#opiate epidemic | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

yourdailykitsch · 9 months

Text

Taylor Kitsch Says Signing onto ‘Painkiller’ with Pete Berg Was a ‘No-Brainer’

The Friday Night Lights alum digs deep to play a man addicted to opioids in the new limited series.

For Taylor Kitsch, joining the cast of the scripted limited series Painkiller was a “no-brainer” for several personal reasons. One, it was another chance to collaborate with showrunner Pete Berg, who worked with Kitsch on his breakout role as Tim Riggins in the 2006 football drama Friday Night Lights.

“He’s like an older brother to me,” Kitsch said of Berg on the set of Painkiller in early 2022, prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike. “We’ve been through a lot, and when I got this call, it was quite simple, to be honest.” After Friday Night Lights, Kitsch and Berg teamed up on the 2012 blockbuster Battleship and again on 2013’s Lone Survivor. “You already have that trust,” said Kitsch, “and the shorthand is really important as well.”

That trust was necessary in grappling with the heavy subject matter of Painkiller, a fictionalized retelling of some of the origins of the opioid epidemic that is believed to have caused over 300,000 American overdose deaths over the last two decades. The six-episode series hones in on an ensemble of characters to tell a broader story: Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), the billionaire senior executive at Purdue Pharma who pushes the wide distribution of opiates for profit; Edie Flowers (Uzo Aduba), an investigator at the US Attorney’s office who chases down answers about OxyContin; Shannon Schaeffer (West Duchovny), a recent college grad who’s recruited to Purdue to sell the drugs directly to doctors; and Glen Kryger (Kitsch), a mechanic who, after getting injured on the job, is prescribed OxyContin, which traps him in a vicious cycle of addiction.

Although Glen is a wholly fictional character, he’s the series’ main face of OxyContin’s devastating effects — another reason why Kitsch felt a personal responsibility in portraying Glen’s struggle. Kitsch has watched people close to him fight addiction. “Man, it’s pretty close to me, this thing,” he said. “Unfortunately, I think we’re all one degree away from someone who’s an addict.”

Authentically capturing Glen’s attempts at detoxing as he hides the seriousness of his addiction from his wife Lily (Carolina Bartczak) and stepson Tyler (Jack Mulhern) required some creative risk-taking from both Kitsch and Berg. Berg’s directing style, which Kitsch knows well, is dynamic and at times improvisational to keep the performances raw and real. “Sometimes he tries to get you out of your own head or your own way,” said Kitsch. “You don’t get faulted for mistakes — he just pushes you left or right. He keeps the set very alive and you move quick.”

The conversation about the opioid epidemic is far from over, as everyone involved in Painkiller understands, and Kitsch hopes his portrayal of Glen helps continue the conversation and remove some of the stigma and shame about addiction. “I’m very lucky to have served a lot of true stories and heavy things,” said Kitsch. “And this is right up there for me in the sense of purpose, of why I get to do what I do.”

Painkiller is now streaming on Netflix.

#taylor kitsch #painkiller netflix

22 notes · View notes

theculturedmarxist · 9 months

Text

The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly.

[...]

The Taliban’s successful campaign to eradicate drug production has cast a shadow of doubt over the effectiveness of American-led endeavors to achieve the same outcome. “It prompts the question, ‘What were we actually accomplishing there?!'” remarked Hoh, underscoring:

This undermines one of the fundamental premises behind the wars: the alleged association between the Taliban and the drug trade – a concept of a narco-terror nexus. However, this notion was fallacious. The reality was that Afghanistan was responsible for a staggering 80-90% of the world’s illicit opiate supply. The primary controllers of this trade were the Afghan government and military, entities we upheld in power.”

Hoh clarified that he never personally witnessed or received any reports of direct involvement by U.S. troops or officials in narcotics trafficking. Instead, he contended that there existed a “conscious and deliberate turning away from the unfolding events” during his tenure in Afghanistan.’

Suzanna Reiss, an academic at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the author of “We Sell Drugs: The Alchemy of U.S. Empire,” demonstrated an even more cynical perspective on American counter-narcotics endeavors as she conveyed to MintPress:

The U.S. has never really been focused on reducing the drug trade in Afghanistan (or elsewhere for that matter). All the lofty rhetoric aside, the U.S. has been happy to work with drug traffickers if the move would advance certain geopolitical interests (and indeed, did so, or at least turned a knowingly blind eye, when groups like the Northern Alliance relied on drugs to fund their political movement against the regime.).”

