Dope Inc: Britain's opium war against the world

http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2010/2010_40-49/2010-47/pdf/54-57_3747.pdf

Being reprinted at a sort of a meaningful time for it....

LaRouche Pac:

Aug. 12 (EIRNS)—The deadly epidemic of opioid and heroin consumption and overdoses in the United States has garnered much attention of late. Some of the reactions have been well-intentioned but misguided (just stop prescribing so many pills); others have missed the forest for the trees (the problem is that heroin is now cheaper than opioids); others have been ill-intentioned and criminally insane (doctors and hospitals are at fault, and need to be educated about the risks of opioids).
The reality, however, is that the devastating U.S. opioid and heroin epidemic is part of skyrocketing production and consumption of all drugs, globally, as part of the deliberate Opium Wars marketing strategy of Britain’s Dope, Inc., the $1 trillion per year business which is controlled at the top by the bankrupt, London-centered banks—as Lyndon LaRouche and EIR have documented for over 30 years.
More than a quarter-billion human beings used some illegal drug in the last year, based on statistics for 2015 just published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in its World Drug Report 2017. Of these, an estimated 183 million consumed marijuana; 37 million used methamphetamine and other stimulants; 35 million opioids; 22 million Ecstasy; 18 million opiates (opium and heroin); and 17 million cocaine. Of all reported world drug-related deaths, one quarter were in the United States.
Heroin on the U.S. market comes mainly from Mexico (80%), Colombia (15%), and only a very small amount from Afghanistan. Afghanistan is still by far and away the world’s largest producer of opium (which is then refined into heroin), producing an estimated 6,300 metric tons in 2016. Myanmar is next, with 900 tons; and Mexico is a rapidly-advancing third, with an estimated 810 tons in 2016, nearly 13% of the world total. Mexico’s opium production has grown from “only” 250 tons in 2011 to 810 tons in 2016: a more than tripling in the last five years, all on Obama’s watch.
Cocaine production has also been growing rapidly again, after a brief pause in the early 2000s: total production of potential pure cocaine jumped from 720 metric tons in 2011, to 1,100 tons in 2015—a 55% increase. Most of that is due to world leader Colombia, under the pro-legalization Presidency of British puppet Juan Manuel Santos, where production rose by 125% during that same time period.
As for the epidemic of marijuana consumption in the United States—Dope, Inc.’s gateway drug of choice for its full array of products—it tracks causally to the huge, successful push for legalization under Obama: from 2007 to 2015, “daily or near daily use” of marijuana jumped by 75%, while those believing that there is “no risk of harm” from smoking marijuana skyrocketed by over 150%, according to data reported in the UNODC annual report.
With that big picture in mind, return to the opioid crisis in the United States, and the soaring deaths from drug overdoses and other “deaths of despair.” According to a report from the government’s Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), an agency within the Department of Health and Human Services, out of the roughly 7 million people currently out of work, opioid users constitute somewhere between one-third and one-half. In a related study published by the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank in early 2017, of those surveyed among people who are not participating in the labor market for “other” reasons (i.e., not because they are in school, ill, etc.) half said they had taken an opioid-based drug the previous day.
Why? Goldman Sachs has a simple answer, which lies by turning causality on its head. “Why aren’t more people actively looking for work again with the job market so strong?” a study published July 5, 2017 by David Mericle, Goldman’s senior U.S. economist, asks. “Part of the answer may be opioid addiction.”
The reality is exactly the opposite: soaring unemployment and despair in large parts of the United States, which is the result of bankrupt Wall Street’s deliberate destruction of the physical economy, is driving larger and larger parts of the population into the waiting arms of Dope, Inc., and death.