“The Empire of Pain” is the terrible title of Patrick E. Keefe’s book, which later became a six-episode series on Netflix recounting how the Sackler family quickly became one of the richest in the United States when its patriarch, gifted in medicine and marketing, and with the soul of a gangster, invented, in the early 1990s, a painkiller more powerful than the morphine they sold as insurance, but caused thousands of deaths and millions of drug addicts until he was unmasked, causing the empire built on pain in the United States to collapse.
The success of OxyContin has been spectacular. It actually stopped or relieved any pain, chronic or occasional, of any intensity. A miracle in pills. Sackler used everything, first to gain strict FDA approval to sell the drug, bribing officials and politicians, spending fortunes on fake marketing, and salesmen who lured doctors into prescribing the drug.
The problem was that the medicine had to be taken every 12 hours, but after eight hours it stopped working and the pain came back stronger, until it was time to take the next dose, in a never-ending addictive cycle, in ever-higher doses.
Detoxification processes are terrible. The person goes into withdrawal syndrome and feels terrible pain throughout their body, which only goes away with the painkillers they are trying to get rid of. The only way is to hang on and wait. Or return to addiction and its consequences.
Pain is serious business, a weak point of human frailty. A simple toothache can drive the most powerful and richest man in the world crazy. Imagine worse ones. Worse than the pain, just shortness of breath. Pain at least has powerful remedies to overcome it, even with serious consequences like addiction. Shortness of breath only has temporary relief devices…
Michael Jackson died of a Propofol overdose and Prince of a Fentanyl overdose. They died from painkillers, ultra-strong painkillers prescribed by doctors that created six million addicts. But drugs and prescriptions became so expensive that addicts turned to the much cheaper but devastating street heroin.
These icon deaths and the painkiller epidemic seem to be a metaphor for today’s United States, where people are dying so as not to feel pain. But only those who feel pain know what it is. I’m talking about physical pain, because moral pain, humiliation, rejection, abandonment, defamation, there is no doctor. A lazy person who is useful.
The story that a ship shot down by the United States in the Caribbean was smuggling cocaine and marijuana to American consumers is absurd. Who would do the stupid thing to bring marijuana into a country where it is traded, grown and sold in most states? As for cocaine, to end narcoterrorism, Trump is simply telling Americans to stop snorting it. They constitute the largest consumer market in the world.
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