The United Sickness of America: Pills over People
Studies show that over half of the American population regularly takes a prescription medication. If that alone does not seem crazy, let me remind you that we are still in the dawning age of the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmacies go back to the mid-1800s. Before that, you were probably taking snake-oil, unless you were lucky enough to have a friend who knew some things about healing herbs. And now over half of the country’s population has willingly become guinea pigs for products that have no long term studies. I’m not saying all pharmaceuticals are bad, some life saving remedies have come by way of this new form of medicine, but many pharmaceuticals have also been banned for the danger they pose. But maybe the most striking thing about this statistic for me is how many Americans consider their situation, whether it is a physical or mental problem, to be incurable.
How can we consider our society to have any semblance of health if the majority of people are “sick?” How is this statistic alone not a call for our leaders to address this as a national crisis? These are rhetorical questions of course. And you can probably guess my assessment, if you’ve followed me for even a short amount of time. The pharmaceutical industry, which is responsible for bankrolling most medical institutions in this country, has no interest in creating cures. Under the current structure of the medical establishment, the pharmaceutical industry is annually worth around $86 billion. And when the backbone of this industry is owned by speculators who are primarily interested in profit not in saving lives, we know that those in charge of the medical establishment will keep trying to squeezing profit out in any way possible.
The opioid epidemic is one glaring example why we should have never let the profit motive take over the medical industry. Since Oxycontin went on the market it has claimed 200,000 American lives, yet this number doesn’t account for the deaths of people who got hooked on Oxycontin and overdosed on stronger opioid drugs like Heroin. In 2007, Purdue pharma was taken to court where they admitted they downplayed known risks about Oxycontin, and they were fined, but no one went to prison. Soon after, the company adopted a new name, Mundi Pharma, and ran the same charade of in new countries like China, Brazil and Mexico. And still no one has gone prison. Shortly before the mainstream media began taking interest in the opioid epidemic as actual news, congress unanimously passed and Obama signed the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016 into law which made it nearly impossible for the DEA to arrest anyone in the industry for carelessly prescribing drugs. This law is still in place which makes the feigned shock and outrage from our politicians nothing more than lip-service.
Debilitating pain is very real for many people, and opioids can help. The same is probably true for every pharmaceutical on the market. But if the industry operates with profit motives that are so deeply ingrained in the industry that when the dangers of a drug are realized, our government makes laws to protect profit at the expense of people, we are not going to see doctors when we are sick, we are going to operatives of a drug-trafficking syndicate. And they want you to become hooked on their drugs.
In the past year, two childhood acquaintances of mine have committed suicide. Both were extremely creative individuals. Both were prescribed psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Their creativity was expressed in ways that put them at odds with society. At some point, they both decided with help from their parents and “medical professionals” that to be better adjusted to our modern capitalist paradigm, they needed drugs. The drugs failed them. The drugs were band-aids that did not address the root of the problem.
If our medical industry did seek to treat the root of the problem for people that would not involve regular drug use, it would lead to a reexamination of everything about our culture. The basics of health, I wrote in an article last week, begin with a low-stress lifestyle and healthy eating. But in a debt-ridden society, where cancer-causing food is subsidized by our government, and health-food stores can only be visited by a privileged minority, stress is rampant and eating healthy is difficult. Add to the mixture that the avenues where a person’s creativity can be monetized are few. Add to that the fact that more and more people need to work extra jobs for longer hours just to make enough to cover the basics of living. Add to that how most jobs available lead to long term health problems. Add to that the constant barrage of partisan negativity that is considered news leading to people becoming more and more isolated. Add to that the constant threat of nuclear war. Add to that the looming threat of climate change. I could go on, but I’ll stop it here. If it is not clear enough yet that when profit is more important than health, sickness becomes the norm, it is probably because you have become sick.