Afghanistan’s transformation into a preeminent narco-state owes a significant debt to Washington’s actions. Poppy cultivation in the 1970s was relatively limited. However, the tide changed in 1979 with the inception of Operation Cyclone, a massive infusion of funds to Afghan Mujahideen factions aimed at exhausting the Soviet military and terminating its presence in Afghanistan. The U.S. directed billions toward the insurgents, yet their financial needs persisted. Consequently, the Mujahideen delved into the illicit drug trade. By the culmination of Operation Cyclone, Afghanistan’s opium production had soared twentyfold. Professor Alfred McCoy, acclaimed author of “The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade,” shared with MintPress that approximately 75% of the planet’s illegal opium output was now sourced from Afghanistan, a substantial portion of the proceeds funneling to U.S.-backed rebel factions.

Unraveling the Opioid Crisis: An Impending Disaster

The opioid crisis is the worst addiction epidemic in U.S. history. Earlier this year, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas described the American fentanyl problem as “the single greatest challenge we face as a country.” Nearly 110,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021, fentanyl being by far the leading cause. Between 2015 and 2021, the National Institute of Health recorded a nearly 7.5-fold increase in overdose deaths. Medical journal The Lancet predicts that 1.2 million Americans will die from opioid overdoses by 2029.

U.S. officials blame Mexican cartels for smuggling the synthetic painkiller across the southern border and China for producing the chemicals necessary to make the drug.

White Americans are more likely to misuse these types of drugs than other races. Adults aged 35-44 experience the highest rates of deaths, although deaths among younger people are surging. Rural America has been particularly hard hit; a 2017 study by the National Farmers Union and the American Farm Bureau Federation found that 74% of farmers have been directly impacted by the opioid epidemic. West Virginia and Tennessee are the states most badly hit.

For writer Chris Hedges, who hails from rural Maine, the fentanyl crisis is an example of one of the many “diseases of despair” the U.S. is suffering from. It has, according to Hedges, “risen from a decayed world where opportunity, which confers status, self-esteem and dignity, has dried up for most Americans. They are expressions of acute desperation and morbidity.” In essence, when the American dream fizzled out, it was replaced by an American nightmare. That white men are the prime victims of these diseases of despair is an ironic outgrowth of our unfair system. As Hedges explained:

White men, more easily seduced by the myth of the American dream than people of color who understand how the capitalist system is rigged against them, often suffer feelings of failure and betrayal, in many cases when they are in their middle years. They expect, because of notions of white supremacy and capitalist platitudes about hard work leading to advancement, to be ascendant. They believe in success.”

In this sense, it is important to place the opioid addiction crisis in a wider context of American decline, where opportunities for success and happiness are fewer and farther between than ever, rather than attribute it to individuals. As the “Lancet” wrote: “Punitive and stigmatizing approaches must end. Addiction is not a moral failing. It is a medical condition and poses a constant threat to health.”

A “Uniquely American Problem”

Nearly 10 million Americans misuse prescription opioids every year and at a rate far higher than comparable developed countries. Deaths due to opioid overdose in the United States are ten times more common per capita than in Germany and more than 20 times as frequent in Italy, for instance.

Much of this is down to the United States’ for-profit healthcare system. American private insurance companies are far more likely to favor prescribing drugs and pills than more expensive therapies that get to the root cause of the issue driving the addiction in the first place. As such, the opioid crisis is commonly referred to as a “uniquely American problem.”

Part of the reason U.S. doctors are much more prone to doling out exceptionally strong pain medication relief than their European counterparts is that they were subject to a hyper-aggressive marketing campaign from Purdue Pharma, manufacturers of the powerful opioid OxyContin. Purdue launched OxyContin in 1996, and its agents swarmed doctors’ offices to push the new “wonder drug.”

Yet, in lawsuit after lawsuit, the company has been accused of lying about both the effectiveness and the addictiveness of OxyContin, a drug that has hooked countless Americans onto opioids. And when legal but incredibly addictive prescription opioids dry up, Americans turned to illicit substances like heroin and fentanyl as substitutes.

Purdue Pharma owners, the Sackler family, have regularly been described as the most evil family in America, with many laying the blame for the hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths squarely at their door. In 2019, under the weight of thousands of lawsuits against it, Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy. A year later, it plead guilty to criminal charges over its mismarketing of OxyContin.

Nevertheless, the Sacklers made out like bandits from their actions. Even after being forced last year to pay nearly $6 billion in cash to victims of the opioid crisis, they remain one of the world’s richest families and have refused to apologize for their role in constructing an empire of pain that has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Instead, the family has attempted to launder their image through philanthropy, sponsoring many of the most prestigious arts and cultural institutions in the world. These include the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, Yale University, and the British Museum and Royal Academy in London.

