The Things They Carried

August 8, 2017August 9, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

I met an older gentleman at church last Sunday who served in Vietnam. The conversation actually started with the current opiate epidemic in America. I said unfortunately thousands of young men came back from Southeast Asia hooked on heroin. He saw many soldiers smoking weed in order to cope with the horrors of what they were being asked to do, but did not personally see any servicemen using heroin. He was aware that it was going on. He related how he was able to avoid the hell of alcoholism and drug addiction that took hold of countless young men.

I became great friends with a minister who lived across the street from my parents for several years before he and his wife, also a minister, returned to Santa Barbara, California. He related to me the horrors of serving in the Vietnam war. He was a sergeant, and said several of his men died in his arms. In the interest of his traumatic experience and his privacy, I will not give any further details here. I will simply say I was shocked to see that he made it out alive, and is living a life of love and service, in full commitment to the Lord. My uncle also served in Vietnam. I know from family conversations that it was very hard on him. I never felt comfortable asking him to divulge the details. He died several years ago after fighting non-cancerous lumps in the back of his lungs, immune deficiency, and kidney failure. He’d been on dialysis for years. My aunt was told his death was due to exposure to Agent Orange. She receives an additional widow’s benefit specific to his exposure.

My conversation with the fellow churchgoer regarding heroin use among the troops in Vietnam made me think of Air America. Air America was an American passenger and cargo airline covertly owned by the United States government as a dummy corporation for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The National Security Agency farmed out the airline to various government agencies. Air America was used by the U.S. government covertly to conduct military operations, posing as a civilian air carrier, in areas the U.S. armed forces could not go due to treaty restraints contained in the Geneva Accords. Air America’s slogan was, “Anything, Anywhere, Anytime.” The airline flew many types of cargo to countries such as the Republic of Vietnam, the Kingdom of Laos, and Cambodia. It operated from bases in those countries, and also from bases in Thailand, and as far afield as Taiwan and Japan. It also on occasion flew top secret missions into Burma and the People’s Republic of China.

Air America flew civilians, diplomats, spies, refugees, commandos, sabotage teams, doctors, war casualties, DEA officers, and even visiting VIPs like Richard Nixon. Air America moved tons of food, water and livestock into villages devastated by Agent Orange, as well as ammunition and other materials for troop support. During the CIA’s secret war in Laos (you might remember Nixon’s secret bombings), the CIA used the Hmong population to fight local rebels. The Hmong happened to depend on poppy cultivation for hard currency. Amazingly, poppy has been used for trade in commerce for centuries. When rebels captured the Plain of Jars in 1964, the Laotian air force was unable to land their transport aircraft for opium transport. They had no light planes that could land near poppy fields to load opium. Consequently, the Hmong were facing economic ruin. Air America was the only airline available in northern Laos. Air America began flying opium from mountain villages. How can we not think some of that opium smuggled out of Laos by the CIA ended up as heroin on the streets of America?

THE REASON I BROUGHT THIS UP

I have become captivated by the history of America’s war on drugs. Sometimes, during research, we get led down paths we never expected. This is what happened when I started looking into heroin and Southeast Asia. I found a wonderfully written, haunting, vitally important piece of literature written by Tim O’Brien called The Things They Carried. I began reading, and I was there, in the jungle, with my uncle. With the gentleman from my church. With the men in the story. This was no Full Metal Jacket experience. It was not like I was watching Platoon or Hamburger Hill. Please understand me: Those movies do a great job, as does Saving Private Ryan relative to World War II. This book, however, is literature. It’s like a living, breathing journal. I could not stop reading. It’s been several months since I’ve done a book review, and this is sort of like that, but it’s more like a peek inside a piece of literature that captures the daily life of soldiering in Vietnam. The scene where I pick up the action is graphic, so please be prepared. I don’t make political statements on this blog, and I will not do that in this post. This is more about heroism, service, dedication, obedience, fear, and the raw experience of hell on earth. It’s about literature. Robert Louis Stevenson said, “The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

I know what I want you to think, to consider, to feel, about this issue. I would love to hear your feedback. Maybe you know someone who served in Southeast Asia. Perhaps you have a family member or loved one fighting ISIS in the Middle East or the Philippines. Don’t stay silent. If this post sparks an emotion, post your reply. Literature at its best provides us with a blueprint of human civilization. It should remind us of what we’re feeling inside. It should provoke us. Literature plays the vital role of preserving knowledge and experience and passing it on to our successors. Literature might even make us ask the big questions: Why are we here? Who are we? What are our responsibilities? In the instant case, The Things They Carried causes us to think about the idea of war. Is war ever just? What does it mean to be noble? When should we help another nation? When is it proper to back away?

I thought you should know that this book is as much memoir as it is literature. O’Brien served in the 23rd Infantry Division.

From The Things They Carried.

The things they carried were determined to some extent by superstition. Lieutenant Cross carried his good luck pebble. Dave Jensen carried a rabbit’s foot. Norman Bowker, otherwise a very gentle person, carried a thumb that had been presented to him as a gift by Mitchell Sanders. The thumb was dark brown, rubbery to the touch, and weighed 4 ounces at most. It had been cut from a VC corpse, a boy of fifteen or sixteen. They’d found him at the bottom of an irrigation ditch, badly burned, flies in his mouth and eyes. The boy wore black shorts and sandals. At the time of his death he had been carrying a pouch of rice, a rifle, and three magazines of ammunition. “You want my opinion,” Mitchell Sanders said, “There’s a definite moral here.” He put his hand on the dead boy’s wrist. He was quiet for a time, as if counting a pulse, then he patted the stomach, almost affectionately, and used Kiowa’s hunting hatchet to remove the thumb.

Henry Dobbins asked what the moral was.

“Moral?”

“You know.”

Moral.

Sanders wrapped the thumb in toilet paper and handed it across to Norman Bowker. There was no blood. Smiling, he kicked the boy’s head, watched the flies scatter, and said, “It’s like with that old TV show, Paladin. ‘Have gun, will travel.'”

Henry Dobbins thought about it.

“Yeah, well,” he finally said. “I don’t see no moral.”

“There it is, man.”

They carried USO stationery and pencils and pens. They carried Sterno, safety pins, trip flares, signal flares, spools of wire, razor blades, chewing tobacco, liberated joss sticks and statuettes of the smiling Buddha, candles, grease pencils, The Stars and Stripes , fingernail clippers, Psy Ops leaflets, bush hats, bolos, and much more. Twice a week, when the resupply choppers came in, they carried hot chow in green mermite cans and large canvas bags filled with iced beer and soda pop. They carried plastic water containers, each with a 2-gallon capacity. Mitchell Sanders carried a set of starched tiger fatigues for special occasions. Henry Dobbins carried Black Flag insecticide. Dave Jensen carried empty sandbags that could be filled at night for added protection. Lee Strunk carried tanning lotion. Some things they carried in common. Taking turns, they carried the big PRC-77 scrambler radio, which weighed 30 pounds with its battery. They shared the weight of memory. They took up what others could no longer bear. Often, they carried each other, the wounded or weak. They carried infections. They carried chess sets, basketballs, Vietnamese-English dictionaries, insignia of rank, Bronze Stars and Purple Hearts, plastic cards imprinted with the Code of Conduct.

They carried diseases, among them malaria and dysentery. They carried lice and ringworm and leeches and paddy algae and various rots and molds. They carried the land itself — Vietnam, the place, the soil — a powdery orange-red dust that covered their boots and fatigues and faces. They carried the sky. The whole atmosphere, they carried it, the humidity, the monsoons, the stink of fungus and decay, all of it, they carried gravity. They moved like mules. By daylight they took sniper fire, at night they were mortared, but it was not battle, it was just the endless march, village to village, without purpose, nothing won or lost. They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same. They carried their own lives.

The pressures were enormous. In the heat of early afternoon, they would remove their helmets and flak jackets, walking bare, which was dangerous but which helped ease the strain. They would often discard things along the route of march. Purely for comfort, they would throw away rations, blow their Claymores and grenades, no matter, because by nightfall the resupply choppers would arrive with more of the same, then a day or two later still more, fresh watermelons and crates of ammunition and sunglasses and woolen sweaters — the resources were stunning — sparklers for the Fourth of July, colored eggs for Easter — it was the great American war chest — the fruits of science, the smoke stacks, the canneries, the arsenals at Hartford, the Minnesota forests, the machine shops, the vast fields of corn and wheat— they carried it like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders — and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.

References

O’Brien, Tim. (1990). The Things They Carried. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.

Community: The Answer to the Opiate Epidemic

July 31, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

The following is taken directly from the Afterword of Sam Quinone’s bestselling book “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic.” You can purchase a copy of this vital publication here.

