The solution to the drug problem is easy. Or so we are being told. Fentanyl is killing Americans. Drug dealers run it in fast boats to America. The solution is to kill the drug dealers by blowing up their boats.
As with most problems, causes are multifaceted, not black and white, and those causes may be unpleasant to look at. Such as the celebration of competition and being winners. Who wins? “He who dies with the most toys.” What characteristic makes you end up with the most toys? Ruthless greed.
We can directly trace the fentanyl epidemic to the Sackler family, icons of ruthless greed.
Purdue Pharma developed OxyContin, a highly effective pain killer once used only for intractable pain like cancer pain. It was a godsend to medicine but the Sackler family knew how addictive it was and began aggressively promoting it for other purposes. Sales soared. They even hired a hot shot advertising firm to promote it. When the government began strict regulations to stop the flood, desperate addicts turned to street drugs and drug dealers stepped in producing illegal fentanyl that was not only vastly more addictive (50 t0 100%) but lethal.
We see the same unrelenting greed in other realms of endeavor in our leaders in high places. Other corporate greed. So — look to yourselves and your vices. Maybe we need to stop fostering ruthless greed.
Secondly, woven into our national consciousness is the conviction that suffering is not part of life. In his book Yesterday’s Addicts, H. Wayne Morgan documents how Americans in the wild West considered the opiates used by doctors to stop the physical pain of injury miracles. It was almost all the doctors had to offer back then. Unregulated and plentiful, opiates crept into over-the-counter medicines that people used daily. Addiction was part of life.
So we have a history of accepting addiction and now a national philosophy that life should be emotionally painless. We do not teach our children to expect pain in life, that suffering is part of life. Even our pastimes are geared to avoid pain — such as addiction to the digital world, to games, to binge watching fiction. Then there are the “positive thinking” people who, rather than have a moment of genuine suffering, avoid it with thought control. We have “Happiness Psychology,” an entire new field. We have A Course in Miracles, based on the same line of thinking, where spirituality is defined as staying in a state of peace, eliminating spiritual transformation through dark night of the soul.
Even grief should be medicated away. I have a friend whose beloved husband died. Her doctor prescribed psychotrophics to ease the grief and she became addicted for life.
I remember the moment in the 1990s that Big Pharma declared mental illness to be a chemical imbalance and off we were to solving all mental suffering with chemicals, instead of helping patients to safely and intensely process their emotions to reach a state of peace and resolution.
Solving the drug problem is simple? I don’t think so.