MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘OxyContin’

Crime Time

Posted by M. C. on March 28, 2022

Oh yes, I almost forgot: I once broke a pair of rackets after losing a close tennis match in a French tournament, and a man I didn’t know approached me and offered some pills to calm down. I told him to get lost. He later befriended me and I even hit some balls with him. His name was Mortimer Sackler, and his company Purdue killed 500,000 Americans with his pill Oxycontin. 

https://www.takimag.com/article/crime-time/

Taki

Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since article 1 section 9 of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus.

We are in the midst of soft-on-crime time, where DA’s like Alvin Bragg of New York City, Kim Foxx of Chicago, Los Angeles’ George Gascon, and, most infamous of all, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin have all declared let’s be nice to the bad guys, let’s be less punitive, and other such nonsense. In the meantime, crime has gone through the roof in American cities, with criminals brazenly breaking the law and looting stores, and murders having doubled in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The media, needless to say, blame the rise in crime on a white-supremacy aftermath, a bit like blaming the Jews for the rise of Hitler.

“If anyone qualifies for PTSD treatment it would be today’s police officers.”

In New York City a black career criminal lures two police officers to his apartment pretending his mother needs help and proceeds to murder them both in cold blood with an automatic pistol, while his witness mother claims that her son is suffering from mental illness and should not go to jail. Another career criminal executes a cashier in a bodega after the 19-year-old girl working a midnight shift handed over the hundred dollars. His family immediately claimed he had mental problems and should not be incarcerated but treated. Still a third career criminal kills a Chinese woman while she was walking to work for no apparent reason (except perhaps being Chinese) and declares that he has mental issues. That’s just three cold-blooded murders in one week in the Big Apple by…er…unstable men. During the funeral for the two slain policemen, photos appeared named “sea of blue” as thousands of cops turned up to honor their slain colleagues. That old hag, actress Susan Sarandon, denounced the pics, saying they reminded her of fascist parades.

PTSD used to be called shell shock, and that trauma was at times real. Soldiers suffered from it while engaged in ferocious combat—trench warfare in World War I, especially—and it hit its peak among the military during the Vietnam conflict. George Patton famously slapped two soldiers claiming to suffer trauma during World War II, and lost his command as a result. My grandfather as a cavalry officer stayed in the front for two years during the Balkan wars, and my uncle six months on the front line without a day off against the Italians in 1940, but for some strange reason the only thing that bothered both of them was the inability to change their underclothes.

Never mind. The world today is increasingly defined by an entire ideology of mental illness that bears absolutely no relation to the psychic reality of human beings—“they must be mad because no one’s that bad” type of thinking. Except criminals are bad, very seldom mad, and the whole psychopathological preoccupation has to do with the root of all envy: money. A cynic would dub it a doctor’s invention of a disease that doesn’t exist, but, not being of a cynical persuasion, I will not go that far. The three-card-monte con is made up by Big Pharma, the psychiatric profession, and insurance companies. One serves the other and so on. The evil doctor who created this Frankenstein monster was of course that arch pseudo Sigmund Freud, now lying in one of Dante’s deadly circles of Hell for having brought such misery to the world.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Crime Time

Posted by M. C. on March 9, 2022

So there you have it. Mental health is being used as an excuse for the criminal behavior of our ethnic minorities, by Hollywood types, and all sorts of freaks, drug addicts, and lowlifes, while the shrinks, the insurance companies, and Big Pharma rake it in. Oh yes, I almost forgot: I once broke a pair of rackets after losing a close tennis match in a French tournament, and a man I didn’t know approached me and offered some pills to calm down. I told him to get lost. He later befriended me and I even hit some balls with him. His name was Mortimer Sackler, and his company Purdue killed 500,000 Americans with his pill Oxycontin. Uncle Sam is asleep at the wheel while mental health hustlers are running riot.

https://www.takimag.com/article/crime-time/

Taki

Like a strange melody that keeps repeating in my ear are four letters, PTSD, an acronym for a psychiatric disorder that seems to afflict most criminals in America. I suppose some shrink invented it, then ambulance-chasing lawyers picked it up; finally the criminals themselves have discovered it. It is the quickest get-out-of-jail scheme since article 1 section 9 of the Constitution, Habeas Corpus.

We are in the midst of soft-on-crime time, where DA’s like Alvin Bragg of New York City, Kim Foxx of Chicago, Los Angeles’ George Gascon, and, most infamous of all, San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin have all declared let’s be nice to the bad guys, let’s be less punitive, and other such nonsense. In the meantime, crime has gone through the roof in American cities, with criminals brazenly breaking the law and looting stores, and murders having doubled in mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods. The media, needless to say, blame the rise in crime on a white-supremacy aftermath, a bit like blaming the Jews for the rise of Hitler.

In New York City a black career criminal lures two police officers to his apartment pretending his mother needs help and proceeds to murder them both in cold blood with an automatic pistol, while his witness mother claims that her son is suffering from mental illness and should not go to jail. Another career criminal executes a cashier in a bodega after the 19-year-old girl working a midnight shift handed over the hundred dollars. His family immediately claimed he had mental problems and should not be incarcerated but treated. Still a third career criminal kills a Chinese woman while she was walking to work for no apparent reason (except perhaps being Chinese) and declares that he has mental issues. That’s just three cold-blooded murders in one week in the Big Apple by…er…unstable men. During the funeral for the two slain policemen, photos appeared named “sea of blue” as thousands of cops turned up to honor their slain colleagues. That old hag, actress Susan Sarandon, denounced the pics, saying they reminded her of fascist parades.

