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Thoughts On Coca, Cannabis, Opium & Tobacco – Gifts Of The Great Spirit

Tag Archives: Opioid


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1870 to 2018 – No Change

1870

2018

Nowhere near enough people understand, or care, that today’s “Opioid Crisis” is nothing new. There may be a few new twists – after all, Pig Pharma has been busy busy in the last 150 – 200 years, constantly tweaking their game to extract more profits from the misery they create. However, the reality is that nothing significant has changed. Here are just a few of the many comparisons that can be made.

  • In 1870 most people addicted to Opium-based “medicines” were originally hooked by medical “professionals” – doctors and pharmacists. In 2018 the same is true.

  • In 1870 it was the “patent medicine” industry that addicted most people with tonics and elixirs. In 2018 it is the “pharmaceutical industry” that addicts most people with pain medicine and psycho-drugs.

  • Most of today’s “pharmaceutical” giants started in the 1800’s as “patent medicine” companies. They have thrived for centuries on blood money, and in 2018 they are immensely rich and virtually untouchable.

  • In 1870 most people who became addicted began using opium-based medicines to deal with some form of painful disease, injury, or emotional state. In 2018 the same is true.

  • In 1870 “respectable” society treated Opium addicts as throwaways and criminals, and non-addicts firmly believed that addiction was due to lack of character. This prejudice was drilled into consciousness through endless propaganda coming from society’s “authorities”. The same is true in 2018.

  • In 1870 there were millions of addicted children, whose mothers were given Opium and Morphine-laced “tonics” by doctors to control behaviors like crying and colic that upset Moms. In 2018 millions of children are saturated with mind & spirit-numbing medications prescribed by doctors to control behaviors like ADHD that upset Moms.

  • In 1870 the “better classes” were able to hide their addiction, and to get confidential treatment when things got too bad. It was everybody else who crashed and burned publicly, allowing the elite to point, smirk and feel smug about their superiority. Nothing has changed in 2018.

  • In 1870 there were only two basic approaches to treating addiction. First, total, instant cessation and toughing out the withdrawal symptoms. Special asylums were built to incarcerate addicts while they went through the agony of withdrawal. The second approach was gradual withdrawal, progressively substituting something supposed to be less addictive. This was a less painful approach, but cost a lot more and took a lot longer. Instant withdrawal didn’t work, and progressive withdrawal only worked occasionally, and things haven’t changed in 2018.

  • In 1870 Heroin was used to treat Morphine addiction. In 2018 Methadone is used to treat Heroin addiction. Pig Pharma continues to prosper.

  • In 1870, very few addicted people were actually addicted to pure opium. Instead, they were addicted to the cheapest dregs of opium production, combined with boosters like Arsenic, Strychnine, Mercury, Lead, Cocaine, Morphine, Belladonna and Datura. In 2018 no Opioid addict is addicted to pure natural opium, but to synthetic substances that mimic Opium boosted with other highly addictive chemicals like Fentanyl.

  • In 1870 Draconian prohibition laws featuring the death penalty made Opium a very expensive and profitable commodity worldwide, creating global criminal syndicates shielded by corrupt police forces and politicians. In 2018 some countries still murder addicts outright, while others just lock them away for life. The criminal syndicates and corrupt police and politicians are reincarnations of the same evil souls that plagued 1870.

  • In 1870 there were hundreds of treatment programs pushed by social entrepreneurs and religious moralists promising to cure addiction. None worked, and relapse was nearly universal. Same in 2018.

  • In 1870 the true causes of addiction were well known. They were invariably some combination of pain, misery, poverty, hopelessness, isolation, loneliness, ignorance, and exploitation. In 2018 the true causes of addiction are the same.


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Diarrhea & Heroin Overdose – American Tragedies

Around 9000 people died of Heroin Overdose in 2014 in the US – or at least what was officially classified as Heroin Overdose – and that same tragic year over 8000 people died from Diarrhea. The Drug Law Enforcement agencies like to shriek that those 9000 Heroin deaths represent “A 400% INCREASE In these Tragic Deaths!!” But I ask you, if those 9000 deaths are so alarming – where’s the hundred million dollar War On Diarrhea? Where’s the equal love?

Well of course those deaths are each a tragedy whatever the cause – but the Heroin OD deaths are certainly not the kind of tragedy that the government is trying to sell them as, and like all so-called statistics they need to be understood in context.

