OxyContin and the American Opioid Crisis

The opioid crisis in America has been going on for a number of years now, but the press and background information on this is becoming more clear.

Today, Esquire published an article related to the opioid crisis and its likely greatest beneficiaries.

In it is a description of how the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, is the single largest driving force behind the opioid epidemic.

Purdue makes OxyContin – which is nothing more than time release morphine.

OxyContin in turn has something like 50% market share in the opioid market in the United States.

It seems very straightforward then to draw a line between the largest share of opioids, its manufacturer and the hundreds of thousands of dead Americans – which Chris Christie described as “9/11 every 3 weeks”.

The story is much more than that, however. It talks about how a professional marketer of quack nostrums purchased Purdue Pharmaceutical, who then cut his teeth in the actual pharmaceutical space as an “innovative” marketer for Valium, and who then turned his attention to finding a new product to display his marketing gifts in.

That product is OxyContin.

And therein lies the tale of the sheep vs. the wolf.

The classic image of a wolf is a ravening beast with no regard for life, limb, emotion or consequence. However, wolves in reality are highly social, cooperative and even friendly (when not starving).

The classic image of a sheep, on the other hand, is docile, kind and communal. Ironically, sheep are anything but. Sheep are the worst possible combination of social awareness, selfishness and envy as noted from the original “Sheep Logic” article.

The story of Purdue, OxyContin and the Sacklers will continue to unfold, but it is abundantly clear already that what we’re seeing is the cancerous spread of a Sheep Logic wave carrying OxyContin and “pain management” into millions of addicted and hundreds of thousands of dead Americans.

First blog post

Hello World!

This is the completely unheralded start of my blog: America the Sheepiful

Credit where credit is due: The inspiration for this theme comes from W. Ben Hunt’s “Epsilon Theory” blog, specifically the post: Sheep Logic

Mr. Hunt’s post resonated with me for several reasons.

First, while I knew that sheep were a huge pain to keep – gleaned entirely from my extensive but eclectic reading – I had never actually thought about why they were so capable of self immolation.

Secondly, I was struck by the juxtaposition of theory vs. reality in how Americans view themselves vs how Americans view Europeans.

Americans think of themselves largely as pioneers: lean, hungry, sharp – as wolves.

Europeans think of themselves as part of a larger community. Could be a town, could be a region, could be a nation, could be the entire EU.

Yet the characteristics of sheep, as propounded by Sheep Logic, show that it is actually not individuality which separates European from American behavior.

Nor is it awareness of others’ thoughts and feelings.

Rather, it is what occurs next: do other’s thoughts and feelings matter? Or are they just grist for one’s own self interested goals?

This seems like a very interesting dichotomy to explore – and one increasingly relevant as the sheep view of the world, disguised as neoliberal economics, attempts to continue its multi-decade run as the establishment view of how society should operate.