![]() Like many journalists, I’ve written about opioids. And documentaries Crime of the Century on HBO, and Recovery Boys on Netflix. There has been great journalism about the opioid epidemic, including the books Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted Americaby Beth Macy, Dreamland by Sam Quinones, and Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. “The amount of illegal fentanyl in our country has risen to an unprecedented level this year alone,” said Anne Milgram, an administrator with the Drug Enforcement Administration, according to WVPB. Although opioid prescriptions have declined, record amounts of illegal fentanyl are killing people. In West Virginia, deaths increased 62% to 1,300. For the 12 months ending in April, here’s the number of drug overdose deaths in the U.S.: The data the CDC released in November is shocking. It sounds like a crazy proposition, but America, a nation that loves to pretend that humans might live free of tragedy, fell for it.Īnd the problem got worse during the Covid pandemic, as isolation, depression and economic uncertainty increased so-called deaths of despair. ![]() Purdue, enabled by corrupt government regulators and the medical establishment, made billions by selling the notion that a pill made of the same stuff as opium and heroin, might be used to treat common ailments like sprains and headaches. The series, which was released in October 2021, illuminates the essential forces of greed, corruption, and our troubled relationship with pain behind the epidemic that’s killed over a million Americans, more than Covid, since Purdue Pharma launched an opiate medication called Ox圜ontin in 1996. ![]() Well, we just might find our better selves. Just part of being human being and sometimes good can come out of it, if we’re brave enough and willing to go a little deeper work our way through it. The further we fall into addiction and pain says to us: Hell, it’d be better off just feeling nothing at all, until we go numb and our souls go numb. There’s some kind of pain in a lot of us, all of us, that we just don’t want to feel anymore. At the end of Dopesick, the spellbinding eight-part series about the opioid epidemic on Hulu, Michael Keaton’s character, a doctor struggling with addiction, gives a riveting speech on pain:
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