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Catherine Read

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by Catherine Read

Opiate Addiction in the US: Chasing the Dragon

This documentary “Chasing the Dragon” puts a face on the opiate/heroin epidemic sweeping the United States. This public health issue has been decades in the making. The fact that it affects predominantly white families – affluent, middle class and the rural poor – has created a stigma that has kept this problem out of the public eye. Drug addiction has been treated as a failure of character in this country instead of as a disease. The crack epidemic of the 80s was considered a problem affecting the black community – “thugs” and “crackheads” were racially charged terms.

The genesis of this current opiate epidemic is the result of a perfect storm of circumstances covered in Sam Quinones book “DreamLand: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” A single paragraph in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 stating that there was no evidence that opiates used for pain management was addictive became the “research” quoted for the next two decades by big pharma as they sold millions of prescription painkillers to the public. That prescription painkiller market created a huge market for a much cheaper drug in the form of black tar heroin coming across the border from Mexico.

We need to understand this epidemic. It’s affecting every community large and small across the entire country. Many families will not talk about the drug addiction affecting their family members. There is a tremendous stigma that has kept it a secret for far too long. Unlike other illnesses, addiction is not something people are willing to talk about. That silence has allowed this problem to continue to spread.

Shining the light on this issue is the only way to beat back this insidious monster that is stealing people’s lives.

Filed Under: Blogging, TV Shows Tagged With: Chasing the Dragon, Dreamland, Drug Addiction, Heroin, Opiate Addiction

by Catherine Read

Dreamland – Sam Quinones

Dreamland - Sam QuinonesThis is an incredible book. MBA programs in universities around the country should be using it as a case study. Author Sam Quinones is a long time crime reporter who became fascinated by the opioid and heroin epidemic that swept across this country killing more people than auto accidents. Quinones started researching the book full time in 2013 and it was published in 2015. The numbers are staggering. Just unimaginable. If it’s a subject you aren’t familiar with, it’s because the stigma associated with drug addiction and death has kept the largely white middle class Americans who have been affected silent about their suffering.

As with many books written by journalists, this one is gripping and reads like a novel from start to finish. The title “Dreamland” comes from a large community swimming pool in Portsmouth, Ohio. For decades it was the community gathering place. The book begins and ends in Portsmouth, which Quinones calls “America’s opiate ground zero.”

This is a story about big pharma, the release of OxyContin, a single paragraph published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1980, the shift in chronic pain management, the collapse of the manufacturing economy in many states, and the small state of Nayarit in Mexico that produced a large network of heroin traffickers out of its capitol of Xalisco. It was a convergence of pill mills in the East meeting a distributed network of drug traffickers from the West peddling a cheap and potent “black tar heroin” that collided in the state of Ohio.

The fascinating cast of characters includes Virginia’s own John Brownlee, US attorney for the western district in 2006, who filed the first law suit against Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, for criminal misbranding. “Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to a felony count of ‘misbranding’ OxyContin. To avoid federal prison sentences for its executives, the company paid a $634.5 million fine, among the largest in the history of the pharmaceutical industry at the time.”Read More

Filed Under: Blogging, Good Books, Virginia Tagged With: Black Tar Heroin, Drug Epidemic, Heroin, Opiates, opioid, opioid epidemic, OxyContin

Catherine S. Read
I believe in the power of community and the ability of one person to make a difference.

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