affects people's lives and they would like a way to live their lives to take care of their family without being in this pain what the brain. drain. brain that's not in pain people have it in their hear there's a. new. lemonade inside the company. they receive so many letters from people who had been suffering for years with no relief and finally felt like. they were getting to be alive again in a way they hadn't for years and that they consider to be the best thing that happened to me if i wasn't on this medication i just wouldn't be able to do the things that i'm doing now there's no question the best strongest and most opioids of serious medical patients are just a.t.m. machines. or you push the. pharmaceutical companies all though we're not entirely transparent about give take the thank you.

and we're told they were non-addictive when in fact they were. taught in medical school about this is the juice we only get told about illnesses that we're supposed to cure we also grew up thinking that doctors were always right so if you have a prescription it's easy and we talk about opioid painkillers we are centrally talking about. the drug companies or the cartel. are the pushers and the pharmacists are the suppliers. a see there's not a city in the united states right now the. major opiate addiction problem and it's not just in cities it's in fact in some places it's worse in rural areas than anywhere else at the peak of the epidemic millions of people in the united states.

prescribe 259000000 prescriptions of opioids that means on average every adult is on one opiate you know once or twice a year if not more scares the living crap out of me opioids are a major category of medical spending according to the centers for disease control it's about. $24000000000.00 in direct cost for the medications no other $75000000000.00 in health care costs people are doing and oxycontin $8010.00 pack a day that's a $1000.00 worth of medication to kids who are spending hundreds of dollars a day if not thousands. howel in washington. and it's cheap. really cheap really inexpensive and readily available the shame of addiction keeps us from knowing the actual numbers but at least 2000000 americans and probably millions more are addicted to prescription opioids prescription drugs. causing

more deaths for example than car accidents from 1909 to 2070 over 500000 americans have died from an opioid overdose more than all the americans killed on the battlefield since world war 2. we have iraq in rates of infant born like the head of children winding up in the foster care system because their parents are addicted kids growing up without parents parents who have lost children you have families decimated you have towns destroyed to think that it started off with you know a company in stanford connecticut that had some marketing material this is the worst manmade epidemic in the history of american medicine it's very clear when one looks at the overprescribing of opioids that's led to this public health crisis that the medical community really for. the 1st will which is

do no harm. opioids are among the world's oldest known drugs their medical religious and recreational use predates recorded history. these are really drugs such as opium codeine and morphine or extract it from poppy flowers and it's some kind of mystery of nature why did the poppy play out create morphine it can bind to the 'd opioid receptors in human brains and probably that's a mystery of nature will never be able to answer but that is the case because it's chemically similar to the compounds that her own brain makes an $874.00 an english chemist by mixing morphine and other assets created a powerful opioid that was eventually called die a seal morphine nothing much resulted from his discovery 23 years later a german chemist working for what is now the bayer pharmaceutical corporation created the same substance baier quickly promoted the drug is less dangerous than

morphine as well as a cough suppressant because of the heroic feelings recipients experienced they called it heroin heroin is a very slight chemical manipulation of the morphine molecule makes the compound heroin much more fat soluble the brain is mostly fat so if someone is exposed to heroin it gets into the brain many many times faster than morphine would the more route that a drug gets to the brain we were told in humans the more apt it's to cause a high this heroic drug originally promoted as a cough suppressant and for other common conditions were soon diverted and abused in 1904 the united states congress banned heroin declaring it a dangerous addictive illegal narcotic it probably would take too long for me to. provide a theory of why as americans we have. such love affairs with with drugs that

potentially can kill us opioid addiction led doctors to fear its use for anything but short term richard pain or end of life palliative care that was a time when the medical community did understand that opioids needed to be prescribed. there are obviously important medicines for easing suffering at the end of life they play an important role when used on a short term basis for severe acute pain for example after major surgery then chile's sciences started creating new semi synthetic opioids similar to heroin in 1917 oxy code was one of several semi synthetic opioids developed in germany you literally start with opium to make hydrocodone and oxy caught on and the effects that hydrocodone oxy co don't produce in the brain are indistinguishable from the effects produced by heroin if you give an experienced heroin user oxy code

known and heroin it's hard for that heroin user to tell which is which in fact if you ask them which they like a little bit better and unlike a blind taste test which was a study that is clumpy university the oxy code is preferred to the heroin so one of saying is that when we talk about opioid pain medicine worse since they talking about her own health and 892 doctors john purdue gray and george being and started the per do frederick company on manhattan's lower east side in 1952 it was sold to 2 other doctors raymond a modem or 2nd in the intervening years they expanded the company to other states moving their headquarters to stanford connecticut and changing the name for producing a private family many of them are doctors many that are philanthropists they've made a lot of money billions but they are night your typical. yacht's dating models things

