '80's there was a certain class of patients getting admitted for "pain" that was clearly drug seeking. (Usually months postop ortho, after getting hooked. Pre DRG days) Then as we moved through the '80s it became almost impossible to get standing and/or PRN orders for even terminal patients. Then as we rolled into the '90s it started to loosen up again. By 1993 I was in the OR so didn't see what was going on out in the units. Clearly Physicians as a community lost the plot to manage patients and just gave-up.
How about Provasic by Devlin MacGregor... LOL... Dr. Richard Kimble went to jail for it. hahahaha
Didn't the Sackler's also create the lie that opioids were not addictive if taken for pain?
Whenever Bivens pushes a narrative, I push back. Here, Biven's narrative is that people are helpless idiots, without agency, women especially, and are easily manipulated by evil capitalist advertising. Doctors, too, cannot resist the capitalist advertising machine. People just need to bite the bullet, toughen up, and learn to deal with life. You have cancer? No opioids for you, they're too addictive, and besides, it makes that Jew Sackler family too damn wealthy.
Greg, our author didn’t use examples of cancer or hospice patients. The tranquilizer ads were targeted at young healthy women. We all accept drug use to relive that type of physical pain. Thanks for the straw man though.
You're welcome, but it's not a straw man. This is not the only article he's written.
I'm not sure how far you are taking this point. Are you saying, Bivens said it, therefore bad? Surely you are not saying that there was no opioid crisis.
I have discussions with my siblings about why alcoholics and drug addicts exist. Are these people just weak and that's why they are addicted, or is it there but for the grace of God go I?
It seems that you are squarely in the they are weak camp.
I'm seeing a lot of assumptions here about stuff I wasn't opining on. I don't view addiction as a question of weakness or strength. Everyone is potentially an addict because of the way the brain works. MDs are experts and do understand the addiction potential of various medications. They understand the benefits and the risks of particular medications, and should work with their patients to chart a path through whatever physical or mental health problem they have, and that includes managing and monitoring the use of potentially addictive medications like opioids and benzos.
Here, Bivens just presents yet another iteration of the standard leftist caricature of capitalism that I've seen repeated over and over again through the decades, that capitalism uses advertising to entrap the gullible, helpless masses into consuming worthless products, all to make greedy corporations wealthy. The masses, of course, have no agency. That's why they need a benighted government of elites to guide them.
The phrase "Jew Sackler" explains what this commenter is really up to.
💯 THANK YOU - tied for my least fav thing in the entire 🌎 is lack of pt accountability ——- you come to the doc for meds!!! There’s no reason otherwise to be there!!! And btw there’s no doc that has succumb to the capitalist advertising machine - but medicine has become a fast food restaurant where if a pt complains you get fired and you have to give them what they want, you can’t insist they try lifestyle/behavioral before medication. The philosophy on meds has changed so much for people seeing meds as performance enhancers rather than shortest duration of time lowest effective dose that I truly believe all meds should be OTC. Total BS that grown ass adults putting something in their own mouth can sue someone else over it. And who are docs to argue with a pt if they say they’re in pain - and it’s also not our job to deal with your addiction problem. Sounds super fun getting between a crack addict (hormones/ssris/adderral/hydroxyzine) and their drugs - no thanks, ive got a bunch more pts to see and you have to take accountability for yourself. Where oh where did accountability go to. No one’s expected to take ownership of their body or what they put in their mouths anymore 😭 and the gov being involved in healthcare means the prices are way inflated and hospitals and insurance companies run the show so docs cant have their own practices and the liability suits omgggg no pt accountability. Really makes people gross.
What about when they prescribe them when we are not in pain and never were? Has happened to me several times. My mom had a nurse berating her for not using a morphine pump after her surgery and my mom was not in pain. My mom got very angry with the nurse. I do take accountability and never took the medication, nor did my mother, but I see both sides to these arguments.
Painkillers fog my head and make me frustrated. I insisted pain meds be taken out of my feed after an appendectomy. “Bet you want those pain meds now,” the nurse moaned later. “No,” I said. “It hurts but it’s tolerable. When I left they gave me a prescription for twenty oxys, “Just in case.” I ripped the thing up in front of them. They were more worried about pain management than stopping me having to go through withdrawal.
Most people have a very low pain tolerance now because they have been popping pills their whole lives and have trouble making their own endogenous pain killers. I also had my babies without any drugs as women have since the dawn of time. Learning to tolerate some pain is an important life skill. One of my babies had a difficult presentation so I understand why women do it, but they rarely know the true risks.
Of course you are correct, but omitted an influence on doctors that is immutably effective where advertising fails: bribes/payolla/ etc
Those trips to Bimini for the doctors that prescribed xyz meds were legendary.
