When the CDC and the media were mass-producing lies and twisted statistics about the opioid hysteria epidemic for the public, and legislators were concocting dangerous anti-opioid legislation designed to make life more miserable for pain patients, COVID-19 was packing its bags for the U.S.
That we might ever be confronted with a real epidemic—pandemic, like COVID-19—that we’d need to be prepared for didn’t occur to these anti-opioid zealots. They were too busy whipping up public hysteria to make sure someone had gone shopping for epidemic basics, like masks or the special swabs (sort of glorified Q-tips) needed for virus tests.
Egged on by the CDC, New York officials like their colleagues in other states, produced opioid scare stories that would be recycled on the news and regurgitated to the public. “The opioid (illicit fentanyl and heroin) overdose deaths “remain at epidemic levels,” said NYC Health about the state’s 2018 2,991 “opioid-involved” deaths. Writing on the New York “opioid crisis” Roneet Lev, M.D., also Chief Medical Officer of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (where truth goes to die), stated—like most of her colleagues—the lie that prescription opioids were causing overdoses, and that “more New Yorkers die of drug overdoses than homicides [611], suicides [1,838] and motor vehicle crashes [943],” combined [3,392].
And here I thought you had to be good at math to get into med school.
2,991 ”opioid-involved” deaths, and the money rolled in. In less than three months in 2018, $34,2 million from the feds (uh, from you), so the blessed drug addicts could go to oversight-fee rehabs that would guilt-trip or pray the darn addiction out of them. (Of the 15,000 treatment facilities surveyed by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) in 2018, only 10% of them offered opioid treatment programs (OTP). Twelve-step “facilitation” was offered in 72% of the programs.)
Smoking kills 28,000 New Yorkers every year. Diabetes 4,519. Alcohol, plus 4,000 deaths (2016). Twelve million of New York state’s 19,5 million inhabitants are obese. Zzzzzz. But 2,991 “opioid-involved” deaths: $O$!!