Broward County has more pill-mills (142) than McDonald’s. ibid.
Superior Injury Centre 870-6370. ibid.
There was one store in particular that was known by drug dealers as the go-to: CVS Pharmacy. ibid.
In 2011 there was a crack-down by the DEA. Operation Pill Nation involved more than 500 law-enforcement officers resulting in seizures of 7 vehicles, $19 million in cash and 105 arrests. ibid.
But the real problem wasn’t on the street. It was in the executive suites of pharmaceutical companies which had become addicted to the profits opioids could deliver. ibid.
Workers disciplined in Prozac mailings: At least one Lilly’s employee fired; seven face various other measures. ibid.
The product was Act-Tiv. It was a lolly-pop made of Fentanyl whose potency carried the enormous risk of overdose. ibid.
They start paying exorbitantly, a huge number of speaker programs, and they use the speaker program basically as a way of cover for the bribes they are paying. ibid. whistleblower
Clearly we’re breaking the law. ibid.
CVS Pharmacy: on the edge of a highway, so people would cruise in, get their drugs, and be out in no time at all. ibid.
I know they’re sick like me. Gotta be number one. ibid.
These changes are good to one way of thinking in the sense that they make it harder to buy and abuse pharmaceutical opioids. But what that does is it drives all these people who are already addicted on to the black market. ibid.
International drug cartels catered to those who had become addicted to prescription pills. As their need for narcotics increased and doctors were more reluctant to prescribe an increasing dose, users turned to heroin, and a synthetic opioid fifty times more powerful: Fentanyl. ibid.
Since 2015 Fentanyl overdoses have been rising dramatically. Rates have soared by 2000% in San Diego. ibid.
The company told me nothing ever. ibid. whistleblower
Late in 2020 the Trump administration rushed to make an announcement for the presidential election. Pleading guilty to three felony counts. The Sackler family would pay a $225 million fine. Purdue Pharma would plead guilt to kickbacks and fraud. And promise to pay fines totalling $8.3 billion. ibid.
Purdue is in bankruptcy and only has about $1 billion which a whole bunch of creditors are already fighting over. That money is never going to be paid by the company or anybody else. ibid.
A cruel irony: the only way the company could pay damages was to increase its sales of drugs, including Oxycontin. ibid.
The Rockefellers monopolized American medicine in the 1920s. They, along with I G Farben, Germany’s leading industrial organization, held the monopoly on the world's chemical and pharmaceutical industries.
The Rockefellers and I G Farben worked together before World War II and during World War II. For all practical purposes, the Rockefellers and I G Farben were the Third Reich.
But then, unfortunately, if you’re a true researcher, you don’t even stop there. Suddenly you get laid out all of the other more insidious, more horrifying documentation, such as who also gave rise to Hitler’s racial hygiene program – they’re the same people. They funded it. It was the Rockefeller family that built and funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics and Human Heredity, which was run by Swiss psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, who was named President of the worldwide Eugenics Federation in 1932. Jim Redden, The Satanic Nazi Flu Conspiracy
The pharmaceutical industry also known as Big Pharma – they have hundreds of thousands of doctors on their payroll. In the last decade they’ve spent over $2 billion on lobbying … $3 billion is spent on drug ads each year. America’s War on Drugs IV: Heroin, Terrorists and Kings of Pain, History 2017
The doctors were pushing Oxycontin also known as Oxycodone. ibid.
Copy-cat pain clinics began to pop up. ibid.
[Thomas] Midgley … put lead in petrol. In 1930 he discovered a new coolant for fridges: it was called by its initials – CFC. Midgley became part of a golden age of chemistry in America in the Thirties. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box IV: Goodbye, Mrs Ant, BBC 1992
It killed insects: it was called DDT … The United States was a continent plagued with insects. Farmers lived in perpetual fear of finding a new infestation. Whole crops were regularly destroyed by pests. DDT and the other insecticides invented in its wake promised victory in this war. ibid.
But the entomologists began to discover what appeared to be serious side effects … Many other species of wildlife were being harmed. ibid.
The chemical companies also portrayed the battle against the insects as a necessary war. ibid.
The first serious public attack on the widespread use of pesticides came from Rachel Carson. She was a biologist who had worked for the United States Fish and Wildlife service. In the late ’50s she began collecting evidence of the side effects. In particular, studies which showed that DDT was becoming more concentrated as it worked its way into the bodies of larger animals. In 1962 she wrote a book called Silent Spring. ibid.