Of course, today those trips and bribes are more surreptitious (swiss numbered accts?)
anyhooo....you're right...personal responsibility - ESPECIALLY over what you put in your body (or take out of it) is paramount, and mandates (yes, I'm talking about COVID and other vaccines) do NOT belong in the hands of the state.
Thank you. I sense this same antipathy in Matt Taibbi towards a certain group. Or maybe just America in general, not sure. He’s always been a skeptic and I like that, it’s why I’ve supported him from the beginning. However, he’s demonstrating signs of not quite Tucker, but Kelly perhaps. It’s an odd phenomenon we’re seeing in a certain group of alternative media.
People need to be taught that their doctors do not know all and learn to do their own research. Very few do, male or female. I did a deep dive before having babies and all 3 were born at home when I discovered it was statistically safer for mother and baby. How many women have the background to read the research and push back? I agree with you overall, but see more nuance here.
It sure as hell isn't personal responsibility when doctors lie to patients through a 3rd party.
And it isnt a childs personal responsibility when parents ask doctors to prescribe dangerous medication to their kids.
But at the end of the day I do agree that less damage will be done overall if a culture shift occurs, where doctors become unemployed for pushing like drug dealers and other doctors profit immensely from making drugs the 2nd or 3rd option.
The narrative is actually that advertising campaigns influence sales. Do you really think they don't? If not, why do drug companies and others have multi-million dollar ad budgets?
Before there was Big Pharma promoting opiiod toxins there was Edward Bernays, teaching the tobacco industrial complexes how to get get women to smoke cigarettes "they didn't used to" shortening the lives of millions of women and consigning them to horrible deaths which, of course, were very profitable for the medical industrial complexes and Wall Street. They were/are so clever they convinced women that having some "mostly crappy BS" job was freedom and better than than being a mother and homemaker so they could move the decent jobs millions of men had offshore and the women of the working class now needed to work. Somehow they structured society so the children needed a BS college debt education to get in the door for a job. Yes, that includes journalism "is it better NOW your in debt and lost years of your lifetime earnings?" The priesthood is nothing compared to tricks the ruling classes play today. Quadrillions of OH so clever derivative weapons of mass financial destruction hanging over our heads as the Oracle of Omaha used to say. We're on the eve of destruction!
And also "BS"primary and secondary education as a de facto child care service, don't forget!
I would love to see a deep dive just like this about the origins of statins and how they became so ubiquitous even though there is plenty of evidence that their usage does not actually work as promised. It would be a great story to read for sure.
My doctor tried to push statins on me, so I started to research. It turns out that in women over 50, having higher cholesterol (not extremely high) is associated with lower all cause mortality. This research was done in Korea on millions of women because all their health records are public. The same is true of carrying extra weight after age 50, it appears to be protective to dwell in the overweight and mildly obese BMI categories. Statins show great benefit to people with extremely high cholesterol. The levels considered healthy were dropped to increase drug sales. Overdiagnosed in an excellent book by an epidemiologist at Dartmouth that does a deep dive into this and many other issues like blood pressure medication.
Wouldn't a fair and just legal system provide for disgorgement of the vast fortune amassed by the Sackler family on the backs of human death, misery and grief? We are surrounded by fraud, abuse, theft and greed in the new United States of Grift under the felonious Democrat Party.
Regarding the irrelevant, mindless, and offensive virtue signaling insertion by Dr. Bivens, wrt: "carpet bombing Viet Nam"... No question that the Vietnamese civilian population (and the militaries on both sides) suffered greatly, but I served at the height of the war as a grunt infantryman there up in Eye Corps, and easily could see that the rural people were profoundly and unjustifiably terrorized by the communist revolutionary forces. And that the vast and ill-considered American firepower was misdirected more often than not! In the ensuing five decades I made it my life's work to personally try to undo as much of the catastrophe as possible; did a post-doc in 1990-91 evaluating the state of recovery of worst agent orange defoliated regions; and have since then contributed to confs and symposia both inside and outside the Socialist Republic of VN: most recently in Hanoi in late 2025 (and also lived full-time in the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic for five years); and I have extensive first hand family experience with the disastrous consequences befalling those on the losing side. Of whom 200,000 "boat people" died at sea, and maybe a number even greater that that not surviving their incommunicado displacement to the re-education camps (i.e., the SRVN gulags). The self-congratulatory US "antiwar movement" has never faced up to —or even ever realized— the awful downsides of their political victory on the homefront!
Centuries before the Sackler's, opium in the form of Laudanum was pushed on women. Legitimate pain patients who were able to function with opioids are not treated like your average street junkie. and cutoff from a legitimate therapeutic. This created a whole new crisis of functional members of society turning to street fentanyl, kratom and other dangerous medications.. How sad that our medical professionals are not allowed to use their clinical judgment to treat pain patients.
