By Frosty Wooldridge
August 8, 2022
Last week, I listened to NPR’s Terry Gross interview Scott Higham, the author of American Cartel, the opioid death crisis overwhelming America in 2021 with 107,000 overdose deaths. Please note that authorities expect another 100,000 deaths in 2022.
Writing for the Washington Post, Higham wrote a thoroughly terrifying book, American Cartel, showing how too many members of Congress facilitated the drug crisis by passing legislation to make sure that DEA agents could not shut down the distribution of drugs. In other words, our own elected officials and medical doctors are as criminal as the criminals who bring the drugs into the USA from our southern border, as well as the drug stores that stock them across the USA.
In 2021, 150 BILLION Opioid Pills Distributed Throughout the USA
How do you wrap your mind around 150 billion pills? Who could do that to THAT many people? How could doctors prescribe such deadly drugs?
That’s 150 billion pills—that’s the figure Higham gave Terry Gross during the interview. That’s why he titled the book: American Cartel. The enemy lives right in our own backyard as pharmacists, U.S. senators, sales persons, President Joe Biden, Mexican drug cartels, MS-13 pushers in all major cities, and God only knows how many other elected officials who benefited from opioid drugs such as fentanyl, and the list grows.
At some point, Joe Biden should be impeached for his breaking of America’s laws by inviting drug cartels to completely and totally overwhelm our border with Mexico. Joe Biden, by his own hand, invited this invasion of drugs across our borders. His legacy will be the hundreds of thousands of lives that suffered and died at the hands of the drugs he allowed into the USA.
But then you start looking at the medical doctors that prescribed them!
It’s estimated that more than 107,000 people in the United States died due to opioid overdoses in 2021. Washington Post journalist Scott Higham notes it’s “…the equivalent of a 737 Boeing crashing and burning and killing everybody on board every single day of the year.”
“In the new book, American Cartel, Higham and co-author Sari Horwitz make the case that the pharmaceutical industry operated like a drug cartel, with manufacturers at the top; wholesalers in the middle; and pharmacies at the level of “street dealers.” What’s more, Higham says, the companies collaborated with each other — and with lawyers and lobbyists — to create legislation that protected their industry, even as they competed for market share.
“Most people think it’s the political parties that run the show or it’s the White House that runs the show, but it really is the companies that run the show,” Higham says. “People were dying by the thousands while these companies were lobbying members of Congress … to pass legislation and to lobby members of the Department of Justice and try to slow down the DEA enforcement efforts.” (Source: Terry Gross, August 2, 2022, NPR)
If even one of you reading this column suffered the loss of a child, parent, friend or neighbor, you must be furious upon knowing that Joe Biden and Congress along with your local doctors facilitated and engineered this drug epidemic. All for what? Answer: money, and lots of it.
Higham says that big pharma fought to create legislation that would limit the DEA’s ability to go after drug wholesalers. The efforts were effective; more than 150 billion pills were manufactured, distributed and dispensed between 2006 and 2014, during the height of the opioid epidemic.
Meanwhile, both federal and state DEA agents are frustrated by the ways in which their enforcement efforts have been curtailed.
“If you talk to them, they’ll tell you that this didn’t need to happen,” Higham said. “The guardrails were in place to prevent an opioid epidemic. And those guardrails were removed by the drug industry, by its lobbyists, by its allies in Congress and its allies in the Justice Department.”
Higham said one DEA agent he spoke to put it stark terms, saying, ” ‘We didn’t get defeated by the drug cartels. We got defeated by the K Street cartel.’ ”
I implicitly add that Joe Biden may be deemed the ringleader. I defy anyone to argue with that point. He allowed over 2,000,000 illegal border crossers in 2021. He allowed billions of dollars of drugs to cross over the border. He allowed MS 13 drug pushers to expand their territories into your town. Without question, he’s one of the deadliest presidents in modern history.
We are living with the criminals within our ranks.
Higham said, “Johnson & Johnson and the big three drug distributors have settled for $26 billion, which sounds like a lot of money, and that money is going to go to drug treatment programs, etc., in some of these communities. But on the day that that settlement was announced, the share prices of all those companies rose by an average of 3%. So what does that tell you about how these fines and these settlements are affecting the bottom lines of these companies? It’s not having an impact.
“But when you talk to the families [of people who have died], they say: Where is the accountability? Where is the justice? This money, it’s almost like the cost of doing business and it’s not affecting them. They’ve not apologized. They’ve not said they’ve done anything wrong. And right now there are 40,000 Americans who are in jail on marijuana charges. And not one executive of a Fortune 500 company involved in the opioid trade has been charged with a crime.”
Money may be the biggest, most insipid, most prevalent criminal in America. Look what it does. Look at the gross inequities of drug addicts, the deaths and the misery from all who suffer at the hands of the CEO’s of Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, et. al.
What does it show this journalist? Answer: we’ve got a very sick society of those who lie, cheat and steal for money. We’ve got a very sick society of illiterate, miserable and decayed lives of people addicted to drugs. Is it going to get better? What’s your guess?
© 2022 Frosty Wooldridge – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Frosty: frostyw@juno.com
