Opioids & the New Opium War

are pharma profits a side hustle in the plot to drug the masses?

Recorded on the eve of my 65th birthday, I do a side-rant on the privatization of Medicare before launching into the opioid infliction, as I call it. I cite stories from my hometown in Appalachia in which, prescribed for medical emergencies, withdrawal was worse than the crisis. I ask if pharma profits are just a side hustle with something more insidious going on. Joseph Mercola seems to think so in his article, Another Layer of Scandal in the Opioid Corruption. Robert Malone gives a snapshot of unprecedented overdose and suicide rates in the pre-pandemic decade. I voice suspicions about Fentanyl being more than just a street drug problem. And I end with a commenter named GAN (not Gar, as I say--that's what I get for not wearing my glasses!) He talks about intoxicants and games being a way of quelling the masses, but that Rat Park shows we won't need them when there's meaning and community in our lives.

Quotes, links & related videos, for commentary see the video above:

Robert Malone in The Way We Were:

In terms of national politics, Donald Trump was President of the United States, and the US Congress was fixated on the issue of whether he had acted to coerce or bribe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky (who I had never heard of before) to reopen an investigation into Hunter Biden (who I had also not heard of, other than as the lesser son of Joe).  As the Presidential election campaign started to heat up, the US House of Representatives voted to impeach the President over the topic, but the Senate did not convict.  For the first time in U.S. history, the economy had avoided a recession for an entire calendar decade, but in a harbinger of the future 9,300 retail stores would still close by the end of the year.  The CDC reported a historic decline in life expectancy (to 78.6 years for a baby born in 2017, down from 78.7 years in 2016), driven in part by a 72% increase in overdoses in the last decade (including a 30% increase in opioid overdoses from July 2016 to September 2017), a ten-year increase in liver disease (men 25 to 34 increased by 8%; women by 11%), and a 33% increase in suicide rates since 1999.

Mercola in Another Layer of Scandal in the Opioid Corruption Revealed:

[PR company Publicis is] part of an enormous network that includes international drug companies, fact checkers and credibility raters, Google, Microsoft, public libraries, schools, the banking industry, the U.S. State Department and Department of Defense, the World Health Organization and Disney, just to name a few. As noted by investigative reporter David Marks in “How PR Giant Publicis Promotes Greed, Deception on Behalf of World’s Most Powerful”:

“An examination of one of the largest entities neck-deep in managing these mass psychological operations reveals the depth of the dysfunction afflicting the planet. The vast activities of the Publicis Groupe demonstrate how the tentacles of greed, profit and privilege connect the catastrophic agendas of the most powerful enterprises on Earth ...

Whether promoting opioids or pushing vaccines, rebranding status quo profiteering as a Great Reset, supporting cigarette sales, disguising the true nature of the fossil fuel industry, increasing soft drink consumption or covering for assassinations — Publicis has all the skills and facilities to create whatever fabrications are needed to sell products and influence how their wealthy collaborators are viewed.”

As a WEF partner and global PR machine for some of the most powerful industries on the planet, it seems reasonable to assume Publicis is helping to coordinate the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. Sadly, that includes not only the management and control of the peoples of the earth, but also the elimination of “undesirables.”…

This raises a disturbing question. Was the opioid crisis the result of an intentional plan — a conspiracy in the literal sense of the word — to hook the masses on an addictive drug? This is purely speculative, of course, but it surely fits in with The Great Reset agenda as a whole.

In closing, it’s worth noting that Publicis is partially owned by the Vanguard Group,34 one of the two largest asset management firms in the world. Together with BlackRock, Vanguard has a hidden monopoly on global asset holdings and exerts control through their ownership of some 1,600 American companies.35

Combined, BlackRock and Vanguard own nearly 90% of all S&P 500 firms.36 To learn more about how Vanguard and BlackRock own just about everything in the world, and have monopoly control over all industries, check out the 45-minute video above, “Monopoly — Follow the Money.”

I had seen the video above before, and recommend it highly as a stunning synopsis. In my video, I mention Gabor Mate and his brilliant, revolutionary analysis of addiction as a functional adaptation to a dysfunctional society. I often quote Aaron Mate and had wondered if Gabor was his dad. In looking that up, I found Caitlin Johnstone, who I also often quote, calling a discussion between Aaron and Gabor Mate The Best Political Video I’ve Ever Seen. Caitlin writes:

The Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté has done an interview with his father titled “America in denial: Gabor Maté on the psychology of Russiagate”, and it is the single best and most insightful political video I’ve ever seen. In 27 minutes it essentially describes the fundamental problems of our times, not just with Russiagate but with world politics as a whole, from the overarching behaviors of globe-dominating forces all the way down to the ways our own inner reluctance to face reality objectively helps to prop up those forces. So it deserves its own article.

I end my video with the hope that, like the Rat Park experiment, when we have purpose and connection restored to our lives, the addictions will release their hold on us—whether to drugs, intoxicants, power or distraction. Here are the two videos of mine that I mention:

How Whites Were Trashed

I respond to Russell Brand's interview of Tim Pool on critical race theory and Occupy Wall Street. I look at the history of Appalachia, where I was born and Tim has moved, as the trashing of "hillbillies and rednecks" to move them off mining and logging land. I answer Tim’s allegation that the US is slipping into civil war by seeing all wars as empire vs. sovereignty, citing the Spanish "civil war" in example. And I end by suggesting that we secede from the real government—Wall Street not DC.

The Epiphany Jumpstart on Gabor Mate

Responding to four interviews between Gabor & Russell Brand, this far-ranging episode discusses religion, faith & spirituality, Palestine, politics, pandemics & parenting, aboriginal art, the three brains of the body & anthropologists from Mars. At Gabor's suggestion, I delve into The Globalization of Addiction by Bruce Alexander (of Rat Park fame) on the dislocation common to slavery, money & addiction, bringing in David Graeber's Debt: the First 5000 Years. Bruce's essay, “What Shakespeare Knew About Addiction and We've Forgotten,” looks at addiction as a "semantic palimpsest" and its connection to devotion. In his second existential crisis he calls for epochal social change as the only way to bring about psychological health. I find that Gabor and I share a go-to deadly sin and I analyze his marriage, with much admiration. I begin by talking about the second greatest force in the universe, which I think is a person who changes their mind, and I end with the most powerful force that I call the epiphany jumpstart.