A Few Leading Causes of Death in US – 2013 (source: CDC)

Traffic                         @45K

Suicide                        @35K

Opioid Pill OD           @40K

Poisonings                  @30K

Misc. Injuries             @25K

Falls                             @24K

Heroin OD                  @9K

Diarrhea                      @8K

So just in the context of raw numbers all the manufactured panic over Heroin overdoses looks kind of – manufactured, doesn’t it? In the context of non-disease causes of death Heroin Overdose is not anywhere near the top of the list. And as for Pills, according to The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the University of North Carolina and Duke University Medical Center, in 2007 there were more deaths from prescription opioid pain killer pills than there were overdose deaths from heroin and cocaine combined.

While my own experience is that I have known plenty of people addicted at one level or another to natural drugs who functioned just fine over a lifetime, I can’t say I’ve ever known a pillhead who was doing that well. Even the CDC figures above show that there are 5 times as many deaths from pill OD as there are from Heroin OD.

But it’s a hell of a story – worthy of Oprah for sure. “400% increase in Heroin Overdose deaths last year!” Right – from about 2500 the year before to about 9000 last year. That’s about 400%, any way you look at it.

Sure looks like Mainstreet America’s got a problem worth throwing a couple of hundred million dollars worth of Police and War machinery at, doesn’t it?  And then maybe when the Feds are done wiping out the Heroin epidemic they can go stalking one of the other killers on the list – I think Diarrhea would be a great next target for the DEA, don’t you? The initials of the agency wouldn’t even have to be changed.

All making fun aside, the true tragedy of Heroin Overdose deaths is that probably a LOT fewer of those 9000 people would have overdosed if they had been able to buy good, pure Heroin as easily as they could have bought a six-pack, and if they then could have gone somewhere clean and safe to enjoy their high.

Does that sound like a strange idea? As easy as a six-pack? Well, why not? Maybe not at a Mini-Mart but how about Heroin at your local natural medicines dispensary where you can also buy Morphine, Opium, Cocaine, and Coca Leaf along with Cannabis.

We know that our society has been thoroughly and deliberately propagandized regarding drugs like Heroin and Cocaine, so when we hear the CDC and DEA sounding alarms over Heroin overdoses we should keep asking, loudly and publicly, if there would be more, or fewer Heroin overdose deaths if good quality Heroin was available through the equivalent of a Medical Cannabis Dispensary.

Is it possible that there are people who really believe that making Heroin illegal keeps people who want to use Heroin from doing so? The cynical forces that created and enforce the Drug Laws and the Police State know better. They know that virtually anyone who wants to use Heroin or any other drug is already doing so. It’s not news that their game isn’t stopping “illegal” drugs – it’s sustaining and expanding a Police State built on the foundation of lies and fear.

The Drug Law mafia are cynically aware of that reality, of course, but they also know that millions of frightened citizens are frozen in fear in front of their TVs, waiting fearfully for the government to make them safe. And in these peoples’ minds, government propaganda has implanted the idea that there are hoards of impressionable children out there yearning to live life addicted to Heroin, sleeping in rat-infested alleys, and earning drug money by giving blowjobs in bus stations. This has them so horrified that they are more than ready to accept the government’s message that only violent punishment and imprisonment of drug users, drug addicts, and especially those evil drug dealers, will keep their the children safe.


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Poppy Juice, Synthetic Pills, & The Trap Of Addiction

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“The Intercept” has just run an excellent piece outlining the lobbying efforts of the Opioid Manufacturing sector of the Pharmaceutical Industry to scuttle new Federal regulations that would attempt to make it harder for doctors to prescribe Opioid drugs like Oxycontin. The major manufacturers involved in the lobbying are Purdue, Cephalon, Endo, and Janssen (a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson).

The efforts of these parasitical manufacturers to maintain open season on the wholesale addicting of new “patients” while at the same time keeping up the flow of millions of tablets of these drugs that somehow manage to leak into the street market ( who, us?), is symptomatic of the thug-like nature of virtually the entire pharmaceutical industry.

When you look at the numbers you see that pills are the main “Opioid” killers, not Heroin, not Morphine, and certainly not Opium from the Poppy, and for all the hype about synthetic Opium pills like Oxy, the job they do of relieving pain is no better than a pipe of good opium. Of the 47,000+ drug overdose deaths counted by the CDC in 2014, 8800 were due to Heroin, which leaves +38,000 due largely to pills.

