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US opioid epidemic, 2021 eyelids | Ideas

One day in Mexico, I struck up a conversation with an elderly man in Virginia who had recently died of cancer. Stung by her recollection of her childhood, her brother would reach out to parents on the street to thank them for their children’s beauty, and the gentleman added that cancer was not the only problem for his brother. He also said he was affected by another “epidemic” – meaning an opioid crisis that killed an estimated 500,000 people in the United States between 1999 and 2019, and claimed many lives as a result of the practice.

The coronavirus epidemic has only aggravated the situation, and the death toll in the US is now over 100,000 a year. About 75 percent of this is due to opioids – a group of drugs that include heroin, synthetic fentanyl, and painkillers such as oxycodone.

A December op-ed in the New York Times, entitled “Opioids Feel Like Love. ‘ , loving and beloved “.

The article emphasizes that isolation and loneliness often lead to addiction, and that the high mortality rate in the US over the past few decades has been accompanied by an increase in isolation. A 2018 study, for example, “found that nearly half of participants felt that they had someone to turn to for all or most of the time”.

So it is not surprising that coronavirus home-based programs and communication strategies can lead more Americans to seek rather than social and loving – not that the US people were more loving.

In fact, life can be lonely in a country that tends to spend billions on war instead of ensuring that its citizens have access to basic freedoms such as medical care – and where the evil system of capitalism hinders social cohesion. preserving the violence of the elite.

Speaking of war, the number of half a million – the number of Americans killed by opioid overdose for two decades – is similar to the number of Iraqi children killed by US sanctions as far back as 1996. When they face this number on time, then US ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright affirmed that “we think value and value”, which pretty much encapsulates the ideas of killing capitalism.

Likewise, the story of Purdue Pharma – the maker of OxyContin’s pain-relieving drug maker – who owns the Sackler billions. As stated in the December 2020 US conference on the role of Purdue and Sacklers in the opioid epidemic, “Purdue looked to top writers to promote OxyContin’s marketing, neglect and work around security aimed at reducing misuse of opioids, I encourage .the false stories about their drugs to keep patients away from other safe practices and to eliminate the guilt of people who struggle with alcoholism. ”

Indeed, former Purdue boss Richard Sackler said in an email that the “perpetrators” OxyContin (a type of oxycodone) were “the cause and problem. in the US with drugs.

Purdue Pharma was abolished in 2021 in a treaty that would make the Sacklers a billionaires, a common form of “justice” in a world where poor people are constantly imprisoned or forced to endure other, life-threatening conditions. penalties for minor medical offenses. The situation is even more irritating when one considers that people who take OxyContin often turn to drugs like heroin while the so-called “legal” ones are not available.

At the above-mentioned conference in the United States, a government spokesman offered David Sackler, a former member of the Purdue Pharma committee, the following statement: “I do not know of any other family in America that is worse than any other family. your ”.

But even though the Sacklers were chosen for their criminal activities, Purdue Pharma was part of the American strategy: killing people for murder. Just ask the dealership.

The company’s separation from the victims of the business that it staged demonstrations is a sign of how poor people are being blamed for their failure to do well in the organization that is killing them – and making them compliant with the law. respect.

Some U.S. businessmen have also been prosecuted for their contributions to the opioid epidemic. In November, an Ohio court found that CVS, Walgreens, and Walmart – the three most prominent chains in the country – were involved in “public disturbances”. And yet this is still a banned protest in a terrorist-infested country where government-corporate alliances in the lucrative and deadly practices of capitalism have produced a system that is seriously ill.

And as long as opioids “feel like love” in a loveless environment, there is no hard end.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Al Jazeera.




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