The opioid crisis has dominated the corporate media for the past few years. Opioid prescriptions have been sharply reduced, doctors have been jailed for prescribing opioids, manufacturers, physicians, distributors have been dragged into court for years and sued for tens of billions of dollars. CBS’s 60 Minutes has done a few segments on the crisis. There have been documentaries (HBO’s The Crime of the Century) and television series like Dopesick (Hulu) and The Pharmacist (Netflix). However, drug overdose deaths continue to rage out of control.
Dr. Andrew Kolodny has made a big name for himself by railing against prescription opioids:
That said, Andrew Kolodny has made a big name for himself, fueling the flames against prescription opioids. Mr. Kolodny appeared on HBO’s The Crime of the Century pursuant to Purdue Pharma’s role in the opioid crisis. I was initially impressed with Kolodny. He seemed extremely passionate and convincing. However, as more data on drug overdose deaths emerged and after I spoke with people familiar with drug users, Kolodny’s narrative began to crack.
Kolodny’s narrative that prescription opioids caused the pandemic is beginning to crack. Last week Dr. Jay Joshi and Dr. William Amarquaye joined Trump And The GE to parse through DR. Kolodny’s opioid hoax. There was an amazing energy as we walked through a recent Axios interview with Kolodny and laid out out illicit fenanyl, not prescription opioids are driving the spike in drug overdose deaths. With a few hundred people in the chatroom, at the 19:00 minute mark of the above video Dr.Joshi brought heat:
When you state ‘opioid addicted’ you are again, simplifying it. I think it’s important to note that nothing Dr. Kolodny said was wrong, but it was deliberately simplified, and the error comes in the oversimplification. When you oversimplify complex concepts into convenient narratives you eliminate the nuances of what Dr. William alluded to. He mention long-term access to care … the issue really is true access for all conditions.
If you focus on just opioid-addicted patients you’re missing out on the continuum of pain, dependency and addiction. There’s a fundamental relationship that harkens back to the earliest use of pain medication. The pleasure-seeking potential of pain medication is inherent in the medication itself. So if you try to separate addiction as its own isolated construct without taking into account the pain dependency addiction spectrum, you’re conveniently simplifying a very complex, ancient phenomenon that we as human beings have that in many ways transcends us as mammals … and how we internalize pain and pleasure.
We were able to convey a lot of complex information in a short time frame. Trump And The GE, along with doctors, patients and activists are slowly changing the narrative, one event at a time. Eventually, regulators, the CDC and the corporate media will have to respond.