BY THE TIME I BEGAN research for this book in 2012, we had, I believe, spent decades destroying community in America, mocking and clawing at the girdings of government that provide the public assets and infrastructure that we took for granted and that make communal public life possible. Meanwhile, we exalted the private sector. We beat Communism and thus came to believe the free market was some infallible god. Accepting this economic dogma, we allowed, encouraged, even, jobs to go overseas. We lavishly rewarded our priests of finance for pushing those jobs offshore. We demanded perfection from government and forgave the private sector its trespasses.

Part of the private sector developed a sense of welfare entitlement. Certainly, in this opiate scourge, it is the private sector that has taken the profits; the costs of dealing with the vast collateral damage have fallen to the public sector. A couple months after this book’s publication, Forbes counted the Sackler family ¹, and Raymond Sackler, the last remaining of the brothers, as the richest newcomer to the magazine’s list of “America’s Richest Families” – with an estimated net worth of $14 billion. All of that was due to sales of OxyCotin, which the magazine estimated at $35 billion since the drug’s release in 1996.²

We seemed to fear the public sphere. Parents hovered over kids. Alarmed at some menace out in public, they accompanied their kids everywhere they went. In one case, a couple was actually charged with allowing their nine-year-old daughter and her sister to go to the park alone. The term “free-range parenting” was coined to describe the daring parents who let their kids out of their sight. No wonder so many kids – boys mostly – were diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Adderall and other drugs. (I wish someone would study the incidence of opiate addiction [in] teens and young adults of people who as kids were diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed drugs like Adderall.) They spent their lives indoors, cooped up, bouncing off the walls. I can say this because I was one: Boys are like dogs; they need to run and run and run.

When I was a boy in suburban Southern California, we spent our entire free time outside playing – football, basketball, riding bikes, or just running around. We probably ran three or four miles a day every day. My knees were in an almost permanent state of being skinned, with scabs growing and being torn off by my roughhousing. My mother had a bell from her family’s farm in Iowa that she used to ring us home at dinnertime – because we were always running around out of the house. I’ve been back to the street where I grew up eight times in the last few years and have yet to see a human being outside. The park where I used to play is always empty.

Keeping kids cooped up seems to be connected to the idea that we can avoid pain, avoid danger. It doesn’t surprise me to hear that in universities, students, raised indoors on screens, apparently lived in some crystalline terror of any kind of emotional anguish. A 2015 story in the Atlantic called “The Coddling of the American Mind” reported on the phenomenon of college students – kids who grew up in the era of hyper-protection from physical pain – demanding to be protected as well from painful ideas. They were demanding professors provide “trigger warnings” in advance of ideas that might provoke a strong emotional content – for example, a novel that describes racial violence. This new campus ethos, the authors wrote, “presumes an extraordinary fragility of the collegiate psyche, and therefore elevates the goal of protecting students from psychological harm. The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some [people] uncomfortable.”

Psychology Today ran a story on “Declining Student Resilience” that [sic] noticed increased neediness in college students, that students had called campus police after seeing a mouse, blaming teachers for poor grades, and “increasingly seeking help for, and apparently having emotional crises over, problems of everyday life.” Professors, the authors continued, “described an increased tendency to see a poor grade as reason to complain rather than reason to study more, or more effectively. Much of the discussions had to do with the amount of hand-holding faculty should do versus the degree to which the response should be something like, “Buck up, this is college!” All of this seems the predictable result of the idea that we should be protected from pain at all costs.

As a country, meanwhile, we acted as if consumption and the accumulation of stuff was the path to happiness. We leave family Thanksgivings to go stand in line to buy products – Xboxes, tablets, and the like – that keep us isolated and that poison our kids, and we go do it as if we have no choice in the matter. We have built isolation into our suburbs and called it prosperity. Added to that mix is the expansion of technology that connects us to the world but separates us from our next-door neighbor. We wound up dangerously separate from each other – whether in poverty or in affluence.

Kids no longer play in the street. Parks are underused. Dreamland lies buried beneath a strip mall. Why then do we wonder that heroin is everywhere? In our isolation, heroin thrives; that’s it’s natural habitat. And our very search for painlessness led us to it. Heroin is, I believe, the final expression of values we have fostered for thirty-five years. It turns every addict into narcissistic, self-absorbed, solitary hyper-consumers. A life that finds opiates turns away from family and community and devotes itself entirely to self-gratification by buying and consuming one product – the drug that makes being alone not just all right, but preferable. [Emphasis added.]

I believe more strongly than ever that the antidote to heroin is community. If you want to keep kids off heroin, make sure people in your neighborhood do things together, in public, often. Form your own Dreamland and break down those barriers that keep people isolated. Don’t have play dates; just go out and play. Bring people out of their private rooms, whatever forms those rooms take. We might consider living more simply. Pursuit of stuff doesn’t equal happiness, as any heroin addict will tell you. People in some places I’ve been may emerge from this plague more compassionate, more grounded, willing to give children experience rather than things, and show them that pain is part of life and often endurable. The antidote to heroin may well be making your kids ride bikes outside, with their friends, and let them skin their knees.

Sam Quinones

________________________________________________________________________________

1 The richest newcomer to Forbes 2015 list of America’s Richest Families comes in at a stunning $14 billion. The Sackler family, which owns Stamford, Conn.-based Purdue Pharma, flew under the radar when Forbes launched its initial list of wealthiest families in July 2014, but this year they crack the top-20, edging out storied families like the Busches, Mellons and Rockefellers. How did the Sacklers build the 16th-largest fortune in the country? The short answer: making the most popular and controversial opioid of the 21st century – OxyContin. Purdue, 100% owned by the Sacklers, has generated estimated sales of more than $35 billion since releasing its time-released, supposedly addiction-proof version of the painkiller oxycodone back in 1995. Its annual revenues are about $3 billion, still mostly from OxyContin. The Sacklers also own separate drug companies that sell to Asia, Latin America, Canada and Europe, together generating similar total sales as Purdue’s operation in the United States.

2 OxyContin is a dying business in America. Literally. With the nation in the grip of an opiate epidemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, the U.S. medical establishment is turning away from painkillers. Top health officials are discouraging primary care doctors from prescribing them for chronic pain, saying there is no proof they work long-term and substantial evidence they put patients at risk. Prescriptions are declining amid increased scrutiny over drug addiction, down 12% since 2012 according to data from healthcare information firm IMS Health. OxyContin saw prescriptions fall 17%.

The Worst Man-Made Epidemic in History

July 21, 2017July 21, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

The following is comprised of excerpts from Sam Quinones’ Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. I want to praise Quinones for this seminal work. Personally, it has defined for me the very nightmare I, and countless others, have lived, each to his or her own level, after discovering the morphine molecule through seemingly acceptable pain medications like Vicodin, Percocet and OxyContin. You can purchase a copy of Dreamland here: Dreamland

AS HEROIN AND OXYCONTIN addiction consumed the children of America’s white middle class, parents hid the truth and fought alone. Quietly. Friends and neighbors who knew shunned them. “When your kid’s dying from a brain tumor or leukemia, the whole community shows up,” said a mother of two addicts. “They bring casseroles. They pray for you. They send you cards. When your kid’s on heroin, you don’t hear from anybody, until they die. Then everybody comes and they don’t know what to say.”

These parents made avoidable mistakes, and when a son died or entered rehab for the fourth time, they again hid the truth, believing themselves alone, which they were as long as they kept silent. This pervasive lie was easily swallowed. It often lay buried beneath lush lawns, shiny SUVs, and the bedrooms of kids who lacked for nothing. It was easier to swallow, too, because some of these new addicts were high school athletes – the charismatic golden youth of these towns. Athletes opened the door for other students who figured that if cool jocks were using pills, how bad could it be?

One addict was Carter, from one of of California’s wealthiest communities, the son of a banker. Carter had been a high school star in football and baseball. With no break from sports during the year, he battled injuries that never healed. A doctor prescribed Vicodin for him, with no warning on what Vicodin contained, or suggestions for how it should be used. Sports were king in Carter’s town. It was a place of gleaming mansions, but he felt no sense that education was of value in providing choices in life, much less for the love of learning. These kids’ futures were assured. Sports were what mattered. Dads would brag to friends about their sons’ athletic exploits, then berate their boys for poor play, urging greater sacrifice. From the athletic director down to parents and teachers they heard, “You need grades so you can play. That was the vibe we got,” said Carter.

Many new athlete-addicts were not from poor towns where sports might be a ticket out for a lucky few. The places where opiate addiction settled hard were often middle- and upper-class. Parents were surgeons and developers and lawyers who provided their kids with everything. Yet sports were as much a narcotic for these communities as they were to any ghetto. Love of learning seemed absent, while their school weight rooms were palatial things, and in many of them pain pills were quietly commonplace. Just as opiates provided doctors with a solution to chronic-pain patients, Vicodin and Percocet provided coaches with the ultimate tool to get kids playing again.