Where once chemicals were seen as good now they were bad. In the early 1970s press and television became fascinated about any reports of the side effects of pesticides and herbicides and above all of the effects on human beings. ibid.
In the early ’90s an epidemic of mental disorders was sweeping America and Britain … uncovered by a new system for identifying disorders. Psychiatry had been attacked for relying on the personal and fallible judgement of psychiatrists and instead a new objective methods based on checklists had been invented. Adam Curtis, The Trap II: The Lonely Robot, BBC 2007
The drug companies announced they had created a new type of drug called an SSRI which they claimed targeted circuits inside the brain that were causing these malfunctions … like Prozac … The result was liberation from anxiety on a wide scale. But in the process the checklists became a powerful and seemingly objective guide for people as to what should be their normal feelings and what was abnormal. ibid.
Large parts of normal human experience, grief, disappointment, loneliness, were all being reclassified as medical disorders. In the process a new system of management was emerging: the drugs took away those complex and difficult feelings and made the individuals happier. But they also made them simpler beings, more easy to predict and manage. ibid.
In America in the 1960s was a man who was convinced that there was something frightening hidden under the surface of the new modern suburbs. Behind what looked like a confident individualism was rising up throughout America there were really hidden fears eating away at people from inside. There were feelings of anxiety, loneliness and emptiness, and he was convinced he could make a lot of money out of these feelings: he was called Arthur Sackler … Valium: he offered it to the doctors as an extraordinary new way to treat these inner anxieties, and he said it wasn’t dangerous or addictive. Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head III: Money Changes Everything
Betty Ford’s admission had a dramatic effect. In its wake stories began to pour out of people all across America who were also addicted to Valium. It seemed that there was a private hidden world of anxiety behind the public faces that affected millions of people. But Arthur Sackler who in the 1960s had promoted Valium as beneficial and non-addictive was unrepentant. And a company that he and his two brothers had started was about to develop a new drug: a synthetic form of opium called Oxycontin, and that was going to deal with the next wave of anxiety that would hit America. ibid.
A new drug was created: it was made by a company that had been founded by Arthur Sackler. In the 1970s Sackler had marketed the drug Valium to deal with the feelings of anxiety and loneliness in the sufferers. He had died in the 1980s but in the mid-’90s his company released a new drug called Oxycontin. It was a synthetic form of opium and it was sold as a painkiller … Oxycontin made them feel safe, in a bubble, protected from the anxieties and fears of the new post-industrial world … Adam Curtis, Can’t Get You Out of My Head V: The Lordly Ones ***** BBC 2021
American citizens are on the brink of disaster now more than ever … The absurd cost of prescription drugs. America’s Prescription Drug Cartel, Youtube 13.42, Second Thought 2021
Price gouging – standard American operating procedure. ibid.
Despite being the most expensive healthcare system on earth … it’s one of if not the least effective in the developed world. ibid.
The opioid crisis is largely a product of the marketing efforts by Purdue and the Sackler family … The nearly 140 opioid-related deaths a day we have here in the States. The Opioid Crisis is Much Worse than You Think, Youtube 18.58, Second Thought 2021
‘The ability to supply, withhold, stockpile and police drugs, and to influence the public conversation about drugs, has been central to projections of US imperial power since the middle of the 20th century’. ibid. Suzanna Reiss, We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of US Empire
Pleasurable drug use is so contradictory to the Calvanist culture America has been its identity around. ibid.
The pharmaceutical industry stands unchallenged in its ability to dictate government health policies. Big Pharma: Gaming the System, Youtube 42.25, DW 2020
Has the pharmaceutical industry’s thirst for profit become a threat to our public health systems? ibid.
A prisoner but also a guinea pig for industry for industry like thousands of other inmates … Multinational chemical companies came here to test the risks of their products. One company did everything they did to keep this a secret … Dow Chemical … These multinationals all have one thing in common – a culture of secrecy. Poisoned Lives: Secrets of the Chemical Industry, 2021
Polluting lands, rivers and groundwater, behind the fumes of these factories we have discovered there are tens of thousand of victims. In India children are born with severe disabilities. ibid.
Lack of transparency, cynicism, denial – in the meantime they continue to reap the profits. ibid.
Dioxin: Dow would study its side effects on the prisoners. ibid.
Dow secretly dumped this waste in the river that flows through the city. ibid.