[ad_1]
The other day, in Mexico, I started talking to an old Virginia gentleman who had just lost a brother to cancer. Drowning at the memory of how his brother approached his parents on the street as a child, praising him for the beauty of his descendants, he added that cancer was not his brother’s only illness. He also said he was a victim of the “other epidemic,” an opioid crisis that caused 500,000 overdose deaths in the United States between 1999 and 2019, while destroying more lives through addiction.
The Coronavirus pandemic has only exacerbated the overdose phenomenon, with more than 100,000 deaths a year in the United States. Approximately 75 percent of these are attributed to opioids, a class of drugs that includes prescription painkillers such as heroin, synthetic fentanyl, and oxycodone.
In a December New York Times comment, “Opioids feel love. That’s why they’re deadly in difficult times,” he said.
The article points out that isolation and loneliness often lead to addiction, and that death rates in overdoses in the U.S. have quadrupled in recent decades as social isolation has increased. A 2018 survey, for example, “found that only half of the participants felt the urge to turn to someone or most of the time.”
It is not surprising, then, that coronavirus stay-at-home protocols and social exclusion measures have encouraged many Americans to seek alternatives to human relationships and love, not that U.S. society has ever been very, um, lovable.
Of course, life can be relatively lonely in a country that prefers to spend billions on war, instead of ensuring that citizens have adequate access to basic rights such as health, and in favor of an evil capitalist system that actively undermines human solidarity. maintaining the tyranny of the elite.
Speaking of war, the figure of half a million (the number of Americans killed by opioid overdoses over two decades) is the same as the number of Iraqi children killed in U.S. sanctions alone since 1996. Dealing with this statistic, at the time, US Ambassador Madeleine Albright affirmed that “we think it’s worth the price,” which perfectly captures the deadly logic of capitalism.
He also makes the case for Purdue Pharma – the maker of the massively highly addictive prescription drug OxyContin – owned by the billionaire Sackler family. As Purdue and Sacklers told the U.S. Congress in December 2020 about their role in the opioid epidemic, “Purdue directed high-volume prescribers to increase OxyContin’s sales, ignoring sponsorships aimed at reducing the misuse of opioids.” false stories about products to keep patients away from safer alternatives and to divert blame from people struggling with addiction ”.
In fact, former Purdue director Richard Sackler once said in an email that OxyContin (a brand of oxycodone) was “abused” and “guilty of the problem.” They are irresponsible criminals.
Purdue Pharma was disbanded in 2021 in a deal that would turn the Sacklers into millions less, a country that envisions “justice” where poor people of color are regularly forced to face life imprisonment or similar life-threatening disruptions. penalties for minor drug-related offenses. The scene gets even worse when you consider that people with OxyContin addiction resort to highly criminalized drugs like heroin when so-called “legal” ones are no longer available.
At a U.S. congressional hearing, a state official offered his direct opinion to David Sackler, a former member of Purdue Pharma’s board of directors: “I’m not sure I know anyone worse than any American family. Yours.”
But while the Sacklers have been noted for their alleged evil machinations, Purdue Pharma was just one part of the American way of doing things: killing from the dead. Just ask the gunsmith.
The company’s shift of blame to the victims of its predatory business model is also symptomatic of a neoliberal domestic landscape where poor individuals are effectively accused of failing in a dying society and paying the bill. honor.
Other corporate actors in the U.S. have also been sued for their contributions to the opioid epidemic. In November, an Ohio federal court found that CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart, one of the nation’s three largest drug chains, were complicit in creating a “public nuisance.” And yet it is a rather trivial accusation that in a profitable and deadly dependence on capitalism a criminal nation has created a system that is completely sick of government and corporate cooperation.
And while opioids “feel love” in an otherwise unloving landscape, there is no end to the crisis.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
[ad_2]
Source link