Carter’s coach told him stories of players years before who were gulping down Vicodin before practices and games. “In my town, the stands were always filled. You wanted to be the hero. So you think, ‘I can’t look weak. I gotta push myself.’ I would get these small injuries. The coaches wouldn’t pay any attention. I taught myself to not pay attention to any injuries.” Most athletes on every team on which Carter played used pills, for injury or recreation. Soon Carter grew addicted to Vicodin, and then to OxyContin. From there, as a student athlete at a Division I university, he began using heroin.

Football players were seen as symbols of this American epidemic. Their elevated status on campus left some of them unaffected by consequences. Carter was caught selling pills and was told not to do it again. Above all, though, players were in constant pain and were expected to play with it. If opiates were now for chronic pain, well, football players endured more chronic pain than most. Necks, thighs, and ankles ached all season. Medicating injuries to get athletes playing through the pain was nothing new. But as oxycodone and hydrocodone became the go-to treatment for chronic pain, organized sports – and football in particular – opened as a virtual gateway to opiate addiction in many schools. Thus, with the epidemic emerged the figure of the heroin-addicted football player. Though, of course, few wanted to talk too much about that.

By 2008, when Jo Anna Krohn’s son died, these kinds of delusions had been accepted for almost a decade in places like Salt Lake, Albuquerque, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and other cities that had for that same decade been the drivers and beneficiaries of the greatest boom in the history of U.S. consumer spending. But it was in beat-down Portsmouth, Ohio, where one mother had the gumption to own the truth and say something about it.

***

ACROSS PORTSMOUTH, AT THE Counseling Center, Ed Hughes thought silence was a huge part of the story. Opiates had exploded all those plans Hughes had in the mid-1990s to consolidate the Counseling Center’s operations and focus on improving its internal workings. The center opened years before in a small house. By 1992 it began residential treatment with 16 beds. This quickly increased to 150 beds, with a huge waiting list, and a staff of close to 200. It moved its outpatient center into an abandoned three-story school due entirely to the swarms of new opiate addicts.

“We’ve never seen anything move this fast,” said Hughes. A decade and a half in, Ed Hughes was still waiting for the arc of addicted clients to plateau and curve downward. Kids were coming to the center from across Ohio. Many, said Hughes, grew up coddled, bored, and unprepared for life’s hazards and difficulties. They’d grown up amid the consumerist boom that began in the mid 1990s. Hughes believed parenting was changing as well. “Spoiled rich kid” syndrome seeped into America’s middle class. Parents shielded their kids from complications and hardships, and praised them for minor accomplishments – all as they had less time for their kids.

“You only develop self-esteem one way, and that’s through accomplishment,” Hughes said. “You have a lot of kids who have everything and look good, but they don’t have any self-esteem. You see twenty-somethings: They have a nice car, money in their pocket, and they got a cell phone… a big-screen TV. I ask them, ‘Where the hell did all that stuff come from? You’re a student.’ ‘My mom and dad gave it to me.’ And you put opiate addiction in the middle of that?” Hughes added, “Then the third leg of the stool is the fifteen-year-old brain.”

Hughes saw this all the time: Adult drug users incapable of making mature choices. This happened because opiates stunted the part of their brain controlling rational action. ¹ “We’ve got twenty-five- to thirty-year-old, opiate-addicted people who are going on fifteen. Their behavior, the way their brain works, is like an adolescent,” said Hughes. “It’s like the drug came in there and overwhelmed that brain chemistry, and the front of the brain did not develop.” He added, “The front of the brain has to develop through mistakes. But the first reaction to the addicted person is to head back to the family: ‘Will you rescue me?’ Whatever the person’s rescued from, there’s no learning. There’s no experiences, no frontal brain development. They’re doing well and then some idea comes into their head and they’re off a cliff. It may not be a decision to use [drugs]. Most relapse comes not from the craving for the drug. It comes from this whole other level of unmanageability, putting myself in compromising situations, or being dishonest, being lazy – being a fifteen-year-old.”

***

FIVE YEARS AFTER PORTSMOUTH found itself swept up in a national epidemic, the victims of America’s opiate scourge had emerged from the shadows and the silence. They were everywhere now. Heroin had traveled a long way from the back alleys of New York City and William Burrough’s Junky. The town of Simi Valley agonized over a spate of opiate overdose deaths – eleven in a single year. Simi Valley, conservative and religious, has long been an enclave for cops. Many LAPD officers live in the town. Simi’s vice mayor at the time was a Los Angeles police officer. So for years Simi was one of America’s safest towns. According to the crime statistics, it still is. But with pills everywhere and heroin sold in high schools, its kids were now also dying of dope. Simi youths clogged the methadone clinic. Nearby, Thousand Oaks, Moorpark, and Santa Clarita told similar stories. Low crime and high fatal overdoses was the new American paradigm.

Susan Klimuski, whose son Austin died from a heroin overdose, formed a coalition to fight back. It was called Not One More. It received support from city council and the town’s retail core. Yet these were times when heroin was still invisible, conveniently hidden away, at least to anyone who wasn’t a junkie, or a parent of one. Then, on Super Bowl Sunday 2014, America awoke to the news that one of its finest actors was dead. Philip Seymour Hoffman, forty-six, was found that morning in his Greenwich Village apartment, a syringe in his arm and powder heroin in packets branded with the Ace of Spades near his corpse. Blood tests showed he had heroin in his system, combined with cocaine, amphetamine, and benzodiazepine. The Oscar-winning actor – a father of three- had checked into rehab the previous May for ten days, and then, pronouncing himself sober again, left to resume a hectic film schedule. This death hit me right between the eyes. I was a die-hard fan of Hoffman’s acting. He had a heroin habit in college (twenty years ago), but managed to get clean. At least for two decades. Hoffman’s death awoke America to the opiate epidemic.

Within days of covering the story of Hoffman’s death, media outlets from coast to coast discovered that thousands of people were dying. Heroin abuse, the news reports insisted, was surging. Almost all the new heroin addicts were hooked first on prescription painkillers. It was not just the pain, however. This scourge was connected to the conflation of bigger forces: of economics, of aggressive prescription drug marketing, of poverty and prosperity. But this was tough to articulate in four-minute interviews, and a lot of it got lost in the media’s rush to discover and report the new plague. Attorney General Eric Holder described an “urgent and growing public health crisis,” and called on police and paramedics to carry naloxone, an effective antidote to opiate overdose. The problem also prompted Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy, M.D., M.B.A. to issue a report in November 2016 on alcohol, drugs and health. This is the most comprehensive health crisis report issued by a surgeon general since cigarette smoking. You can read a PDF of the entire report here.

Two decades since the evolving pain revolution,² a consensus emerged that opiates are not helpful for some varieties of chronic pain, including back pain, migraines, and fibromyalgia. In fact, it was finally decided that opiate use is risky. Many clinics and physicians developed policies against using opiates for chronic non-cancer pain. One 2007 survey of studies of back pain and opiates found that “use disorders” were common among patients, and “aberrant” use behavior occurred in up to 24 percent of the cases. It was unclear whether opiates had a positive effect on back pain in the long term. Personally, I have found that opiates do nothing more than create a euphoria that tends to distract me from the pain for a few hours, only to ebb, thus requiring more opiates. By the end of the 2000s, it was already common for people to go from abusing opiate painkillers to a heroin habit. Purdue Pharma, the inventor of OxyContin (who paid a $635.5 million fine for falsely claiming their formulation of the drug oxycodone in time-released pills was far less addictive) recognized this, and in 2010 they reformulated OxyContin with an abuse deterrent, supposedly making the drug even harder to deconstruct and inject.

Unfortunately, by this time, heroin had spread to most corners of the country because the rising sea level of opiates flowed there first. “What started as an OxyContin and prescription drug addiction problem in Vermont as now grown into a full-blown heroin crisis,” said Governor Shumlin. What made New York City the dominant heroin market for much of the twentieth century – its vast number of addicts, and its immigrants from poppy-rich regions of the globe – was now true of most of America. Most of the country’s heroin was coming from Mexico, through the Southwest, trucked into New York. The entrepreneurial Xalisco brothers from Nayarit, Mexico, devised a system for selling heroin across the United States that resembles pizza delivery. An addict calls and places an order, and an operator directs him to an intersection or parking lot. The dealer carries balloons of heroin in his mouth. He simply spits out what the addict ordered. If the cops move on the dealer, he washes the balloons down his throat with a swig from a nearby bottle of water. No evidence, no arrest. The dealers have also been known to deliver to the door for “clients” that are home-bound due to illness or disability.