One group who are disproportionately affected by opioids like OxyContin, heroin and fentanyl are veterans. According to the National Institutes of Health, veterans are twice as likely to die from overdose than the general population. One reason for this is bureaucracy. “The Veterans Administration did a really poor job in the past decades with their pain management, particularly their reliance on opioids,” Hoh, a former marine, told MintPress, noting that the V.A. prescribed dangerous opioids at a higher rate than other healthcare agencies.

Ex-soldiers often have to cope with chronic pain and brain injuries. Hoh noted that around a quarter-million veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq have traumatic brain injuries. But added to that are the deep moral injuries many suffered – injuries that typically cannot be seen. As Hoh noted:

Veterans are turning to [opioids like fentanyl] to deal with the mental, emotional and spiritual consequences of the war, using them to quell the distress, try to find some relief, escape from the depression, and deal with the demons that come home with veterans who took part in those wars.”

Thus, if the Taliban’s opium eradication program continues, it could spark a fentanyl crisis that might kill more Americans than the 20-year occupation ever did.

Broken Society

If diseases of despair are common throughout the United States, they are rampant in Afghanistan itself. A global report released in March revealed that Afghans are by far the most miserable people on Earth. Afghans evaluated their lives at 1.8 out of 10 – dead last and far behind the top of the pile Finland (7.8 out of 10).

Opium addiction in Afghanistan is out of control, with around 9% of the adult population (and a significant number of children) addicted. Between 2005 and 2015, the number of adult drug users jumped from 900,000 to 2.4 million, according to the United Nations, which estimates that almost one in three households is directly affected by addiction. As opium is frequently injected, blood-transmitted conditions like HIV are common as well.

The opioid problem has also spilled into neighboring countries such as Iran and Pakistan. A 2013 United Nations report estimated that almost 2.5 million Pakistanis were abusing opioids, including 11% of people in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Around 700 people die each day from overdoses.

Empire of Drugs

Given their history, It is perhaps understandable that Asian nations have generally taken far more authoritarian measures to counter drug addiction issues. For centuries, using the illegal drug trade to advance imperial objectives has been a common Western tactic. In the 1940s and 1950s, the French utilized opium crops in the “Golden Triangle” region of Southeast Asia in order to counter the growing Vietnamese independence movement.

A century previously, the British used opium to crush and conquer much of China. Britain’s insatiable thirst for Chinese tea was beginning to bankrupt the country, seeing as China would only accept gold or silver in exchange. The British, therefore, used the power of its navy to force China to cede Hong Kong to it. From there, it flooded mainland China with opium grown in South Asia (including Afghanistan).

The effect of the Opium War was astonishing. By 1880, the British were inundating China with more than 6,500 tons of opium per year – the equivalent of many billions of doses. Chinese society crumbled, unable to deal with the empire-wide social and economic dislocation that millions of opium addicts brought. Today, the Chinese continue to refer to the period as the “century of humiliation”.

Meanwhile, in South Asia, the British forced farmers to plant poppy fields instead of edible crops, causing waves of giant famines, the likes of which had never been seen before or since.

And during the 1980s in Central America, the United States sold weapons to Iran in order to fund far-right Contra death squads. The Contras were deeply implicated in the cocaine trade, fuelling their dirty war through crack cocaine sales in the U.S. – a practice that, according to journalist Gary Webb, the Central Intelligence Agency facilitated.

Imperialism and illicit drugs, therefore, commonly go together. However, with the Taliban opium eradication effort in full effect, coupled with the uniquely American phenomenon of opioid addiction, it is possible that the United States will suffer significant blowback in the coming years. The deadly fentanyl epidemic will likely only get worse, needlessly taking hundreds of thousands more American lives. Thus, even as Afghanistan attempts to rid itself of its deadly drug addiction problem, its actions could precipitate an epidemic that promises to kill more Americans than any of Washington’s imperial endeavors to date.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

#afghanistan #taliban #war on drugs #fentanyl #heroine #us occupation of afghanistan #us imperialism #diseases of despair #drug trade

26 notes · View notes

omegaplus · 1 year

Text

# 4,276

William S. Burroughs: “A Junky’s Christmas”, Spare Ass Annie And Other Tales (1993)

Christmas 2012. I finished having holiday dinner in Mastic with my friend from the Brentwood era. 10:30PM arrived and she was tiring out for the night, so we hugged and said our good-byes until whenever. I don’t remember. I had the college station on the dial as I turned the ignition and “A Junky’s Christmas” came on. I caught the tail end of it as the selection apexed itself and immediately segued into some trash lo-fi garage rock. I take off and drove west towards Route 27A / Sunrise Highway where I had the dim low-light road all to myself for a good five minutes under the stars and an almost-full moon, partially obscured by passing clouds covering up the pitch-black meta night sky. Yep, “A Junky’s Christmas” couldn’t have come at a better time which was five years after the start of Long Island’s opiate ‘epidemic’, and as I got back in touch with an old flame whom I haven’t seen in almost six years - the same amount of time she was deep into opiate addiction herself.