like that their intellectual people they care about science cancer research on arts a 3rd brother dr arthur sackler revolutionized pharmaceutical advertising are there originated a blitz style marketing of drugs aimed at general practitioners through medical conventions as with well known doctor endorsements direct mailing and a sales force giving out free samples and perks. for the response you know wand and trust there's 963 campaign for the new tranquilizer value touted it as a safe non-addictive stress reliever women particularly were targeted to cure the every day stress of being a wife and mom valuing became the 1st $1000000000.00 profit drug leading to an addiction crisis by the mid 1970 s. and 1987 dr arthur sackler died a very rich man his successful marketing strategies continue to live on the per do

pharma. to do began focusing on pain management in 1972 they patented content a controlled drug release system produced form of believe that if they could link their 12 hour time release system content to an opioid pain reliever that could be marketed for chronic pain without the sudden rush or heroin high to the brain there is an interim logic to making lauren acting opioids because obviously convenience you know if your dose is in a day you'd also have your picks and troughs right so you wouldn't have those sudden potential respiratory depression on your own how to bridge your pain at the time opioids had limited use for short term acute end of life pain neither are markets where fortunes are made you know all of their sales materials were targeted to get to get the drugs out of the oncology suites and into the hands of local practice. do began funding organizations that endorsed long term use of opioids for

common conditions in 1993 they established partners against pain quote to help alleviate unnecessary suffering by advancing standards of chronic pain care through education $996.00 saw the launch of the 12 hour extended release synthetic opioid designed to be safe for both acute and long term chronic pain they called their new revolutionary drug oxycontin. the next step was to convince the skeptical medical profession of the safety and effectiveness of their powerful pain reliever per do at the time it launched oxy cotton in 1996 really opened new territory in terms of aggressive promotion of narcotics they did things that really had never been seen before oxy khat was really one of the 1st painkiller is that was marketed to general internists

and the public for moderate pain they are the company that sort of originated the playbook inspired by the arthur sackler playbook produce launched a marketing campaign to sell oxycontin through multiple levels of attack. let's number was educate the medical community from 1906 to 2001 purdue conducted national pain management and speaker training conferences and resources in florida arizona and california there in appropriately influencing maybe even corrupting 5000 doctors nurse practitioners and nurses to just sell the kool-aid several videos were created named both doctors and patients to encourage the use of opioids as a long term safe methods to treat chronic pain once a. video was entitled i got my life back the video centers around dr allen spano

sent his patients personal success stories thanks to oxycontin our gum a lot back now maybe i can enjoy every day. since i've been on this new pain medication i have not missed one day of work these videos were seen by about 15000 doctors through direct marketing seminars and medical school. and. i met kaiser one for my guide to financial survival this is a hedge fund and a the mice used by professional scallywags to earn money. that's right these hedge funds are simply not accountable. to them. totally destabilize the global economy you need to protect yourself and get informed watch kaiser put.

the simple things workshops in some people's back up public spaces where adults with learning disabilities can engage on equal terms with creative activities like graphics soong ceramics. cookery and joinery. just giving you shit what's it you know it was. very young but just as what did you give one case a couple of. the underlying idea of the workshop is a calendar of happiness which they feel thrilled to find joy in the little things of.

there was a period let's call it the unique polo you know period after the end of the cold war where the u.s. and nato countries and other people sort of wanted russia to become what they described as a normal country what they meant by normal was a country that was democratic by western standards that was capitalists that was a member of u.s. led international rules based order established by the u.s. i think a lot of people saw that as sort of permanent 2nd class status in the u.s. led system and i think it's pretty clear that russia in particular has been pushing back on that. and. joined me every day on the alex salmond show and i'll be speaking to us of the world of politics. i'm sure. i'll see that.