What started as a concern among physicians for a solution to chronic pain was hijacked by greedy Big Pharma, eventually morphing into nationwide heroin use and addiction resulting from the medical community and the government tightened the reins on prescriptions. Of course, whenever drugs are involved, there is always someone at the ready to provide a system of delivery to dope-sick addicts and chronic pain sufferers hankering for release.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

¹ Adolescence and young adulthood is a period of continued brain growth and change. The frontal lobes, key to executive functioning, such as planning, working memory, and impulse control, are among the last areas of the brain to mature. Age is a risk factor that is associated with the onset of drug use in adolescence and young adulthood. Adolescence is a developmental period associated with the highest risk for developing a substance use disorder.

² During the 1990s changes in attitudes and techniques in pain treatment were coming quickly. In 1996, the president of the American Pain Society, Dr. James Campbell, proposed that pain should be assessed in the same manner as other vital signs. They trademarked the slogan, “Pain: The Fifth Vital Sign.” This led to the 0-10 pain intensity scale now prevalent in every ER and doctor’s office in America. Essentially, doctors were finally given more power in prescribing opiates to patients suffering from chronic pain who were not cancer patients.

References

Quinones, Sam. (2015). Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press

Winters, K. and Arria, K. (2011). “Adolescent Brain Development and Drugs.” The Prevention Researcher, 18(2), 21–24.

The Role of Science in Addiction

July 12, 2017July 12, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

SPECIAL REPORT
From the New England Journal of Medicine
May 31, 2017
By Nora D. Volkow, M.D, and Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D.

Opioid misuse and addiction is an ongoing and rapidly evolving public health crisis, requiring innovative scientific solutions. In response, and because no existing medication is ideal for every patient, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is joining with private partners to launch an initiative in three scientific areas:

developing better overdose-reversal and prevention interventions to reduce mortality, saving lives for future treatment and recovery;
finding new, innovative medications and technologies to treat opioid addiction; and
finding safe, effective non-addictive interventions to manage chronic pain.

Overdose-Reversal Interventions

Every day more than 90 Americans die from opioid overdoses. Death results from the opioid’s antagonistic effect on brainstem neurons that control breathing. In other words, the victim succumbs to respiratory failure. Naloxone can be used effectively to reduce the effect of opioid intoxication, thereby reversing the overdose, if it is administered in time. Although naloxone has saved tens of thousands of lives, overdoses frequently occur when no one else is around, and often no one arrives quickly enough to administer it.

Overdose fatalities have also been fueled by the increased availability of very powerful synthetic opioids such as fentanyl and carfentanil (50-100 times and 5,000-10,000 times more potent than heroin respectively). Misuse or accidental exposure to these drugs (e.g., when laced in heroin) is associated with very high overdose risk, and naloxone doses that can often reverse prescription-opioid or heroin overdoses may be ineffective. New and improved approaches are needed to prevent, detect and reverse overdoses.

Treatments for Opioid Addiction

The partnership will also focus on opioid addiction (the most serious form of opioid use disorder), which is a chronic, relapsing illness. Abundant research has shown that sustained treatment over years or even a lifetime is often necessary to achieve and maintain long-term recovery. Currently, there are only three medications approved for treatment: methadone, buprenorphine, and extended-release naltrexone. These medications, coupled with psychosocial support [such as rehab and 12-step programs] are the current standard of care for reducing illicit opioid use, relapse risk, and overdoses, while improving social function. There is a clear need to develop new treatment strategies for opioid use disorders. New pharmacologic approaches aim to modulate activity of the reward circuitry of the brain.

Non-Addictive Treatment for Chronic Pain

The third area of focus is chronic pain treatment: over-prescription of opioid medications reflects in part the limited number of alternative medications for chronic pain. Thus, we cannot hope to prevent opioid misuse and overdose without addressing the treatment needs of people with moderate-to-severe chronic pain. Though more cautious opioid prescribing is an important first step, there is a clear need for safer, more effective treatments.

Foremost is the plan to develop formulations of opioid pain medication with built-in abuse deterrent properties that are more difficult to manipulate for snorting or injecting, the routes of administration most frequently associated with misuse because of their more immediate rewarding effects. Such formulations, however, can still be misused orally and still lead to addiction. Thus, a more promising long-term avenue to addressing pain treatment will involve developing a powerful non-addictive analgesic. There are some fascinating x-ray crystallography studies going on that look promising.

Non-pharmacologic approaches being explored today, including brain-stimulation technologies such as high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS, already FDA-approved for depression), have shown efficacy in multiple chronic pain conditions. At a more preliminary stage are viral-based gene therapies and transplantation of progenitor cells to treat pain. NIH researchers are investigating the use of gene therapy to deliver a potent anti-inflammatory protein directly to painful sites. Pre-clinical studies show powerful and long-lasting effects in reducing pain without side effects such as numbness, sedation, addiction, or tolerance.

Public-Private Partnerships

In April 2017, the NIH began discussions with pharmaceutical companies to accelerate progress on identifying and developing new treatments that can end the opioid crisis. Some advances may occur rapidly, such as improved formulations of existing medications, opioids with abuse-deterrent properties, longer-acting overdose-reversal drugs, and repurposing of treatments approved for other conditions. Others may take longer, such as opioid vaccines, and novel overdose-reversal medications. For all three areas, the goal is to cut in half the time typically required to develop new safe and effective therapeutics.

As noted throughout the history of medicine, science is one of the strongest allies in resolving public health crises. Ending the opioid epidemic will not be any different. In the past few decades, we have made remarkable strides in our understanding of the biologic mechanisms that underlie pain and addiction. But intensified and better-coordinated research is needed to accelerate the development of medications and technologies to prevent and treat these disorders. The scope of the tragedy of addiction and overdose deaths plaguing our country is daunting. The partnership between NIH and others will take an all hands on deck approach to developing and delivering the scientific tools that will help end the opiate epidemic in America and prevent it from reemerging in the future.

References

Volkow, N. and Collins, F. (May 31, 2017). “The Role of Science in Addressing the Opioid Crisis.” The New England Journal of Medicine. DOI: 10.1056/NEJMsr1706626

Volkow, L. (May 31, 2017). “All Scientific Hands On Deck to End the Opioid Crisis.” [Web blog comment]. Retrieved from : https://www.drugabuse.gov/about-nida/noras-blog/2017/05/all-scientific-hands-deck-to-end-opioid-crisis

Fentanyl Becomes Deadly Force

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

Some Excerpts taken from an article By Eric Scicchitano
The Daily Item
July 10, 2017

Fentanyl

The deadly heroin and opioid epidemic is expected to become even deadlier with the increasing presence of Fentanyl in America. According to the DEA, Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine, and substantially more potent than heroin. As little as 2 grams of Fentanyl can be deadly. Alarmingly, it is fast becoming the most prevalent active ingredient in counterfeit drugs like Adderall, Xanax, and OxyContin being sold on the streets. During the first quarter of 2017, heroin combined with Fentanyl was detected in 61% of opioids seized for evidence and inspected in DEA labs. It is also frequently laced into marijuana and smoked.

The DEA’s Philadelphia Division warns that Fentanyl is on the rise, with seizures of shipments more than doubling from 167 kilos in 2015 to 365 kilos in 2016. Investigators are trying to determine if an outbreak of Fentanyl is responsible for 51 overdoses which occurred in Williamsport (Pennsylvania) in forty-eight hours. [See my post 51 overdoses in 48 hours] Three of those cases ended in death. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), heroin and opioids killed an estimated 280,000 people nationwide between 2002 and 2015. Based upon preliminary figures put together through state coroners, more than 4,800 people died of an overdose in Pennsylvania last year. Experts are concerned that the next chapter in the opioid crisis could dwarf what we’ve seen so far. Their concern is based on the proliferation of Fentanyl.

Fentanyl Deaths Map

Let’s take a few moments to discuss Fentanyl. It is a man-made (synthetic) opioid, meaning it is manufactured in a laboratory, but it acts on the mu-opioid receptors in our brain and spinal column in the same manner as the morphine molecule found naturally in opium. Typically, these receptor sites are meant for naturally-occurring endorphins, our “feel good” chemical released by the pituitary gland. Fentanyl is usually prescribed to patients suffering from intractable cancer-related pain and, in some cases, debilitating back pain. My father was given Fentanyl patches for compression fractures near the end of this life. Initially, it was believed Fentanyl would not be abused. Unfortunately, addicts decided to start opening the patch in order to scrape out the medicine and abuse it.

Fentanyl Mapping.gif

As if that were not enough, Fentanyl is being illegally manufactured in labs (primarily in China). It is produced in powder form, and is also pressed into pills, and smuggled into the United States. These knock-off pills are catching users off guard. Fentanyl is 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine. DEA and border patrol seized more than 10,000 counterfeit pills containing Fentanyl in 2015. An amount as small as 2 milligrams can be deadly. First responders and ER physicians have to use extreme caution in order to avoid accidental exposure. According to the article in The Daily Item, an Ohio police officer accidentally overdosed in May of this year after brushing Fentanyl powder from his uniform during an arrest.

After the recent overdose surge in Lycoming County (Pennsylvania), Todd Owens, Mount Carmel police chief and head of the Northumberland County Drug Task Force, advised first responders to take measures to protect themselves. Chief Owens said his own department stocks medical masks, coveralls and heavy-grade gloves in their cruisers to be worn in the event they encounter heroin.

Heroin Fentanyl and Carfentanil Pics

The above is an illustration of potency betwen heroin, Fentanyl, and Carfentanil.

Carfentanil

Carfentanil is an extremely powerful derivative of Fentanyl. While Fentanyl is up to 100 times more potent than morphine, Carfentanil is 100 times more powerul than Fentanyl. In other words, it is 10,000 times more powerful than morphine. It is not approved for use in humans; rather, it is used in veterinary medicine to sedate large animals, primarily elephants. Yes, elephants! Carfentanil is so powerful that when veterinarians handle it, they use protective gear to avoid breathing it in or absorbing it through their skin. The amount of Carfentanil that can be safely administered to a human is 0.1 mg., compared to 13 mg. needed to sedate an elephant. It is obviously rather easy for an addict to accidentally take too much Carfentanil.

Interestinly, there are no statistics showing Carfentanil leading to addiction. That’s because even in the case of a seasoned addict a dose the size of a grain of salt can rapidly lead to an overdose and death. Frighteningly, drug dealers have begun cutting heroin with Carfentanil because it is extremely cheap to acquire. Even more disturbing is the fact that addicts in search of the ultimate high are deliberately trying this deadly drug. Rangers at Yellowstone National Park have recently begun issuing warnings to avoid eating the meat of bison killed in the park because the bison might have been sedated with Carfentanil for tagging or medical treatment. The drug can easily enter the bloodstream of those who eat the bison meat. It is most chilling to note that Carfentanil rapidly latches on to the mu-opioid receptors in humans, causing overdose almost immediately.

Moving Forward

Fentanyl moved up the rankings, from the 9th most common drug involved in overdose deaths in 2013, to the 5th most common drug involved in overdose deaths in 2014. The singer-songwriter Prince died of an overdose of Fentanyl in April 2016, according to officials in Minnesota. Philip Seymour Hoffman, a very successful indie film star (and one of my favorites), died of a heroin overdose on February 2, 2014. Although he had a drug problem while in college, he was clean for twenty years. No doubt his system was not able to handle the strength of today’s heroin.

Reports from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that deaths from heroin more than tripled during a five-year period, from 3,020 deaths in 2010, to 10,863 deaths in 2014. These deaths are yet another symptom of the broader epidemic of opioid addiction. Just as deaths from AIDS are due to untreated HIV, deaths from overdose are frequently due to untreated addiction. I know of many addicts attending 12-step meetings who are positive for hepatitis-C secondary to sharing needles while injecting heroin. Prince’s death is a reminder that opioid addiction is a disease that can and does affect people from all economic classes and all walks of life.

References

Scicchitano, E. (July 10, 2017). Fentanyl Becomes Deadly Force. Daily Item. Sunbury, PA.

Wakeman, S. (Aug. 5, 2016). Fentanyl: The Dangers of this Potent “Man-Made” Opioid. [Web Blog Comment.] Retrieved from: http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/fentanyl-dangers-potent-man-made-opioid-2016080510141

Rettner, R. (Dec. 20, 2016). Deaths From Fentanyl Overdoses Double in a Single Year. LiveScience.com. Retrieved from: https://www.livescience.com/57268-fentanyl-overdose-deaths-double.html

Local Opioid Abuse: A Piece of the Nation’s Newest Health Crisis

July 9, 2017July 9, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / 1 Comment

By Steven Barto

I am no stranger to addiction. I started drinking and getting high the summer after high school graduation. It was 1977 and pot and southern rock went hand-in-hand. I found my answer to all the anger, anxiety, depression, insomnia, and feelings of not belonging. Of course, I had no idea where it would lead, or that it would take me nearly four decades to get clean. I’ve said it before: No one wakes up one day and says, “I think I want to be a full-blown alcoholic or drug addict when I grow up. I want to loose all self-respect, most of my teeth, two wives, four jobs, three cars, and my sense of ambition. I’d love to be estranged from family and friends. It’ll be great. Just me and my drugs!” Anyone whose not an addict or alcoholic and thinks it is a moral or deliberate choice doesn’t understand addiction.

Opiate Use Map (2)

Map shows areas of opiate use, with the most prevalence noted in dark pink.

Nationally

The “perfect storm” that got us to a nationwide opiate epidemic is intertwined with influences you’d never expect. Heroin used to be limited to the beatniks, poets, jazz musicians, wild-and-crazy rock stars of the 1950s, 60s and early 70s. But things were about to break loose. Congressmen Robert Steele (R-CT) and Morgan Murphy (D-IL) released an explosive report in 1971 covering the growing heroin epidemic among U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. America saw thousands of military personnel coming home from Southeast Asia addicted to heroin. As a result, President Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs.” In fact, Nixon called drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Initially, the lion’s share of monies thrown at the drug problem went for treatment, which was a good thing. Unfortunately, this did not remain so in subsequent years. Politicians saw the opportunity to “take back the streets” of America from hippies, druggies, liberals, love children, people of color, and other “subversives” who did not seem to be conforming to the American lifestyle. Emphasis changed to criminalizing addicts and locking them up.

Admittedly, cocaine and crack became a serious concern before America fell face-first into the current opiate epidemic. Interestingly, one of the major factors contributing to increased cocaine trafficking was the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) signed into law under President Bill Clinton. Goods began to flow into the United States from Mexico at such an increase that border patrol was unable to adequately assure drugs were not coming over the border. There simply were not enough agents to keep up with inspection and enforcement. Prior to the climate of unrestrained trade, President Nixon had ordered that every vehicle returning from Mexico must be searched for drugs. Long lines ensued, and there was no appreciable reduction in drug trafficking.

Heroin and a Handgun

In 1995, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved OxyContin for prescription use. Its active ingredient, oxycodone, was believed since the 1960s to be highly addictive. Purdue Pharma, the inventor of OxyContin, claimed their formula of delayed-release oxycodone would all but eliminate the “rush” experienced by taking the drug in its original form. Purdue launched an extremely aggressive marketing progam, sending drug reps to virtually every family practitioner and pain management specialist, armed with what was eventually deemed a falsified report that less than 1% of OxyContin patients became addicted. Doctors were offered outrageous incentives to prescribe the drug. Purdue Pharma began the practice of sponsoring trade shows and symposiums, often plying physicians with lavish meals and “entertainment.” On the heels of this marketing blitz, the American Pain Society began arguing for medical providers to view pain as the “fifth vital sign.” This is precisely the basis for the How would you rate your pain on a scale of 0-10? question that is asked in every emergency department in America today. Well-intentioned doctors believed it was unconscionable to let patents suffer through severe pain. They didn’t believe Oxy would do more harm than good.

By 1996, Purdue Pharma reported $45 million in sales of OxyContin. As of 2000, the number jumped to over $1 billion. That’s a two-thousand fold increase. Misuse and abuse of opiate painkillers (OxyContin, Vicodin, Lortab, oxycodone) increased significantly beginning in 2000. In 2002, 6.2 million Americans were abusing prescription drugs, and emergency room visits resulting from the abuse of narcotic pain relievers had increased dramatically. By 2009, the total number of visits to ERs for overdose on opiates was 730,000, which was double the number of five years before. More than 50,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016. Heroin accounted for 12,898 of those deaths that year. Synthetic opioids (such as Fentanyl) killed 5,880. Prescription painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin claimed 17,536 lives.

Companies like Purdue Pharma have restructured the formula of opiate medications in order to make them even harder to abuse. No doubt this had a lot to do with the $635.5 million fine levied against Purdue for intentionally misleading the medical community regarding the potential to become addicted to OxyContin. Typically, addicts crush and snort the drug, or cook it down and inject it. What’s disheartening today is that most people who started out taking and then abusing OxyContin and other opiate pain medication are now using heroin because it’s cheaper – $5 to $7 dollars for enough to be high most of the day versus $10 to $80 for one Oxy, depending on its strength. Heroin is readily accessible virtually everywhere you go, and it is easily converted to a form that can be smoked or injected.

Locally

Front page news in my hometown paper, The Sunday Item, indicates that drug overdoses in Pennsylvania killed nearly 11,000 people in the last three years, fueled largely by heroin and prescription painkillers. The number of deaths has steadily increased year after year. As fatal overdoses have increased, so has public awareness, access to addiction treatment, and legislative initiatives against an epidemic the U.S. Department of Justice describes as the leading cause of death of Americans under the age of 50. It is important to note that this is a disease that affects everybody. Let’s stop playing the New Jim Crow game and stigmatizing, criminalizing, and institutionalizing drug addicts based upon skin color. Heroin and opiate drug addiction is rampant today in all socioeconomic classes, to be sure, but surprisingly it is most prevalent in white males age 18 to 25.

heroin-graph_1185px

The Sunday Item interviewed a man named Steven C., 27 years old, who is a recovering heroin addict attempting sobriety after fifteen years of opioid abuse. When he heard the news of an overdose outbreak in the Williamsport (Pennsylvania) area that sent 51 patients to the hospital in 48 hours, with three patients now dead, Steven couldn’t help but realize, “That could have been me.” Steven was brought back to consciousness from a heroin overdose on August 9th of last year. EMTs adminstered naloxone, which is used in the field to reverse the effects of an overdose, but it didn’t work. His heart had stopped. Thankfully, CPR eventually restarted his heart.

The Official Response

Federal and state funding for the opioid and heroin problem in Pennsylvania has been increased 19% to $76 million for the current fiscal year. The funds include $5 million for grant money to provide naloxone for emergency responders, which is proven to reverse the effects of narcotic overdose in most cases, and $2.3 million to establish specialty courts for handling drug-related criminal cases. Great strides have already been taken in fighting this epidemic. Pennsylvania restricts opioid prescriptions to seven days for minors and those discharged from hospital ERs. Emergency room physicians are not allowed to see patients for follow-up visits or refills. Each instance where an opioid prescription is filled is recorded on a state-wide database in order to stop “doctor shopping” or getting refills “too early.” According to the Sunday Item article, the prescription database has been accessed by doctors 8 million times since it was launched.

An estimated 2 million Americans are addicted to painkillers, and another 591,000 are addicted to heroin. Although we’re beginning to made headway regarding opioid prescriptions, much remains to be done regarding heroin addiction. It is noteworthy that taking opioid pain medication for longer than three months makes patients up to forty times more likely to become addicted to heroin. Senator Gene Yaw (R-23) of Williamsport told reporters, “I have said many times that I don’t expect to see positive results for at least ten years. It took a long time to get into the situation we find ourselves and we can’t expect a change to happen overnight. We are addressing many issues and eventually together they will make a difference.” It is abundantly clear that there is a risk of progression from alcohol and other drugs (especially opioid painkillers) to heroin.

heroin-use_1185px

Concluding Remarks

What can you do? Most importantly, as public service announcements state on TV in Pennsylvania, “Mind your meds.” Please don’t react to this suggestion by simply saying drug addicts should be able to be trusted, otherwise they’re just thieves. Or, that they should have better impulse control. Addiction is not about willpower, nor is it a matter of a moral deficiency. Virtually anyone who uses opiates for pain for longer than three months can become addicted. That is the very nature of the morphine molecule found in these medications. It is extremely difficult for an opiate addict to “just say no” to the screaming of their mu-opioid receptors in the brain and spinal cord once the morphine molecule has latched “lock-and-key” into place. Opiates are far more potent than naturally occurring endorphins.

I really had no idea how difficult it can be to quit drinking or taking opiates once your body gets used to the chemical reaction and the euphoria. I have not had a drop of alcohol, a line of cocaine, or a joint since 2008. It was not so easy for me to give up opioid painkillers. It’s a two-edged sword. First, there’s the initial legitimate need for pain relief. Doctors recognized this in the 90s when they decided to not let their patients suffer in chronic agony. Although I was in recovery for other substances, I thought I could use pain medication safely. I’d abused it in the past, sure, but now I was “sober” and I needed help with severe back pain. I didn’t want the drug in order to “party.” The other edge of the sword is the neuropsychology of the addiction itself. These types of medications actually restructure the brain. Sometimes the effects are permanent, as when memory or IQ or motor skills are compromised. Thankfully, this is not the case for me.

If you or someone you know is struggling with a drug or alcohol problem, please consult your physician for a phone number to the nearest help line. You will also find AA and NA phone lines in the phone book or online. If you are a Christian facing addiction, consider Celebrate Recovery. Facebook has numerous groups you can join. You call also email me at stevebarto1959@gmail.com and I will reply as soon as I can.

References

The Sunday Item. (Sunday, July 9, 2017) Sunbury, PA http://dailyitem.com

Karlman, J. (February 16, 2017). Timeline: How Prescription Drugs Became a National Crisis. Retrieved from: http://fox5sandiego.com/2017/02/16/timeline-of-how-prescription-drugs-became-national-crisis/

Moghe, S. (October 14, 2016). Opioid History: From Wonder Drug to Abuse Epidemic. CNN Online. Retrieved from: http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/12/health/opioid-addiction-history/index.html

Sandino, J. (May 13, 2015). A Timeline of the Heroin Problem in the U.S. Addictionblog.org Retrieved from: http://drug.addictionblog.org/a-timeline-of-the-heroin-problem-in-the-u-s/

Tribune News Services. (December 8, 2016). More than 50,000 Overdose Deaths. Chicagotribune.com. Retrieved from: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-us-overdose-deaths-20161208-story.html

The Molecule

June 20, 2017June 20, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

Andy Coop very nearly spent his career watching paint dry. The son of a machinist and school cafeteria worker, Coop hailed from Halifax in Northern England. He finished his undergraduate work in chemistry at Oxford University in 1991. He was given a choice of where to continue his studies. At Cardiff University was a professor whose specialty was the chemistry of paint. Industry at the time was aiming to find a new paint that dried at a certain temperature. At the University of Bristol was John Lewis, who studied the chemistry of drugs and addiction. In the 1960s, Lewis had discovered buprenorphine, an opiate that he later helped develop into a treatment for heroin addicts.

Coop didn’t remember giving the choice much thought. Drugs sounded more interesting than paint, so off to Bristol and John Lewis he went. It was there, in 1991, in a lab at Bristol, that Andy Coop encountered the morphine molecule – the essential element in all opiates. In time, Andy Coop got hooked on the morphine molecule – figuratively, of course, for he only once took a drug that contained it, and that was following surgery.

Like no other particle on Earth, the morphine molecule seemed to possess heaven and hell. It allowed for modern surgery, saving and improving too many lives to count. It stunted and ended too many lives to count with addiction and overdose. Discussing it, you could invoke some of humankind’s greatest cultural creations and deepest questions: Faust, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, discussions on the fundamental nature of man and human behavior, of free will and slavery, of God and evolution. Studying the molecule, you naturally wandered into questions like, Can mankind achieve happiness without pain? Would that happiness even be worth it? Can we have it all?

In heroin addicts, there is a certain debasement that comes from the loss of free will and enslavement to what amounts to an idea: permanent pleasure, numbness, and the avoidance of pain. But man’s decay has always begun as soon as he has it all, and is free of friction, pain, and the deprivation that temper his behavior. In fact, the United States achieved something like this state of affairs during the last decade of the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. It was first observable in widespread obesity. It wasn’t just people. Everything seemed obese and excessive. Massive Hummers and SUVs were cars on steroids. In some of the Southern California suburbs, on plots laid out with three-bedroom houses in the 1950s, seven-thousand-square-foot mansions barely squeezed between the lot lines, leaving no place for yards in which to enjoy the California sun.

In Northern California’s Humbolt and Mendocino Counties, 1960s hippies became the last great American pioneers by escaping their parents’ artificial world. They lived in tepees without electricity and funded the venture by growing pot. Now their children and grandchildren, like mad scientists, were using chemicals and thousand-watt bulbs, in railroad cars buried to avoid detection, to forge hyperpotent strains of pot. Their weed rippled like the muscles of bodybuilders, and growing this stuff helped destroy the natural world that their parents once sought. Today, great new numbers of these same kids – most of them well-off and white – began consuming huge quantities of the morphine molecule, doping up and tuning out.

What gave the morphine molecule its immense power was that it evolved somehow to fit, key-in-lock, into the receptors that all mammals, especially humans, have in their brains and spines. The so-called mu-opioid receptors – designed to create pleasure sensations when they receive endorphins the body naturally produces – were especially welcoming to the morphine molecule. The receptor combines with endorphins to give us those glowing feelings at, say, the sight of an infant or the feel of a furry puppy. The morphine molecule overwhelms the receptor, creating a far more intense euphoria than anything we come by internally. It also produces drowsiness, constipation, and an end to physical pain. Aspirin had a limit to the amount of pain it could calm. But the more morphine you took, Coop said, the more pain was dulled.

240_F_66049671_jg8l5ex2XfMiQrMRoDeGQubSsqDtFAnp (2)

For this reason, no plant has been more studied for its medicinal properties than the opium poppy. As the mature poppy’s petals fall away, a golf-ball-sized bulb emerges atop the stem. The bulb houses a goo that contains opium. From opium, humans have derived laudanum, codeine, thebaine, hydrocodone, oxymorphone, and heroin, as well as almost two hundred other drugs – all containing the morphine molecule, or variations of it. Etorphine, derived from thebaine, is used in dart guns to tranquilize rhinoceroses and elephants. [Amazingly, Etorphine has hit the streets of America as an opiate which teens and young adults are taking to get high, only to be dropping dead due to its potency.]

capsules-87113__340 (2)

Tobacco, coca leaves, and other plants had evolved to be pleasurable and addictive to humans out of the gate. But the morphine molecule surpassed them in euphoric intensity. Then it exacted a mighty vengeance when a human dared to stop using it. In withdrawal from the drug, an addict left narcotized numbness and returned to life and to feeling. Numbed addicts were notoriously impotent; in withdrawal they had frequent orgasms as they began to feel again. Humans with the temerity to attempt to withdraw from the morphine molecule were tormented first with excruciating pain that lasted for days. If an addict was always constipated and nodding off, his withdrawals brought ferocious diarrhea and a week of sleeplessness.

The morphine molecule resembled a spoiled lover, throwing a tantrum as it left. Junkies say they often have an almost constipated tingling when trying to urinate during the end of withdrawal, as if the last of the molecule, now holed up in the kidneys, was fighting like hell to keep from being expelled. Like a lover, no other molecule in nature provided such merciful pain relief, then hooked humans so completely, and punished them so mercilessly for wanting their freedom from it.

Certain parasites in nature exert the kind of control that makes a host act contrary to its own interests. One protozoan, Toxoplasma gondii, reproduces inside the belly of a cat, and is then excreted by the feline. One way it begins the cycle again is to infect a rat passing near the excrement. Toxoplasma gondii reprograms the infected rat to love cat urine, which to healthy rats is a predator warning. An infected rat wallows in cat urine, offering itself up as an easy meal to a nearby cat. This way, the parasite again enters the cat’s stomach, reproduces, and is expelled in the cat’s excrement – and the cycle continues.

The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule.

1280px-Homeless_woman

It became the poster molecule for an age of excess. No amount of it was ever enough. The molecule created ever-higher tolerance. Plus, it had a way of railing on when the body gathered the courage to throw it out. This wasn’t only during withdrawals. Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose in the human body, which then expels them. Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled. It resisted being turned into glucose and it stayed in the body.

“We still can’t explain why this happens. It just doesn’t follow the rules. Every other drug in the world – thousands of them – follows this rule. Morphine doesn’t,” Coop said. “It really is almost like someone designed it that way – diabolically so.”

Predictable

June 12, 2017June 12, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

He’s about as predictable as a wasp on speed!

There is a commercial running on broadcast television that defines predictable as the comfort in knowing where things are headed. That’s a very lovely yet very narrow definition. Generally, it is defined as “able to be predicted.” If you’re talking about trading on the open market, the comment typically is “the market is volatile and never predictable.” A derogatory definition is “behaving or occurring in a way that’s expected.” Unfortunately, this is a definition I am personally familiar with. A predictable person is one for whom it is easy to anticipate actions; easy to foresee or anticipate what he or she will do. An example of a predictable person is someone who always shows up drunk.

In fiction, we find the predictable boring. In real life, we find the unpredictable terrifying. I’ve heard it said that an artist should paint from the heart, and not always what people expect. Predictability often leads to the dullest work. In comparison, in The Art of War Sun Tzu said, “Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.”

When Predictability equals Immutable Truth

Unlike us, God is totally unchangeable, and has revealed to us many things about His immutable character. He is ultimately and fundamentally predictable. I can predict, for instance, that God will never leave me, nor forsake me; that He will work all things out to good for those who love Him; that He will hear and save all those call on His name. To doubt these things or fail to depend on them would be a great insult. Hebrews 13:8 says, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.”

The naturalist believes naturalism is a logical conclusion for atheists. Naturalism maintains that all things in the universe are the byproducts of natural laws, behave according to natural laws, and that such laws cannot be violated. Accordingly, atheists believe theism grants power to an omnipotent being who, by definition of being “all powerful,” could cause the universe to operate in any manner they choose. Here’s an interesting thought: What if any laws we might think we observe are merely the coincidental result of God’s choice to make things happen that way at the exact moment when we’re looking?

Routine versus Schedule

Predictability isn’t something you could say I’ve aspired to embody. It sounds sort of boring, doesn’t it? Not something the Cool Kids are into. I’ve never sought it out. That is, not until after a decade of stumbling around the chaotic territory of bipolar disorder, and, before that, nearly thirty years of active addiction. And when the two met, it was the “perfect storm.” As I struggled to manage my mental illness, and get clean and sober, my father told me I was addicted to chaos. That I needed to live on the edge. I think he was right.

I found it helpful to create routines rather than schedules. (Besides, there would be plenty of time for schedules and punching a clock once I got well and was able to return to full-time gainful employment.) Routine smacks of lifestyle, and I was certainly in need of changing that. For me, stability comes from routine. I did find benefit, however, in ritual, no matter how contradictory that might sound. For example, morning meditation and regular time in my “war room” like in the movie of the same name. Prayer seemed almost meaningless to me for a long time. I realize now that this was rooted in poor self-image and thinking I deserved nothing of value from God or anyone.

What You Can Do to Help Yourself

Take some time to think about a few concepts, such as what the term predictable means to you. Where do you think this definition or concept originated for you? What do you think the difference is between schedule and routine? Can routines be healthy? What are your daily Dos and Don’ts? What are some of the meaningful or constructive rituals you use daily? What new habits might you be able to cultivate to help you reach your goals?

An example of high predictability would be a mouse who was trained to push a lever after it sees a light. It receives food after it pushes the lever. After the mouse has been trained and repeated this task hundreds of times there will be a high predictability that the mouse will hit the lever once it sees the light again. Do you have a high level of predictability in a particular area that is bad for you? Something that might be sabotaging your goals? Remember, there is absolutely no shame in seeking help for those serious, dangerous or predictable behaviors you just can’t seem to quit on your own.

A Fundamental Orientation of the Heart

May 9, 2017May 9, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

Perhaps one of the hardest things we face is taking stock of whether our actions match what we claim to believe. Our worldview – that is, how we see the world and our place in it, or, if you prefer, our “philosophy of life” – should be obvious from our behavior. A worldview is not just a set of basic concepts but a fundamental orientation of the heart.

Since the events of 9/11, the term worldview is often used as a very general label for how people view the cultures with which their culture clashes. This is very important to note, as a worldview is a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or unconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic makeup of our world. A worldview is sometimes considered to be the fundamental perspective from which we address every issue of life.

From a Human Perspective

Imagine someone who thinks life has no true purpose. For that person, events are random. “I live, then I die.” A meaningless existence requires nothing from anyone. There is no need to check our bearings along the way to see of we’re “on track.” There is no need to justify our choices, values, or goals. There is a quiet desperation that drives humanity to think about the question, “Does life have meaning?” Even non-religious people understand that man has a burning desire to make sense of his life. Humanist Deane Starr writes, “Humans find their most complete fulfillment, whether real or imaginary, in some sort of intimacy with the Ultimate.” Our greatest and most difficult achievement is to find meaning in life. It is well known that many people lose their will to live because such meaning evades them.

What happens when someone fails to find a reason for living? Often they experience a spectrum of emotional and behavioral aberrations. Jay Asher published a book in 2007 titled Thirteen Reasons Why. Netflix has produced a mini-series based on Asher’s book, which has caused quite an uproar across the country. The story begins when Clay Jensen returns home from school to find a strange package with his name on it lying on his porch. Inside he discovers several cassette tapes recorded by Hannah Baker—his classmate and crush—who committed suicide two weeks earlier. Hannah’s voice tells him that there are thirteen reasons why she decided to end her life. Clay is one of them. If he listens, he’ll find out why.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death in the age group of 10 to 24 years. It is a critical problem in America. Educators and mental health professionals have mixed feelings about Thirteen Reasons Why. Dr. Nicole Quinlan, a pediatric psychologist at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, PA, objects to the show’s graphic, gratuitous portrayal of Hanna Baker’s suicide. I watched the mini-series, and I was shocked and upset by the final scene. I didn’t expect to see Hanna Baker drag a razor blade up both of her arms while sitting in a bathtub of warm water. It was, indeed, horrific.

Hanna Baker is a fictional character, but her plight is far from pretend. She was hounded by classmates, bullied online, and was labeled a “slut” after a football jock posted a random shot of her dress flying up when she came down a sliding board during her date with him. He intimated in his online post that Hanna was “easy.” Hanna’s problems worsened when she was raped by another member of the football team. On each side of the cassette tapes, she exposed one person (one “reason”) why she decided to end her life. Her thirteen excuses. Teenage angst is a very real and difficult emotion. Hanna, as are many teens, was trying to find meaning in what she felt was an already meaningless existence. Her worldview was that life was without purpose. The fault of the story depicted in Thirteen Reasons Why is its lack of providing meaning, hope, or the option of seeking treatment.