#William S. Burroughs #Long Island #personal #drugs #omega #music #mixtapes #reviews #playlists

63 notes · View notes

pornosophical · 2 months

Text

The pharma companies didn't just stop making ADHD medication, it's a whole big kerfuffle (Operation Bottleneck) with the DEA/FDA trying to head off another oxycontin situation and absolutely shitting the bed by refusing to recognize that opiates and stimulants are very different

There’s been a national shortage of ADHD medication for more than a year and a half. According to the government and industry experts, there are multiple overlapping causes: manufacturing problems, labor issues, supply-chain failures, and a huge rise in demand during the pandemic. But Ascent claims there’s another factor exacerbating the shortage, one that’s completely sui generis: the fact that it’s been shut down by the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency has accused Ascent of shabby recordkeeping that might have allowed millions of pills to go unaccounted for. Ascent makes painkillers in addition to stimulants, and, amid the ongoing opioid epidemic, the DEA has been under pressure to show it is aggressively policing the industry. (The agency did not respond to requests for comment.) Ascent has said that its paperwork is in order and has sued the Department of Justice to get its assembly lines working again.

4 notes · View notes

pregnant-and-addicted · 3 months

Text

~PLEASE FOLLOW ME TO SUPPORT ME AND TO STAY UPDATED WITH HOW MY CRISIS UNFOLDS! I WILL FOLLOW YOU BACK~

So basically, everything is as screwed up now as it could possibly be and at this rate I'm set to lose my son to CPS, but I'm not going to let that happen which means I'm going to have to take some drastic steps here in the next week, all while praying that I can stay out of preterm labor because I've begun having symptoms of upcoming labor and I've only got a mere 30ish days remaining. My methadone program has utterly refused to help out with getting me stabilized and off of the illicit substances, and today I put in one final attempt at getting them to help me via appealing to them one last time by asking that they please allow me to get my dosage raised high enough, to around 100mgs, that it will allow me to begin to rapidly and safely decrease my opioid dosage and achieve a clean test before I end up going into labor, but if this does not end up being possible, I have a small amount of Methadone that I've saved up to combine with the 65mgs that I'm currently on now, for the first three days, while discontinuing Fentanyl, and even though it still probably won't be enough and I will be experiencing some symptoms of withdrawal, I will just bite the bullet and put up with it. The one thing I'm waiting for is for a new RX of Xanax to go through either on the 14th or 19th, as I will need this medication, along with probably Gabapentin, which I'm pretty certain I can get a prescription for, I should be able to endure the withdrawal and succeed in achieving a clean test before having to go into labor... Fingers crossed. Hopefully though, I will find out on Monday though that my Methadone clinic is finally willing to take my circumstances seriously and begin allowing me a clinically relevant dose of Methadone on Monday. I am not hopeful nor expecting to receive anything from them though to be honest, but we will see what happens.

The other order of business is the state of affairs in my apartment, which I have let become an unbearably huge mess so extreme that you can barely even get my front door open at present! This will NEVER in a million years pass any kind of home inspection that may be required by CPS, let alone is there any space to build an area for the baby and get all the required necessities together. My mom is going to help me afford everything that I need for him, but first I've got to get this total mess cleaned up. I am committed to doing it and my baby's dad is living here with me and is equally committed to getting this mess fixed up... I'm beginning on this TONIGHT and I hope to finish it over this same night as its only 600sq ft in here, but achieving any success in this endeavor tonight will be a success as it may end up taking more than a day or two to get finished up. I have gotten it fixed up before in only a day's time for the purpose of a manager inspection. I need to get this done BEFORE having to go into withdrawal though or I will be too sick to get it done. So this must begin tonight! I will take before and after pictures at the beginning and end of this project...

I am absolutely COMMITTED to doing what I have to do to become part of the >1% of drug addicts who manage to do what everyone says isn't possible for them. I know everyone is expecting me to fail in my endeavor but I will prove them all wrong. I want to keep my son and be a good mother to him and I'll do whatever is necessary to make that happen.

