We consume 75% of the world’s drugs. ibid.
Are we just a nation of prescription thugs? ibid.
Mad Dog’s [Mike Bell] addiction began in wrestling. ibid.
‘These doctors are profiting from keeping you sick.’ ibid. addiction counsellor
One in every ten Americans are on anti-depressants. ibid.
‘There’s too much money to be made.’ Our World: America’s Opioid Crisis, BBC 2019
‘When they first entered life, your first breath of air came along with withdrawal symptoms.’ ibid. addict
‘There is no other medication that kills so many people as opioids.’ ibid. critic
One in eight children in America live with a parent who suffers from a substance use disorder. And they all have secrets they need to share. ibid.
Every eleven minutes someone dies of a heart attack. ibid.
America’s greatest health crisis. 80% of heroin users started their path to addiction on prescription painkillers. And now pharmaceutical companies have been blamed for igniting this epidemic. ibid.
It was in the 1990s that this opioid epidemic began. ibid.
It was Purdue Pharma, with their painkiller Oxycontin, that revolutionised how they were marketed. ibid.
Purdue Pharma has earned more than $35 billion from Oxycontin sales. The company is wholly owned by the Sacklers. In 2016 the family’s net worth was $13 billion. ibid.
From the 1950s to the 1970s the German firm Schering manufactured a hormone pregnancy test that campaigners believe caused severe foetal abnormalities. In 2006 the pharmaceutical giant Bayer acquired Schering, and the company now faces a multi-million-pound lawsuit launched by the alleged victims of the drug. Bayer insists there is no link between birth defects and the drug, and denies liability. Bitter Pill: Primodos, Sky Documentaries 2020
I’m Dan Schneider. And I’m a pharmacist … My son was murdered buying crack in the Lower 9th Ward. The police have the attitude that it’s another drug deal gone bad. And these kids maybe got what they deserved. The New Orleans police department was corrupt. And almost none of the murders were ever solved. But I was determined to get the killer off the street. The Pharmacist I: Justice for Danny, Netflix 2020
I started noticing in the drug store an unusual amount of high-powered opiate prescriptions. There was a certain doctor using her licence to virtually decimate my community. ibid.
I saw this opiate epidemic in its infancy. We were creating addicts all over this country. Purdue could have done things to stop this but they saw the profits. Not only were they white-collar criminals, they were white-collar murderers. My son’s killer paid a price. What about Purdue Pharma? What price have they paid? They gave birth to a crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of people. ibid.
Jeffrey [dealer] said he knew my son and he wouldn’t have killed my son. ibid.
Addiction was not spoken of in pharmacy school. It’s not something we thought we’d have to face. The Pharmacist II: A Mission from God
When I see these kids coming in with these Oxycodone prescriptions I felt that something wasn’t right about this. ibid.
I was going out there [local pill mill] almost every week filming hard. ibid.
My mind went into paranoia. I really do believe I crossed the edge. The Pharmacist III: Dope Dealers with White Lab Coats
I was pretty much working full time at shutting Dr Cleggett down. ibid.
I saw Dr Cleggett taking pills herself when arriving at the clinic. The Pharmacist IV: The Tunnell, local prosecutor
Millions of Americans gobble down diet sodas, artificial sweeteners and thousands of other products that contain huge amounts of Aspartame and never even imagine that they could literally be destroying their health. Aspartame was discovered by accident in 1965 when James Schlatter, a chemist for G D Searle & Company, was testing an anti-ulcer drug. It is the most common sweetening additive being used in over 6,000 consumer foods, beverages, multivitamins, frozen desserts, cereals, pharmaceutical products, and artificial sweeteners sold worldwide.
One thing that many Americans do not realize is that Donald Rumsfeld played a key role in pushing the approval of aspartame through the FDA ...
While it has a very sweet taste, the truth is that Aspartame is much worse for you than sugar is.
Out of 90 independently-funded studies on Aspartame, 83 of them found that the artificial sweetener causes one or more serious health problems.
Aspartame contains three very insidious components: methanol, phenylalanine, and aspartic acid. All three of these chemicals have each been shown to either stimulate brain cells to death, severely disrupt hormone balances in the brain or act as a dangerous nerve poison ...
