Opioids:
Another Crusade Doomed To Fail
So... while the world is talking about the orange-skinned wacky man that
is in the White House, and the lunatic man-baby in North Korea, and the chaos
with the Islamic State and Iran, and the mindless social madness that is Kim
Kardashian and Kylie Jenner and Taylor Swift and whatever the pimped-out food
product is for the moment (as of this column’s
posting, it’s pumpkin spice), another so-called “war” has been quietly
ratcheted up in the media.
The “war” on opioids.
Not content with being part of the already-existing and already-failed
“War on Drugs”, certain groups have decided to specifically single out opioids for
attention and a perceived “need” for “society” to “fix”. Because, you know, we’ve done just a
“wonderful” job tackling the problems of cocaine, heroin, marijuana, meth, LSD,
alcohol, tobacco, not to mention poverty, homelessness, obesity, teen
pregnancy, healthcare, illiteracy… Speaking of which, we can sum up the great
“success” of resolving the “War on Ignorance” with three words: President Donald
Trump.
Oh, did that sting a little bit?
Good. There’s a pill that can
take care of that for you. There usually
is one.
Yes, opioid addiction is now the “new” crusade for self-appointed
crusaders to scream and wail about and demand that we all “do something” about
it. The problem is that there is no real
solution to this manufactured “crusade” because it is a crisis that was
manufactured by us in the first place.
What are opioids? Pain-killers. They’re designed to numb the pain.
Now, unlike some of the other drugs that we’ve manufactured a crusade
over, this kind of drug is not a “party drug”.
It’s not designed to help people escape or to have a good time. It’s designed to help them function, because
they’re experiencing pain that does not seem to go away.
Pain is our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong with
us. Something inside us is broken, or is
breaking, or hasn’t stopped breaking. And
it’s the kind of pain that does not go away that debilitates us. We cannot function. We cannot think straight. We can only think about the pain. We can only live in the pain and hope, even
pray, that it will go away soon, because we cannot do anything else until it
does. The real addiction is being used
to not having to deal with the pain.
So why are we in pain?
We are in pain because life puts us in pain. The demands of work, the demands of our
personal lives, put us in this situation.
We get hurt and we are expected to just “walk it off”. We have something wrong with us, but we are
not supposed to admit to it. We are supposed
to just take a pill and keep going.
Hell, we make movies about people who push themselves even when they’re
still injured! We play video games where
if you’re injured, just pop some medicine avatar and you can keep going.
This is something that goes back to the Industrial Revolution. You work people long hours doing things that
could get them hurt or maimed or even killed, and you expect them to keep
coming back to work the next day. They
can’t be bothered with pain. And the
business taskmasters can’t shut down the great machine just because you are
hurting. So you are told to just walk it
off and go back to work. And if you can’t,
then you will be replaced by other people eager to work that same job and put
up with the pain. The need to eat, to
feed your family and to have a roof over your head, is more important than any
kind of pain you experience, and unless you are part of the one-percent, then
you are seen as disposable and easily replaced.
And that mindset is just as true today as it was a century-and-a-half
ago.
And the rise of Big Pharma only made things easier to “manage the pain”. Now you don’t have to go to the local opium
dens. Now you can see your doctor, and
he can give you a piece of paper to give to a pharmacist so they can give you a
pill. The pain goes away, you go back to
work, problem solved.
Only it’s not really “solved”, is it?
People are still in pain, and the human body has a rather nasty trick in
that it learns to build up an immunity to drugs. So they need more drugs, stronger doses, and
take them more and more often to beat the pain that hasn’t gone away. Next thing they know, they got a new
problem... they’re addicted.
So that’s how we got here. Next
question: how do we fix this?
Short answer is... we don’t.
Because we can’t really deal with the addiction problem without first
dealing with the reasons why we are doing this to ourselves in the first
place. We are not dealing with the true
cause of the pain. We are just pushing
it aside. That’s what the opioids really
do. They’re just kicking the real
problem down the road, hoping that the pain will go away. We don’t address the source of the pain,
though. We don’t address the overloaded
demands of work and the unrealistic expectations of the elites and the sadistic
expectation of people being able to work through pain. No, don’t deal with any of that. Just kick it down the road and hope it goes
away. Ain’t “my” problem, is it? “I’m” not the one taking the pills.
No, we just want to deal with the addiction part. We expect Big Pharma to somehow come up with
ways to make sure their drugs aren’t addictive, or that they can somehow negate
centuries of human evolution of being able to adapt to changes – including the drugs
that we’re creating and ingesting. We
expect doctors to somehow violate their Hippocratic Oath to never do harm and
actually let people in pain continue to suffer.
(In other words, continue to be harmed.) And, on top of that, we somehow expect people
to just go on with the pain like nothing is wrong.
Well let’s get brutally honest here... any kind of plan to deal with this
manufactured crisis will be doomed to fail.
No matter how determined these self-appointed crusaders are, no matter
how effective any kind of government program will be, no matter how much money
is dumped into this manufactured “war”, it *will*
fail, because you are not dealing with the real problem, and are instead
dealing only with the peripheral issues.
It’s like having a car with bad brakes, and instead of actually fixing
the brakes, you tell the driver to not drive too fast and you put extra padding
on the seat belts because you know that it will dig into you when the brakes fail
and you get into an accident. Nobody
with even half a brain would consider that to be a real solution to the
problem. And yet, that is precisely what
we expect in this manufactured crusade.
It’s the same reason why all other self-appointed manufactured crusades
fail. One of the key reasons why
Prohibition failed in America a century ago is because it was all about taking
away the booze and expecting people to just deal with the situations that led
to them turning to alcohol to cope or escape in the first place. If they instead focused on the true source of
why some people turned to drink, then they wouldn’t have to ban anything. But we never did that, so all we truly did
was make that problem even larger.
To be clear, I understand that there is a problem with people overdosing
on opioids, just like there are people that have problems with other kinds of
substances. I also understand that there
is enough of a demand for relief from the pain to lead some people to turn to
risky options that could kill them. I do
not deny that these things are going on.
But I am tired of seeing history repeat itself over and over again
simply because we expect simplistic peripheral solutions while ignoring the substantive
reasons behind them.
The real problem in this self-appointed manufactured “crusade” against
opioids is not the drugs, nor the people that use drugs, or the doctors that
proscribe them, or even the big corporations that make them. It’s not even about the pain itself. It is the sources of that pain that truly need
to be managed. As long as we refuse to
do that, then we about as beneficial as the substances we claim to abhor.
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