The single justification for the “Opioid” pill industry’s existence is that their products are claimed to be safer than natural Opium, Morphine, or Heroin. If you want to find the reason for the industry’s panic at the increase in Opioid pill deaths, look at the ratio between deaths from the dreaded slayer of youth Heroin and the supposedly safe if used as directed wonder pill.

If a huge part of your industry’s claim to fame is that your product is safer than the juice of the poppy then you have to be pretty upset when people are finally realizing that your pills are killing users nearly 5:1 compared to the fruits of the little flower.

Consider for a moment two possible tracks for our society – the one we are on and the one that could have been, and yet might be.

The track our society has taken is to turn our health, just like we’ve turned most of the other key aspects of our lives, over to highly intrusive institutional management. Most of us no longer have any management role in our food, our children’s education, our family and community security, our finances, or our privacy. One of the results of our capitulation to pervasive institutional management of our lives is that the exponentially-growing health industry, always quick to spot (or make) an opportunity, responded by creating vast numbers of expensive, enormously profitable drugs for all those astounding new diseases of modern society that patients are required to take by their doctors who give no natural options in place of the medical management system’s proprietary pharmaceuticals.

The second track, which might have been, is that all of the medical knowledge gained by doctors, patients and society at large in the 1700s and especially the 1800s regarding three of the great natural drugs – Opium, Coca and Cannabis – might have been kept and nurtured rather than discarded and largely forgotten. Had those three natural medicinal drugs not been demonized and outlawed as part of the warped spiritual movement of the early 1900s that gave birth first to Prohibition and later to the War On Drugs, these three great natural drugs would be available today as a part of the :People’s Pharmacy” just like hundreds of other herbal, natural medicines.

The industrial pharma industry would still have developed, and a lot of people would still be victims of their concoctions, but without the legal framework lovingly erected over decades by authoritarian conspirators there would be a whole segment of the Medical industry devoted to the use of all natural medicines, not just those permitted by the state as part of its role in enforcing the monopoly of Industrial Pharma over medicinal products.

Even more important, a nationwide, community-bases network of natural medicine practitioners would have evolved – people in every community who knew how to grow all of the ancient medical herbs and who utilized the advances of technology to produce ever-more effective but still natural medicines.

Of course we have a great model for this system in the network of Medical Cannabis growers and patients who are finally emerging after the long night of Prohibition – which is still in the very earliest stages of dawning – to point to and see what might have been for ALL the great natural medicines and not just Cannabis, and not just in a few states in the US and a few countries in the world.

In a society where those who wanted any form of any natural drug could grow and prepare it for themselves, or could go to a reputable dispensary or belong to a regulated collective, then we would certainly have some addicts among these people, but they would be able to lead as normal a life as they chose to live without the constant suffering, pain, and jeopardy of addiction to “illegal drugs” and all the horrors that go with that scene.

People with little income would not be driven to prostitute themselves and do violence to feed a drug habit if the drugs they wanted were freely available in safe, natural forms. It is possible, is it not, that given access to natural drugs in a climate free of violence and exploitation many if not most people could use drugs and still lead a normal life even if trapped in circumstances of poverty.

I believe that centuries of recorded experience in societies worldwide shows that the overwhelming problem with addiction is how society treats addicts. If an addict is free to lead an otherwise productive and normal life, many will do so, and those who won’t would have been lost whether drug laws made them criminals or not.

Perhaps what makes addiction so awful for so many people isn’t what the drug does to them, it’s what society does to them as a consequence of their addiction. The popular image of addiction is what is used to sell all the prevention/intervention programs that flourish around addicted people. Human degradation in every form is shown as a consequence of drug addiction, and many people buy that and think no further. But consider the number of people who are technically addicted who lead normal, productive lives in comparison with those whose lives are supposedly ruined by addiction, you begin to realize that plenty of people are addicted to drugs and other substances and don’t descend to street prostitution, emaciation, bleeding scabs and sleeping in alleys. It seems that one begins to see that maybe it is circumstances and not the drugs themselves that determine the direction that addiction takes. Remove all the harsh punishments for addiction and I wonder – what would happen to addiction?

If the illegal status of drugs and the consequences for addiction were removed, at least drug addiction would no longer be part of the trap that ensnares millions of people in the US. Poverty and exploitation would continue in other ways – unless of course (you never know) some kind of new dynamic was released in poor communities by removing the key role of criminalized drug addiction in keeping the iron collar of poverty and exploitation firmly clamped around their necks.