"But this wasn’t a specifically American phenomenon. It was a Western capitalism phenomenon; a feature of free market-steered medical decision-making."
Hmm, so the point seems to be some people in a capitalist system are incentivized to take advantage of other people. We need a nanny state to protect us from the vultures? Capitalism is excellent at providing goods and services to people. Enlisting capitalism comes with the responsibility of consumers to be savvy (caveat emptor). Some people will not be savvy and they will thus be vulnerable to those more motivated and more capable. Should all of us be deprived of the benefits of capitalism because some of us are perpetually naive?
This gets to the heart of the problem. As soon as the government starts regulating, there is an implied safety to anything they allow. People stop taking responsibility for their actions. With the snake oil salesmen, everyone knew they were suspect. Now we have people who are just as bad, but they are cloaked in approval.
It’s not like anti-capitalists have been any more philanthropic with truth-bending and propaganda. By the time Covid-era government deceit shakes-out they’ll make the Sackler clan look like Saint Francis of Assisi.
Anthony Fauci, maybe?
Maybe medical care could have priorities other than profit. I mean, can we obviate the need for government regulation in the area sufficient to allow a free market? The pooch, in this case, seems pre-screwed.
One of the precepts I apply is "if something is made to be more difficult or more expensive, less will be innovated and produced". Government regulation and taxation are a couple obvious potential culprits when it comes to reducing innovation and production.
Assume the incentive to innovate and produce is reduced by 25% below what it would have been without the reduction. We'd still have innovation and production, but 25% of what would have been made available would not exist. Which new procedures, medications, medical devices, ... would not be innovated or produced? At least some of our most vital medical advancements would not appear or its arrival would be significantly delayed making it to our medical marketplace of options hence adversely impacting those who would have otherwise benefitted.
I am not advocating a wild west in the medical sphere, but, in my opinion, we need to be extremely careful and judicious when constructing barriers to innovation and production.
Of late I sense in Matt Taibi this strange phenomenon rising of being, what should I call it, anti American. Or better put heading in that direction. Not that he hasn’t always been a healthy skeptic. For which I’m grateful and have said as much over the years. It’s why I’ve supported him from inception.
However, Matt Bevins in this article exudes this same anti American antipathy I’m sensing from Matt Taibi among others. This time it’s cloaked in condemnation of Pharma, condemnation it heartily deserves I should say. And it receives it in this well written article. But it doesn’t stop at Pharmaceutical companies and their, bwah, evil owners in this article, does it. Or is that just me.
It feels like there’s a concerted effort of late to denigrate, mock, alienate and generally demonize America and its leaders. It feels orchestrated, definitely not organic.
I’m not saying America doesn’t deserve serious lambasting, it often does. But there’s a malignant undertone to a lot of the criticism lately from sources you wouldn’t normally expect. It feels spiteful and peevish, premeditated and planned.
I get the feeling its spreading tentacles are not an accident either.
Aside from all that, here’s John Cleese with a very good take on behaviorism:
https://johncleese.substack.com/p/a-very-profound-joke?r=kp9du&utm_medium=ios
The Cleese bit is great. Well, not a bit, but a statement
He often makes insightful observations on the world and our behavior in it. The one before this one on the English word “Know” is very good.
I meant to respond to your original comment in this thread. You and I could be twins. I have this sense that folks are afraid of embracing the America of the Revolution. It is easy to find fault. Much harder to embrace our country even with its faults. Kinda like religion. But I do think that is important. To believe in something - country, philosophy, whatever.
I don't know the answer, just that my skepticism gets in the way of what matters.
Check out Clarence Thomas' recent speech at UT in Austin, TX. Encouraging that someone like that is still on the Supreme Court.
https://www.c-span.org/program/public-affairs-event/justice-thomas-speaks-in-honor-of-250th-anniversary-of-us/677395
Don’t lose your skepticism. Healthy skepticism is good. Eventually though we have to choose whose banner we march under. If you’re looking for perfection in anything, you’ll flip flop and flounder. I suggest making a decision based on sound skepticism and rigorous testing. But make a decision.
By the way, personally I don’t see life as wholly political, ideological or idealistic choices. Though it is in many ways. I see it as a spiritual choice, a spiritual battle to be fought and won. So God being the banner under which I choose to march, headed by totally imperfect human beings, yes, but ones I perceive he put there to lead. But that’s me.
On another note. Have you seen Andrew Scott recite Edith Sampson’s “One of Five”? If not here’s the link:
https://substack.com/@augmentedman/note/c-244767336?r=kp9du&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action