Aspartame accounts for over 75 per cent of the adverse reactions to food additives reported to the FDA. Many of these reactions are very serious including seizures and death. Organic Health online article
Since 2000, more than 500,000 Americans have died of opioid overdoses. Millions of Americans have become addicted. Every 25 minutes a baby is born with opioid withdrawal. The US government estimates that the cost of opioid abuse is over $1 trillion. We call this ‘the opioid crisis’. But a crisis is something that just ‘happens’. What if we discovered that the opioid crisis was caused by businesses seeking to profit from pain? What if behind the crisis there was a spectacular crime? Alex Gibney, The Crime of the Century I ***** Sky Documentaries 2021
No American family has profited more from controlled substances, from Valium and Oxycontin, than the Sacklers. ibid.
In the 1960s Sackler became incredibly rich by expanding the market for addictive tranquillizers. ibid.
Controlled-release Oxycodone, or Oxycontin, would be the drug that triggered what we call the ‘opioid crisis.’ ibid.
Johnson & Johnson also genetically altered the nature of the plant to create a super-poppy … Soon 74,000 acres of Tasmania were devoted to opium. ibid.
Blinn was taking the equivalent of 200 hits of heroin a day. He kept the prescription bottle for 20 years because he felt something was not right. ibid.
A nationwide criminal conspiracy that included Fraud, Pills Mills, doctors trading drugs for sex, false statements to Congress, and attempts to target key officials of the Bush administration … The FDA was used to falsely and fraudulently market Oxycontin. ibid.
None of them would spend a day in prison. ibid.
Lifetree Pain Clinic prescription: 60 x Amitriptyline 50mg; 30 x Celexa 40mg; 224 x Oxycodone 30mg; 112 Percocet 10/325mg; 60 x Requip 1mg; 60 x Xanax 1mg; 60 x Zanaflex 4mg. ibid.
Starting in 2013 a powerful synthetic opioid surged in popularity: Fentanyl. It’s a 100 times more powerful than morphine. Rather than reckoning with its dangers, companies sold it as aggressively as drug cartels. But instead of gun-toting dealers on street corners, men and women in suits and lab coats pushed opioids and cash bonuses and power-point presentations at pain management jamborees. Flush with campaign cash from Big Pharma, Congress would look the other way. ibid.
‘40 people every day die from Prescription overdoses.’ Alex Gibney, The Crime of the Century II ***** news
‘The opioid crisis started with prescriptions, prescriptions and patient care. This idea that we weren’t adequately treating pain. Drugs like Oxycontin … began to preach the gospel of the opioid … They developed new medical terms like pseudo-addiction … As you get stronger drugs, it’s more expensive. ibid. Joe Rannazzisi, insider whistleblower gives evidence
Fentanyl byproducts is killing a lot of people … It was a natural progression … Overdose deaths is under-reported, we know that for sure so we don’t know really how many people died. We started seeing massive amounts of death … prescriptions: 250 million. ibid.
An onslaught of pills, hundreds of thousands of deaths. Who is accountable? ibid. The Washington Post online article 20 July 2019
Some of America’s biggest pharmaceuticals were not only profiting from the opioid crisis, they may have been manufacturing it. ibid.
We have had many run-ins with the Sacklers lately. The crisis began when Oxycontin hit the streets. Their man point of contention is that they did not ignore the opioid crisis single-handedly. Whether you believe that or don’t believe that, there is voluminous evidence the crisis began when Oxycontin hit the streets. Purdue [Pharma] led the charge. ibid. Bernstein, Washington Post
Generic versions … sending massive amounts of these drugs downstream because there were corrupt doctors all over the country. It became like the Wild West. This was a new drug cartel that was being established in the United States. But instead of coming in from a foreign country, they were drug dealers who were wearing suits and lab-coats. ibid.
A patient survey form. You say, I got back pain. The problem is that no-one ever saw the patient. As long as they have any kind of credit card they were fine. You’d have a doctor on the east coast, a patient and drug seeker on the west coast, the pharmacy was in the mid-west. It was just a trafficking organisation that was hiding behind the veil of the internet. ibid.