Hopelessness, Heroin, and Corporate America

August 11, 2017

Hopelessness, Heroin, and Corporate America

“I’ve seen the needle and the damage done” sings Neil Young. We can relate to that verse. Due to overdoses, A whole generation of young men and women are dead, dying, lost. I have lost so many family members and friends to this insidious disease. Collectively, we shed a sacred river of tears. Today, I thought of the congregation of friends and family who have succumbed to addiction.

When it comes to a social issue that has resulted in the death of some of the kindest, loving, and gentle souls whose acquaintance I was blessed to make, I am duty bound to ask why this epidemic has gotten so out of control–I am duty bound to research and explore, and find some answers.

And I’m not writing this article for MD’s and PhD’s (yet they should not consider this a snub, and, if solicitous of the research, should continue reading). I am writing this for you: the addict, the addict’s friend, the addict’s family member. And if I start to lose your attention because of my choice of words or my citing of research, please be confident that in the end, you will understand what I have to say.

Please believe in your ability to produce a positive change in society. Your questions, answers, and experiences matter to me, and matter to the lives you spare when your share your story of how faith, hope, and love saved your life and ordained you with a serenity that a superficial high just cannot compare to.

Always remember what our goal is here: we are trying to figure out why all our friends are dying to a vicious disease–a disease that, if we’re being honest, wants to kill me, wants to kill your loved ones, or wants to kill you.

Already some of you have open-and-closed my research. “Addiction is a progressive disease that if left untreated results in death.” I agree with that statement, and so doesn’t the American Medical Association. But addiction is not a unique psychological illness. There are social/environmental causes that precipitates the disease.

One need only compare the rates of addiction in The United States with that of other countries.

It is highly unlikely that everyone with the biological trait that makes addiction more probable, somehow ended up in the United States.

Something precipitates addiction in American society, whether it is political or sociological/social psychological. There is an anomaly in the United States that leads to the highest rates of addiction in the world. The answers to the question, “Why have I lost so many people to this disease?” is closer to being answered when we discover these anomalies.

Let’s take a look at the political anomalies. The United States has a political system that requires candidates to consistently raise money. A congressperson is required to raise $15,000 a week to hold on to his or her seat. That money is not coming from you or me. It is coming from the pharmaceutical lobby. (Aliyah Frumin, “How much does it cost to win a seat in Congress? Well, if you have to ask…” Hardball with Chris Matthews. MSNBC. Retrieved from http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/how-much-does-it-cost-win-seat-congre Accessed on 17 August 17)

So far this year, the lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have spent $1,657,260,107 on bribing your federally elected representatives to pass laws that benefit the pharmaceutical industry (retrieved from OpenSecrets.org on 9 March 2017).

Money has a harmful influence on our government, but senators like Senator John McCain witnessed the greed and harm that infected our federally elected politicians. Senator McCain pushed for limits on the amount of money special interests could donate (or legally bribe) to our elected representatives. With Senator Feingold, he promulgated legislation that would limit soft money contributions to campaigns.

The conservative Supreme Court’s Decision in the Citizens United v. The FEC now allows corporations to donate limitless amounts of cash to Super PAC’s. Super PAC’s ostensibly do not coordinate with campaigns, but folks with no official role in the campaign act as the mediators between the campaigns and their Super PAC’s. After the nomination process the DNC and RNC act as the mediators. Essentially, since Citizens United, bribery of federal officials is a legal act.

Why is this important to the issue of addiction? The money donated to campaigns by Purdue Pharma, for example, have had devastating affects on the opiate epidemic. Purdue Pharma, “greased the wheel” for FDA approval. And at the time, there were no laws prohibiting companies like Purdue Pharma from enticing doctors and medical professionals from prescribing certain drugs. In Democracy’s Edge, Frances Moore Lappé writes:

…consider that throughout the 1990’s, pharmaceutical manufacturers poured more than $108 million into campaigns for federal candidates and their parties while the Food and Drug administration approved twice as many drugs in half the time it used to take to review them…hundreds of people have died while taking drugs that were later pulled from the market.

– Lappé, Frances Moore. Democracy’s Edge. Jossey-Bass. 2006. p. 59

The 90’s was the OxyContin Era. It led many people to heroin, and heroin has led to fentanyl–an opiate 100% stronger than morphine.

Did the prescribing Doctor tell people how addictive OxyContin is and how tolerance increases, which requires one to take a higher quantity to feel the same effect? It is doubtful. These drugs were pushed on medical professionals by pharmaceutical industries. According to Forbes Magazine:

The FDA approved the medication in 1995 and it soon took off. By 2003 OxyContin sales hit $1.6 billion as the drug helped drive a huge nationwide spike in opioid prescribing. At its peak in 2012, doctors wrote more than 282 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers, including OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet – nearly enough for every American to have a bottle. (Chase Peterson-Withorn, “Fortune of Family Behind OxyContin” Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/chasewithorn/2016/06/29/fortune-of-family-behind-oxycontin-drops-amid-declining-prescriptions/ accessed on 9 August 2017)

Let’s discuss the corrosive proclivities that exist in the social psychological make up of American society–a pervasive sense of hopelessness in the souls of most American addicts presupposes a sort spiritual malady. The genesis of this spiritual malady begins at a young age. We are exposed to commercials and advertisements that darken our souls with the belief that happiness is an external search. We seek money and material goods more than we seek peace, happiness and serenity, which can only be found in the deepest recesses of our minds.

The Jesuits at BC High taught me that happiness requires that we commit acts of justice–we must be “men for others”. And I never feel more fulfilled while engaging in acts of justice–particularly social justice.