If by some stroke of bad luck he does begin to come early and I end up with a positive test and CPS has to get involved, I have family members who are willing and capable of taking him for the time necessary that it would take to get their requirements completed and in that case I will go ahead with whatever I have to do to regain custody but I am keeping the faith that it won't come to that and that I've still got just barely enough time...

Pray for me and wish me luck, I am going to need it!

--Pregnant & Addicted

~PLEASE FOLLOW ME TO SUPPORT ME AND TO STAY UPDATED WITH HOW MY CRISIS UNFOLDS! I WILL FOLLOW YOU BACK~

0 notes

kolibripilled-canine · 9 months

Text

I should develop an opiate habit. in all my life, the only thing that's let me feel like everything was going to be okay was opiates. I've never taken them recreationally, but the times I've been on them for surgery have always been so comfortable.

i think this is probably a huge component of the "opiate epidemic". sure it was also a result of pharmaceutical companies pushing drugs, but I don't think people would have been as likely to develop addictions if their, if our, very existence wasn't so painful.

if the phrase "I should develop an opiate habit" stops being a joke for me, this is why.

#bpd #mental illness #addiction #drugs

10 notes · View notes

hail-tim · 18 days

Note

The drug thing and diary farming

ohohoh so i'm not as seasoned in the area of crystal meth; I think Gus knows enough about that if we're talking about Gus Fring. I am more knowledgeable in the field of opioids because it's more of a problem where I live and it's a pretty old phenomenon. So not considering the United States, you can trace a lot of mass opium addiction to the appropriately-named Opium Wars that took place mainly between China and the UK. This was because the UK wanted to trade large amounts of tea from China but there were generally conflicts with that cause y'know, imperialism rightfully leaves a bitter taste in some people's mouths. So this ended in a sketchy deal where opium instead ended up being smuggled to China, getting a lot of people hooked. So began a mass addiction to opiates. Another thing that I can trace to modern opioid addiction in the US is OxyContin. This common prescription painkiller was first advertised as a "non-addictive" alternative to many painkillers. Spoiler alert - this was incorrect information and a lot of people, especially people from rural areas, got addicted real fast. This led to an uptick in heroin use as well, I believe. Looking into the cocaine/crack epidemics on another note; cocaine was used a lot by the Hollywood elite/generally rich white people leading up to the 1980s. That is, powder cocaine. When crack was introduced, it was a basic alternative to cocaine that allowed for it to be smoked/shot up meaning quicker and stronger absorption into the blood stream, if that makes sense. This was actually a lot more accessible and affordable. It made its way into the poorer regions of the United States, specifically Black communities, very very quickly because of this. This was essentially because of the US's involvement with Latin American countries that supplied the stuff - the CIA was involved with coups in that area that supported these sketchy groups opposed to democratic uprisings in Latin America. The US disliked this democracy because it meant that theses countries were getting more stable, self-sufficient and independent from countries like the United States that had power in the form of companies based there that could do essentially whatever the hell they liked. The CIA allowed for these anti-democratic groups to funnel their cocaine up into the United States and created a racial disparity. Oh boy. How surprising and uncharacteristic of the CIA (sarcasm). It goes deeper than that but I'll stop there. NOW. On a lighter note - DAIRY FARMING :)))

I am a dairy farmer right now! I milka the cows and all that good stuff. that entails a LOT but I'm going to stick to what I really focus on in the job.

-Milking cows. It's pretty robotic but I enjoy it. We use machines so I don't milk by hand unless I need to test a cow - basically what you do is you sanitize each teat with an iodine-based solution, wipe that off after a couple of seconds, and put on the machine. Once they're all done, you check to see if their udder is firm (which could indicate the presence of a disease like mastitis or that the cow isn't milked all the way) and if they're good, you put another solution on their teats (post-dip. The first solution is called pre-dip). Voila! You've milked a cow, my friend. And what you do to one, you must do to the next two hundred we have coming in.

-DISEASE. very feared amongst farmers. Sanitation is sososososo important and a huge part of the job is washing the parlor (the room where we milk), the equipment, and cleaning the housing area for the animals. These things shit. A lot. it's messy.

-Crop work. My beloved. Love of my life. Everyone loves operating machinery. tractors are cool. Hay season makes me so sentimental it's insane. Been doing that shit since I was five years old. You lug around dry grass all day in the hot sun and it's amazing beyond words.

-Finally, my coworkers. I won't talk too much about them because they're real people who probably would be uncomfortable with getting posted about on tumblr, but they're crazy. You either work with teenage boys or really old guys. I'm the sole female worker right now and it's something to witness for sure.

Sorry for the long post. Hope this answers your questions, Gus!

5 notes · View notes