we now know that in patients who have no history of substance abuse no history of chemical dependency the likelihood that the treatment of pain using it opioids which is prescribed by a doctor will need to addiction is extremely low people like russell portnoy and many others were teaching that addiction was rare and these false words and that we should be comforting people in chronic pain just like we have learned to convert people with cancer pain and in fact if you don't do that you're probably going to be found wanting these are what is termed in the industry a k o well or a key opinion leader and if a drug company can hire these k o l's they don't have to do the promotion themselves and in fact a lot of what the k o l say to other doctors and other practitioners doesn't have to meet the same

level of scrutiny by the f.d.a. doesn't have to even conform to the labeling instructions for the drug a generation of physicians were trained that opioids were effective for chronic pain and unsafe blitz number 2 promote the drug they increase their sales force and their position called list these sales reps were offered lucrative bonuses their average compensation purdy's sales rep was about $55000.00 but they could get that increased by an extra $250000.00 bonus if they could get enough doctors writing prescriptions if you can increase your salary 5 fold you're going to cut corners who's the doctor writing the prescription for is that just the drug mill prescription office those questions just were not asked health care professionals received all kinds of promotional perks oxycontin fishing hats stuffed plush toys

musical compact disks and of course the proverbial free lunch pharmaceutical companies were off this all the time to get pens and then. prescription pads for their products were written and that's why you had to do was sign it you could take him out to lunch you can go to meetings you go to the meetings and there's a reception by those guys knew what they were doing and they must have been good at it or they wouldn't have done it but what happened is they sort of. grey shape the physician to them to be beholding for the goodies that they provided for them they're all guidelines for what the sales rep can and can't say that you're not saying and that lunch i'm not saying in on that lunch there's no recording or transcript of it who knows primary care doctors who fell for this began prescribe thing aggressively people always say follow the money there's considerable amount of money involved in the in the prescribing of opiates purdue paid honoraria

speaking and teaching fees to doctors boarding the oxycontin bandwagon he was taking about $100000.00 a year. and then we looked to see how much the drugs that he was writing prescriptions for were costing us and so the drugs he wrote for those drug companies cost us $500000.00 a year so they can easily target dark jurors that are covering 80 percent of all of the narcotic prescriptions and that's what produced did blitz number 3 get the state and federal regulatory agencies on board as well as the legislative branches big pharma is one of the most powerful lobby groups in washington they have armies of lobbyists that they use to reward congresspeople to reward senators most of it is done legally and above the board and in fact if you look at the websites that are out there you can see how much money is paid by each drug

company to each senator and each congressman but there's also a lot of sort of dark money that goes for you know political action committees and other organization. since that that we really don't know about in our system of special interest politics. the special interests unfortunately often are the ones that carry the day when it comes to produce farm and there was essentially an unholy alliance between. the company executives and the advisory board of the f.d.a. they reviewed the drug big pharma is supposed to be regulated by the f.d.a. but unfortunately through the badoo for laws big pharma is actually paying the f.d.a. . very large sums of money to review their drug applications so the f.d.a. doesn't do independent testing i've never bought into and that has taken account on the drug companies clinical trials for them i was investigating whether or. where

their company executives were essentially writing the advisory decision. that legitimized approving this struck the joint commission that accredits health care organizations mandated pain is treated like the 5th vital signs as patients routinely had their temperature and blood pressures checked doctors were expected to ask each person to rate their pain on a scale from $1.00 to $10.00 doctors and hospitals were mohnish to if they did not treat this pain the joint commission developed this pain as the 5th vital sign. as part of a grant of that was provided to them by the pharmaceutical company purdue pharma the joint commission on accreditation of health care organizations recently defined and adopted stringent pain standards on the basic thrust of our new standards is that organizations like practitioners have an obligation to ask the patient even if

the patient doesn't look like he or she is in pain ask them the surprised here when you go to a doctor's office how they ask you or are you having paid. though you may go for a raise that has nothing to do with pain which just added lighter fluid to the fire because because it became equivalent to say if you have pain you need opioids. at least in the united states you know 2 plus. you know i mean probably not for making people smile an oxy condom produced marketing of oxycontin depending on how you look at it very successful very tragic all the marketing legislative maneuvering cash and free giveaways handed to doctors and politicians might have been justified if opioids were a safe effective non-addictive treatment for chronic pain but they weren't my personal experience that it wasn't working. i was watching many of my

patients deteriorate. a few deaths. retrospect clearly related to my prescription produce on sales reps were saying that the rate of addiction is only one percent. with artsy con and that was clearly just false when you go back to look at the original data on which the and which their claim that that opioid use or pain medicine used for for treating pain doesn't cause addiction is scary the right of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by don't tolls is much less than one percent cited a study by porter and chick few bothered to check out the source of this critical statistic in 197917 years before the creation introduction of oxycontin. dr herschel jek used boston university's new crude database to satisfy his curiosity of how many hospitalized patients became addicted to opioids grad student

