It isn’t a new story. Back in the days, celebrities like Judy Garland, Alan Jay Lerner and Elvis Presley were made into addicts by the physicians to whom they had entrusted their health care concerns. Those were unscrupulous doctors who saw opportunities to exert control over their well-heeled patients and extract money from them. In recent years, Big Pharma, taking a page from that same playbook, is doing its level best to create an entire nation of addicts under a corrupt, profit-driven health care system – and bleed them dry while doing it.
Recent obscene price increases for a number of life-saving drugs isn’t the least of it.
They’re even targeting people who have wised up to their game and are attempting to take control of their own health. For example, how many times have you heard the dire warning, “Diet and exercise may NOT be ENOUGH”? Of course, fear-based advertising messages about how many people are suffering from, or at risk of developing a certain disease, are endemic. It’s all part of what is called “calculated messaging.” This marketing strategy accomplishes two things: it milks the taxpayers who pay into Medicare or get insurance through the Affordable Care Act for every dime, and it creates demand by increasing the number of addicts.
It is said that sunshine is the best disinfectant when it comes to this kind of corruption – and investigative journalists at the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) have been busy, providing that sunshine. Most readers of The Ring of Fire and other Progressive media outlets won’t be surprised at what CPI reporters have been discovering.
It turns out that for over ten years, a lobbying group by the name of Pain Care Forum (PCF) has been busy at work on Capitol Hill. This group, made up of drug companies, trade associations and other organizations funded by Big Pharma, has been busy convincing lawmakers of the significant role that prescription analgesics play among Americans, who already consume approximately two-thirds of all opioid pain relievers sold across the globe. In a letter sent to the U.S. Senate in 2012, PCF lobbyists urged lawmakers to hold a hearing on the issue of chronic pain among Americans. This was based on a report describing the issue as a “crisis of epidemic proportions,” and claimed that 2 out of every 5 Americans suffered from chronic pain. (Not so, say researchers).
What that letter failed to mention was another, very real crisis – the death rate from abuse of prescription painkillers. Fatalities due to drugs such as Vicodin, Percocet and Oxycontin have gone up by 300% since the turn of the century. The same year that the PCF sent its propaganda letter to senators, the number of deaths caused by the products they were touting outnumbered those due to cocaine and heroin.
Since 2006, the PCF has spent more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in lobbying efforts in Washington D.C. as well as every state capitol. That’s a small fraction of the revenues generated by the sale of prescription pain meds, which totaled $9.6 billion in 2015 alone. In comparison, lobbying groups attempting to get laws restricting the availability of opioids since 1999 amounts to a mere $4 million.
Money talks as the old saying goes. It talks even better when it holds its conversations with corrupt lawmakers behind closed doors. But the secret is out now, thanks to the CPI.