And acts of economic justice are necessary to combat the socioeconomic factor in the addiction epidemic. Neoliberalism began with Reagan, and continued with Clintons and the DLC who sought to turn the Democratic Party into a fiscally conservative party.

The middle class has slowly disappeared. No jobs, the inability to take care of one’s family, the rampant hopelessness, all lead to drug use. (Carl Latkin, PhD.; Aaron Curry, PhD; Wei Hua, MD, MS; Melissa Davey MPH, CHES; “Direct and Indirect Associations of Neighborhood Disorder with Drug Use and High Risk Sexual Partners” American Journal of Preventative Medicine Vol. 32 Issue 6 (2007) http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749379707001110 Accessed on 16 August 17

The United Nations has been able to quantify the happiness of each country. The countries that are the most happy are Norway, Denmark, Iceland, and Switzerland. What do these countries have in common: universal healthcare, union membership of 80-90%, free day care, good schools, lack of corruption in business and governance. (Retrieved from http://worldhappiness.report/ed/2017/) Essentially these countries learned–a long time ago, at around the same time we were unlearning it–that the economic power of the United States came from the strength of the middle class created by the Keynesian economic model. FDR used this model as the basis for promulgating social security and medicare.

Our friends that have succumbed to this diabolical disease are not just the victims of their genetic make up. They are the victims of a society the values money and materialism over human life. Our society is based on the lie that materialism and self-interest are the traditional traits of American Society. This is an egregious lie.

Corporations have reduced us to consumers who seek happiness through external means. When we seek happiness externally we are bound to feel the pain of an inconspicuous oppression. Corporate greed and the milieu it has created has formed a society of demoralized citizens. This demoralization of our society is the reason we have lost so many friends. Rebellion is not antonymic to The Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Are we going to fight back, or will we continue to allow the demoralization of society by corporate America? If we don’t do something about corporations that make drugs like OxyContin getting away with killing our friends, we ourselves our sinners.

Drugs, heroin, politics, corporate greed, neoliberalism, politics

anti-union, Clinton, corporate citizen, corporate greed, Corporate rate america, drugs, empathy, heroin, Hillary, middle-class, obamacare, pseudo-capitalism, roosevelt, unions, working-class

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Paul Adams MSM

I grew up in the Old Harbor Housing Development in the Irish American neighborhood of South Boston. Currently, Southie has gained fame for being the home of gangsters, powerful politicians, and as the toughest inner city neighborhood in America. It is the home of Speaker of the House McCormick; but it’s the home of three housing projects as well. It’s the home of Senate President Bulger; but it’s also the home of Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger—the most infamous gangster of our generation. I survived the streets of South Boston by learning to defend myself in a boxing gym with national champions and professional boxers. I still box to this day. I also am very blessed to come from a family that values education and demands top academic performance. Out of my Irish grandmother, who has her high school diploma, she had a daughter that put herself through nursing school as a single mom (my mother); out of four grandchildren, I went to Boston College High School founded in 1864 by the Jesuits as Boston College, and the girls went to Fontbonne Academy. Both are college preparatory schools run by the Jesuits and the Sisters of Saint Joseph, respectively. These Catholic orders inculcate their students with the belief that we are meant to be of service to others. Three of the four have Bachelors Degrees. One has a graduate degree, and I am a graduate degree candidate at Suffolk University in marketing. My BA is in political science. I ran a multiplicity of Boston campaigns. I managed campaigns and was field coordinator. However, as field coordinator, my role was that of a campaign manager. I developed the theme, message, and strategy. The candidate and I start off with a SWOT analysis, and go from their. It requires tremendous trust for a public official to put her reputation in your hands, to trust you with their deepest, darkest secrets, and to develop a working relationship, so that the candidate does not need to be a campaign manager. Not all candidates are political scientists who grew up in politics and knew that campaigning was one of their callings. I remember taking on a campaign managing role in one of my campaigns en medias res, and it was a campaign manager’s worst nightmare: I had an articulate, courageous, progressive candidate from a great Latino family, including a father who was a Boston Public School teacher. However, he knew not how to campaign. I proudly took over that campaign. That candidate went on to serve as the Boston Coordinator for Kennedy’s U.S. Senate bid. I ran a presidential campaign for a labor union, and I needed to utilize my Southie street smarts to come out with the win. I worked for the Obama ‘08 Campaign as a co-founder of South Boston for Obama. I then worked for him for a year in NH, where I got to meet and speak with him. I served in two branches of government. I worked for the Committee for Public Counsel Services (public defenders), and, as an Adams, who going all the way back to John Adams, believed that the keystone to free society was fair and proper representation under the law for all people, no matter the court of public opinion. I also worked in the legislative branch for a statesman named Senator Hart. I did constituent service work, which was so rewarding. I got to give back to a community that gave me the opportunity to achieve my dreams and goals. As an undergraduate at Suffolk University where I served as the President of the Pre-Law Association and graduated with a 3.4 GPA, I was honored to be given a scholarship to study the effects of fascism and communism on Central Europe after writing a paper about my own family’s tragic experiences in Poland during Nazi occupation. I completed an independent study with a brilliant political scientist, Kenneth Cosgrove, PhD., author of Branded Conservatives, opened my eyes up to the ways in which conservatives successfully utilize modern marketing techniques to win elections. They shifted the country to the right with their use of marketing strategies. I am currently an MSM (Masters in Science in Marketing) candidate at Suffolk University. I am proficient with Wordpress and Squarespace; Google Analytics; social media advertising campaigns; and other forms of marketing like STP (Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning). This site will be the home of my new blog that will discuss politics and marketing. I hope my life experience and my education in these fields creates a healthy dialogue that can lead to higher truths.

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