jane porter helped compile the statistics dr jacques rogge house press secretary typed it up and submitted it to the new england journal of medicine. short letter was one of the many printed in january of 1980 the power graph simply stated the statistics and made no conclusion. what everybody was citing as evidence that we didn't have to worry about getting our patients addicted in some cases this was being described as a landmark study it was this one paragraph a letter to the editor this of course would tell you nothing about the risk of addiction when you put a patient on long term opioids but it turns out in fact they have always been just as addictive as we always knew they were there for many hundreds if not thousands of years when people used the obviously and in the early derivatives of opium for pain control. as patients began to exhibit symptoms of tolerance and addiction to

do former was quick to pacify fears we were often taught that tolerance imply the diction but it doesn't tolerance just means that you may need to increase the dose of the drug to get the same effect but that doesn't go along with compulsive use of the trial and doesn't go along with any of the other things that with the concept of pseudo addiction what we were told was that if you had a patient coming in early who looked addicted that it wasn't addiction it was a pseudo addiction pseudo addiction is a fairly new term attorney came in about 990 but it's crucial pseudo addiction is. when a patient is looking the life of a drug addict because pursuing high in relief so pseudo addiction is relief seeking behavior in this state as drug addiction produces remedy for so-called pseudo addiction actually endangered lives if you had

a patient who appeared addicted to educational message was that you should increase the dose of the opioid. give them more opioids and sure enough if you give somebody who's addicted all of the pills that they could possibly want they do stop coming and orally they spend the day and narcotic stupor on the so the average daily dose went from about 80 milligrams a day to over 140 milligrams it's very just within a couple of years and it's shifted tremendously from the slightly weaker schedule 3 opioids to the stronger longer acting scheduled it's so by now the horse is out the door is closed you've got people running around thinking believing that they need these opiates to have a peaceful successful life completely pain free will the price that they paid was dependency and addiction to opiates dr peter grace research assistant professor

with the university of colorado boulder published a study indicating that opioids like oxycontin when used long term increase chronic pain rather than the long term use that really isn't scientifically justified by now study actually suggests that. the long term effects might not just be the absence of benefit but actually that they might be causing long term time release opioids when crushed snorted or injected. rushed to the brain similar if not better than a legal heroin. young people began diverting the drugs described or stolen from medicine cabinets to get high. to lead to addiction and overdose the children using oxy codeine by children i mean people between the ages of 12 when you're starting up to 25 all those children they crush the oxytocin they can get a whole day supply out of a sustained release but they became 2 kinds of opioid addicts the abusers and

those unknowingly addicted to a drug their trust a doctor had prescribed in the 1009. he's linda g. and noddy from exeter new hampshire sought treatment for back pain and fibromyalgia at her local clinic at one point. $150.00 milligrams however they do have that now patches plus oxycontin. i had a woman that lives in my building said to me you drive like you would cross and that was because of the opiates i don't drink so. and you never did anything other than what you would prescribe right another practice was the off label use of drugs this is the use of drugs to treat elements other than what they were designed for off label use is not illegal or regulated by the f.d.a. doctors began prescribing oxycontin for migraines and depression there's no law

against writing the drug for an off label use so there might be the drug detail guy comes in your office and you know with a wink and a nod and says you might want to use that try try that drug for this because some other doctors we know have used it for that even though it's not approved for that in addition to oxycontin other opioids were put off label use one of which was methadone a drug used to treat heroin addiction. and . some control from middle class to homeless overnight most of them are very hardworking people who want to get ahead that have either have some some health issues or have some of it out of strict about luck the whole

time joel bloom told me his pay for a place to live and missing just a month's rent can get she will victim to gunpoint if anything bad happens to. any thing that just throws your budget off slightly. you better catch up real quick or you're going to have a judgment of possession against you and get addicted anyone that's homeless is history like garbage people look at you like a monster or someone bad or you chose to be there most of the time it's not the case see how it is to be in the world's richest country. we are witnessing the rise of a new secular religion and it's called gives them the moment in a short history. and racism well everything is now considered racist the believers in this cult demanded deviancy self-criticism who really never told how the racism is to be eradicated or how it helps serve the interests of working people oh.

you're. black lives that matter protests the shake of the united states police in atlanta fatally shooting an african-american man causing a fresh wave of pain and anger. the other main stories of the week anti-racism demonstrators in the seattle 6 blocks of the city center declaring it an autonomous zone president demands the law and order and threatens to send in the army. as combat vehicles and drones appear with increasing frequency of rallies across the u.s. concerns that grow over the militarization of the police.