PTSD used to be called shell shock, and that trauma was at times real. Soldiers suffered from it while engaged in ferocious combat—trench warfare in World War I, especially—and it hit its peak among the military during the Vietnam conflict. George Patton famously slapped two soldiers claiming to suffer trauma during World War II, and lost his command as a result. My grandfather as a cavalry officer stayed in the front for two years during the Balkan wars, and my uncle six months on the front line without a day off against the Italians in 1940, but for some strange reason the only thing that bothered both of them was the inability to change their underclothes.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Lessons from Fentanyl

Posted by M. C. on February 17, 2022

The moral of the fentanyl overdose epidemic story is not that prescription opioids should never have been legally prescribed, nor that advertising should be prohibited, but that individual patients should be more vigilant as they consider which course of treatment to undergo.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/lessons-from-fentanyl/

by Laurie Calhoun

pexels karolina grabowska 5207322

The use of drugs is sometimes characterized as a victimless crime, since the person who ingests them will bear the negative consequences should something go awry. Supporters of prohibition, who wish for the government to regulate and limit sales and distribution, are typically concerned with not only the moral effects on individuals themselves but also what might be called the “collateral damage”: the family and community members affected by the user who succumbs and loses “the plot” of his life, so to speak. This concern with “collateral damage,” however, applies to drug (including alcohol) use more generally, whether or not the substance in question is illegal. In fact, as both Prohibition and the War on Drugs illustrate, the crimes committed by users and suppliers multiply in tandem with laws enacted to prevent people from obtaining the substances which they wish to ingest.

If no one in the United States who sold drugs was committing a crime, then there would be no witnesses to worry about and possibly eliminate. There would be no need for armed cadres of contract killers to deal with the rival gangsters attempting to control sales over makeshift domains. No one would be in prison for drug possession or sales, including the parents of children rendered homeless or wards of the state as a result. The purchase of drugs would be rendered safer for consumers themselves, who would no longer have to gamble in deciding which criminal to patronize, having no idea what the source of the substances was and whether and with what they may have been cut. When drug use is criminalized, addicts in search of a needed but expensive (because illegal) fix may be driven to commit other crimes, generating even more collateral damage, only because of the illegality of drug use. It may seem axiomatic to libertarians that laws create crimes, but all of these empirical hypotheses, previously tested by the Prohibition, have been more recently confirmed by Portugal in the years since 2001, when the government of that country decriminalized recreational drug use.

The drug scene has transformed significantly over the course of the past three decades, as a result of the sudden appearance and spread of synthetic substances. Throughout much of the twentieth century, most of the street drugs which people were peddling had natural origins: marijuana, hashish, cocaine, opium, morphine, heroin, et al., are all derived from plants. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a potent synthetic drug, but it is not addictive and, aside from the hippie era, it has never been as popular as any of the aforementioned natural drugs. Today, however, for reasons peculiar to the explosion of synthetic drug production in the late twentieth century, including the never-ending quest of pharmaceutical companies to discover and market profitable molecules, many popular street drugs, too, are synthetic. Drug trends come and go, but among the substances which have taken off in recent years, fentanyl stands in a class all its own. Fentanyl is not only inexpensive to produce but also highly addictive and so potent that even a tiny dose can be deadly. At first glance, it might seem to some that the fentanyl crisis itself constitutes a cogent argument for prohibition. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as an examination of the etiology of the current overdose epidemic reveals.

The use of fentanyl as a synthetic heroin surrogate became widespread after millions of people became addicted to prescription pain medications such as Vicodin, Hydrocodone, and Oxycontin, and turned to the streets for their needed fixes.

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

American Pravda: Our Public Health Problems, by Ron Unz – The Unz Review

Posted by M. C. on January 11, 2022

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-our-public-health-problems/

Ron Unz

Opioids as the White Death

All of us necessarily focus on different areas, and until quite recently I’d never paid much attention to public health issues, naively assuming that these were in the hands of reasonably competent and reasonably honest government servants, monitored by journalists and academics of similar reliability.

For many of us, myself included, an important crack in that assumption came in 2015, when the pages of the New York Times and our other major newspapers were filled with reports of a shocking new study by Anne Case and Angus Deaton, a married pair of eminent economists, with Deaton’s career having been crowned a few weeks earlier by winning the Nobel Prize in his discipline.

Their remarkable finding was that during the previous 15 years, the health and survival rates of middle-aged white Americans had undergone a precipitous decline, completely breaking with the pattern of non-white American groups or with whites living in other developed nations. Moreover, this sharp fall in physical well-being represented a radical departure from the trends of the previous half-century, being almost unprecedented in modern Western history.

Although their short paper filled merely a half-dozen pages in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, it was quickly endorsed by a host of prominent public health experts and other scholars, who emphasized the dramatic nature of the discovery. A couple of Dartmouth professors told the Times “It is difficult to find modern settings with survival losses of this magnitude,” while an expert in mortality trends exclaimed “Wow.” Their striking results were illustrated by numerous simple graphs based upon easily obtained government statistics.

The two authors were both economists, whose normal work was distant from public health issues, and according to their account, they had stumbled into these remarkable results quite accidentally, while exploring a different topic. So the natural question that came to my mind was how such a momentous calamity affecting a large fraction of the American population could have been entirely ignored for so long by all the academics and researchers actually working in public health. Perhaps a short trend of three or four years might have escaped notice, but missing fifteen years of such a deadly national decline?

See the rest here

Be seeing you

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »