OxyContin: Between Malevolence, Incompetence, Suffering, Grief and 'Denying History'
There is a really moving docudrama called Dopesick about the opioid scandal in the US. It is the story of how Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, relentlessly pushed and profited from a pain relief drug that killed and destroyed thousands of American people's lives. It is not a unique story, but certainly becoming canonical in global public awareness, I hope.
Produced by Hulu and available in the UK on Disney, it is a great introduction to how evil pharmaceutical companies and medical regulators can be, how duped medical professionals can be and how powerless their victims are, unless something virtuous, sustained and unrelenting aligned in the direction of justice is mobilised. Even though the series delivers its own dopamine hits and ends on a positive note, e.g. state authorities taking Purdue to court and winning damages, basically the wealthy have gotten away with corporate murder.
While many cultural institutions in the US have removed the name of the Sackler family from the buildings that these Greedy Sacklers sucked out of their victims, Britain's cheapskate institutions have been slower off the mark. There is a devilish Opium Warrior irony to New Labour's gutless wonder folding his dismissal of moral responsibility into his brush off of the righteous iconoclasm pouring out of the murder of George Floyd.
What has this got to do with the pandemic?
Maybe we feel that the NHS protects us from these excesses, with NICE pathways, the negotiating position of such huge buying power and all the good doctors and nurses trying their hardest with Borg-like collectivity....
For healthy, transformative adaptation in the direction of Justice, I feel that we must continue to empower each other to know better what is being done to us, and navigate our own miXtrust issues, the n(sh)arr(ll)owness of publicly permitted discourse, the feelings of different sorts of traumatised health workers, the highly compromised edicts of the surveillance state, what is knowable on the sciences front and what is doable about all these things on the life front.
I intend to update/improve this annotated list.
Resources
Pfizer were recently forced to release some data on adverse affects reported after their vaccine. To scale my concern, the unknowable unknown that bothers me much more than this is the number of people killed and harmed in underreported places.
There are three youtube channels I've found interesting and I'm at least a 7 on the Ivermectin Hoper Spectrum.
Dr John Campbell an experienced academic nurse who has been video blogging about the disease since before anyone in the UK too it seriously. More enthusiastic about Vitamin D than, say decoloniality. Getting more and more pissed at medical corruption with time.
Dr Tim Spektor and The ZOE Project (Aka Dr Poo) academic and doctor based at KCL who focusses on gut health and nutrition. His spin off company has taken a Citizen Science approach to understanding disease prevalence and changing symptoms and the years have rolled on. Unlikely to sing from the minaret that Machine Leaning and Citizen Science are sh!t.
Dr Mubeen Syed (Aka Dr Beanz) , US based physician and medical educator who has great drawing skills and gets very science in a human biology sort of fashion.
One channel I've found infuriatingly egotistical but keep an eye on sometimes to anticipate what 'outrage' might pop out of some people.
The Dark Horse podcast - husband and wife biologists in the sin bin combo Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying are a challenge, their (q)white popularity illustrates the epistemic autism of many STEM people, most of whom lack the erudition to express themselves with such conviction and self certainty. Weinstein got himself cancelled from cushier academic life a few years back. Penchant for antiIslam guests and evolutionary explanations for their underpants.