From a Biblical Perspective

Developing a biblical worldview involves both a mindset and a willset. First, how does the Bible explain and interpret my life and the world around me? Once this question is answered and accepted, the next aspect of a biblical worldview presents the challenge of putting this view into practice. A worldview is the framework of our most basic beliefs that shapes our view of and for the world, and is the basis for our decisions and actions. Worldview leads to values, which lead to actions. Beliefs clearly shape our behavior.

Man’s attempts to explain his existence are just that: man’s attempts. Within the world, man’s experience and perceptions of the infinite universe are limited and inadequate. We need help from the “outside.” This is what a biblical worldview is. Help from the outside. More fundamental than any worldview that can be delineated by ideas and propositions is the religious or faith orientation of the heart. There are only two basic commitments, leading to two basic conditions of life: “man converted to God,” and “man averted from God.” The commitment one makes is decisive for all life and thoughts. From a Christian perspective, worldview is not so much a matter of theoretical thought expressed in propositions, but is a deeply rooted commitment of the heart. Theory and practice are a product of the will, not the intellect; of the heart, not the head.

How Would My Life be Different if I Lived Out my Convictions?

I have spent most of my life manipulating others. For reasons best understood by reading my testimony, https://theaccidentalpoet.net/about/, I felt the need to hide, run away, or escape. I had a difficult time telling the truth, and, because of a victim mentality, I was able to rationalize my behavior. I became a born-again Christian at age 13, but never fully developed a relationship with, nor the mind of, Christ. When I began escaping through drugs and alcohol, I set off down a road that ultimately took me until August of last year to get off of and head in the right direction.

How could I act in such a callous and selfish manner if I was a Christian? I now understand the reason. One of my sponsors in Alcoholics Anonymous kept saying, “I hope you get God out of your head and into your heart.” Each time I heard that, I became defensive. Who are you to tell me I don’t have God in my heart? My former pastor said the same thing when he commented, “You don’t seem to have a heart for God.” What? I continued becoming defensive. Several things happened over the past year that finally got through to me

First, I returned to the church of my youth where I accepted Christ. Within a few months, our church got a new pastor from New Jersey. Pastor Mike is exactly what I needed. He has a wealth of experience counseling Christians struggling with addiction. In our several one-on-one meetings, he has been able to help me restructure how I see my addiction and the many excuses I was holding on to as justification. He has also helped me take a different approach to my chronic back pain. He made an amazing statement: “Have you ever considered that your chronic pain gives you the opportunity to share in the sufferings of Christ?” Whoa!

Last August I made the ridiculous decision to “help myself” to some of my mother’s oxycodone. Unfortunately, this was not the first (or second, or third) time I’ve done so. The result was serious damage to my relationship with her and the rest of my family. Interestingly, this is something I feared would happen if I did not stop using drugs. Especially using mom’s medication! I remain estranged from the family, and can only continue on my road to recovery, turning my relationship with the family over to Christ. I know I am delivered from the bondage of addiction. I have to live that freedom all over again each day. One day at a time.

Luke 6:45 is a Scripture I meditate on daily. It is very convincing, and seems to confirm what my former pastor and a former sponsor said regarding my lack of having God in my heart. The verse states, “A good man out of the good treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is good; and an evil man out of the evil treasure of his heart bringeth forth that which is evil: for of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaketh.” Proverbs 23:7 says, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” God is concerned about the hidden man of the heart, which is our inner life. Our inner life is what we think about. And like the Scriptures above indicate, how we live and who we are.

A Change of Behavior Requires a Change of Heart

It says in Jeremiah 17:9, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” Why do we sin, do bad things, and make mistakes? Because of our heart, which the Bible says is desperately wicked. Why do so many people struggle with drugs and pornography, returning again and again to these sins and vices even though they know their lives are being ruined by them? Because our heart often leads us astray. We cannot live perfect lives, and we cannot save ourselves from the punishment that we deserve. Moreover, it is impossible to deny the flesh, resist temptation, and stop living a self-centered and sinful life without a true change of heart.

Can this explain my constant relapsing over nearly forty years? Can it account for my selfishness? The disrespect and dishonor I’ve shown toward my parents and siblings? Does it help explain how I can “believe” and “speak” about Christ and recovery while secretly using drugs? Worldview, as I mentioned at the beginning of this post, is how we think about the world and our place in it. This basic belief establishes our values, which directly control our actions.

O Lord, how heartily sorry I am for failing to establish the proper Christian worldview, and to hide your Word in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.

It is only through my embracing a true Christian perspective and asking Christ to take away my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh that I can hope to act from a position of love and respect.

Opioid Use Disorders and Suicide

May 1, 2017 / The Accidental Poet / Leave a comment

The following is a guest blog taken verbatim from the monthly blog post of Dr. Nora Volkow, director, National Institute of Drug Abuse published April 20, 2017.

“At a Congressional briefing on April 6, the President of the American Psychiatric Association, Dr. Maria Oquendo, presented startling data about the opioid overdose epidemic and the role suicide is playing in many of these deaths. I invited her to write a blog on this important topic. More research needs to be done on this hidden aspect of the crisis, including whether there may be a link between pain and suicide.” – Nora

In 2015, over 33,000 Americans died from opioids—either prescription drugs or heroin or, in many cases, more powerful synthetic opioids like Fentanyl. Hidden behind the terrible epidemic of opioid overdose deaths looms the fact that many of these deaths are far from accidental. They are suicides. Let me share with you some chilling data from three recent studies that have investigated the issue.

20170311_woc097

In a study of nearly 5 million veterans recently published in Addiction, scientists reported that presence of a diagnosis of any substance use disorder and specifically diagnoses of opioid use disorders (OUD) led to increased risk of suicide for both males and females. The risk for suicide death was over 2-fold for men with OUD. For women, it was more than 8-fold. Interestingly, when the researchers controlled the statistical analyses for other factors, including co-morbid psychiatric diagnoses, greater suicide risk for females with opioid use disorder remained quite elevated, still more than two times greater than that for unaffected women. For men, it was 30 percent greater. The researchers also calculated that the suicide rate among those with OUD was 86.9/100,000. Compare that with already alarming rate of 14/100,000 in the general US population.

You may be tempted to think that these shocking findings about the effects of OUD on suicide risk are true for this very special population. But that turns out not to be the case.

Another US study, published last month in the Journal of Psychiatric Research, focused on 41,053 participants from the 2014 National Survey of Drug Use and Health. This survey uses a sample specifically designed to be representative of the entire US population. After controlling for overall health and psychiatric conditions, the researchers found that prescription opioid misuse was associated with anywhere between a 40 and 60 percent increased risk for suicidal ideation (thoughts of suicide). Those reporting at least weekly opioid misuse were at much greater risk for suicide planning and attempts than those who used less often. They were about 75 percent more likely to make plans for a suicide, and made suicide attempts at a rate 200 percent greater than those unaffected.

Using a different strategy, a review of the literature in the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence estimated standardized mortality ratios for suicide. This is a way of comparing the risk of death in individuals with a given condition compared to individuals from the general population. The researchers found that for people with OUD, the standardized mortality ratio was 1,351 and for injection drug use it was 1,373. This means that compared to the general population, OUD and injection drug use are both associated with a more than 13-fold increased risk for suicide death. These are stunning numbers and should be a strong call to action.

Persons who suffer from OUD are highly stigmatized. They often talk about their experience that others view them as “not deserving” treatment or “not deserving” to be rescued if they overdose because they are perceived as a scourge on society. The devastating impact of this brain disorder needs to be addressed. People who could be productive members of society and contribute to their families, their communities, and the general economy deserve treatment and attention.

As a country, we desperately need to overcome stigmatizing attitudes and confront the problem. We need to understand what causes some individuals to become addicted when exposed to opioids and thus study the biological basis of the disease of opioid addiction. We desperately need to know what the best treatments are for a given individual, and for that too, we need research to identify biomarkers for treatment response. Given the fact that effective medications exist but are drastically underutilized, we need to overcome institutional and attitudinal barriers to these treatments and deliver them to the 24 million people who could benefit. It can prevent not only the suffering of addiction and the danger of unintentional overdose but also help prevent the tragic outcome of opioid-related suicide.

mountain-lake-931726__340

	The Accidental Poet on Creation vs. Evolution: Inside…
	The Accidental Poet on The Narrow Way
	locsworld on Creation vs. Evolution: Inside…
	Fentanyl Becomes Dea… on Local Opioid Abuse: A Piece of…
	kevin theriault on The Narrow Way

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: