In BC, fentanyl deaths have just kept growing from 50 in 2013 to 1,422 in 2017. In the US in 2016, 64,000 people died of drugs overdoses, up from 52,000 the year before. Fentanyl is behind the surge, as deaths from fentanyl have surged from around 2,000 a year before 2014 to over 20,000 in 2016. 2017 is expected to be worse.
The fentanyl crisis shouldn’t surprise anyone. It is the product of Big Pharma who pushes for profit not people’s health in a crisis of social, emotional and physical pain ravaging our society.
Opiate addiction is an ancient problem. Opium and its derivatives have been used for centuries for physical and emotional pain. Unfortunately, opiates are addictive. Surges in addiction coincide with surges in pain such as war and social upheaval like industrialization. Many large corporations sold opiates at the company store. Synthetic opioids, not made from opium poppies, allow pharmaceutical companies to bring us their patented magic.
Nothing treats pain better than opiates. Short-acting opiates treat severe pain. Long-acting opiates, like OxyContin, were pitched by Big Pharma, as safe, low addiction risk treatment for chronic pain.
Big Pharma’s advertising blitz to doctors coupled with alleged kickbacks in the case of one giant, Insys, produced an explosion of prescriptions, profits and addiction. In the globalized economy, where health and safety rules are considered red-tape and poverty wages keep many working people in permanent desperation, there’s lots of pain to treat.
Higher addiction risk occurs if using opiates for psychological pain. The need for some peace drives addiction, especially without physician oversight.
When Ontario removed OxyContin from the list of drugs it paid for in 2012, the hardest hit were the opiate dependent without alternative treatment options.
Enter fentanyl. Street chemists extracted fentanyl from so-called addict-proof products in the late 1990s. It rapidly became the drug of choice following opioid bans in many jurisdictions. Fentanyl is 100 times stronger than morphine.
Thus, the fentanyl holocaust, killing tens of thousands worldwide. Thousands have died across Canada, although none at safe injection sites. The simple real solution is eliminating a profit driven system and decriminalizing the use of all drugs, as in Portugal’s legal, medically- supervised access to pain treatment.
