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By Liam Quinn | Fox News
Seattle’s homeless crisis has reached such catastrophic levels that a north-side cemetery has become home to drug abuse, drug dealing and prostitution.
Bikur Cholim Cemetery board member and city council candidate Ari Hoffman detailed the desperate effort to fight the epidemic and placed blame for how bad it has gotten squarely on the local government.
“The city council, city elected officials failed our city. They created a haven where it is OK for people to die on the streets through drug use, and to live on the streets people who have a mental illness,” Hoffman told “Fox & Friends.” “They are not offering treatment solutions, and they are failing us.
Hoffman added: “Through 2013, the homeless population was relatively stable. And then what happened after that is it grew… because the policies they had enabled drug use behavior. It’s just absolutely tragic that we have people who are living inside of a cemetery, that are dealing drugs outside of a cemetery, and are running prostitution in a cemetery, but you see it on the streets all over Seattle.”
Hoffman, who is running for city council, then took aim at “non-performing non-profits” for not doing enough to combat the crisis and revealed what he believes is the first step to turn back the tide.
“You have to wonder where the money goes, the first thing we need to do is audit where all that money is going. There’s plenty of money, the city’s coffers are full, the money is just not being spent appropriately,” he told “Fox & Friends.” “According to Seattle’s own numbers, 78 percent of people want to be off heroin. They don’t want to have addiction problems, they want treatment. Unfortunately there just aren’t enough services – there aren’t enough mental health options for them… we need to make sure those services are available for people on the streets.”
Groundskeepers frequently find trash and other debris at the cemetery. (Ari Hoffman)
Cemetery groundskeepers have had to deal with cleaning up everything from used needles to human feces, according to a representative. (Ari Hoffman)
Hoffman went on to paint a dire picture of the scene at the historic Bikur Cholim Cemetery.
“They find needles, they find drugs, they find human feces all over the place and they have to clean it all up,” he said. “Our grounds-crew has been pricked by needles before, they’ve been assaulted by people they found living there, they’ve found people on the ground overdosed thinking they were dead.”
Federal data released in 2018 found Washington state’s homeless population had risen more than any other state in the country.
Seattle, King County, had a homeless population of 12,112 — the third highest in the country behind Los Angeles and New York City. (Click to Source)
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By Stefan Stanford – All News Pipeline – Live Free Or Die
June 20, 2019
According to this incredibly sad June 12th story over at NBC News, death rates in America from suicides, drug overdoses and alcohol related causes have reached an all-time high here, with this new report released by the Commonwealth Fund examining data from all 50 US states finding the states of Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania particularly hard hit.
Reporting that these so-called ‘deaths of despair‘ are exploding across the country with the rate of overdose deaths from drugs in West Virginia called ‘mind boggling‘, the NBC News story contained 3 different maps which we’ve put into this story, maps which show just how many people are dying from these preventable deaths and hinting that there are very few possible long lasting solutions to all of the different crisis our nation now faces: America’s return to God. Or the Return of Jesus.
As we had reported on ANP back in January of 2018, America has been suffering a huge spiritual vacuum as the masses turn away from God and have instead embraced evil and as the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, has warned numerous times that if the world continued upon the path that it is now on, the world was approaching ‘end times‘. First, from NBC news.
“When we look at what’s going on in mid-Atlantic states — West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania — those are the states that have the highest rates of drug overdose deaths in the country,” David Radley, a senior scientist for the Commonwealth Fund, said.
Rates in those states are at least double the national average of fatal drug overdose rates. West Virginia had the highest drug overdose death rates, fueled mostly by the opioid epidemic. What’s more, those rates rose by 450 percent from 2005 to 2017, according to the report.
“The rate of growth in drug overdose deaths in West Virginia is absolutely mind-boggling,” Radley told NBC News.
It’s not just prescription painkillers and heroin that are driving these death rates. The study authors also point to fentanyl and other potent synthetic opioids that are creeping into illicit drugs such as cocaine. Fentanylis similar to morphine, but 50 to 100 times more potent, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Following West Virginia, the District of Columbia, Kentucky, Delaware and New Hampshire had the next highest drug overdose death rates in the country, according to the report.
Death rates from suicide and alcohol also showed regional disparities. People died at higher rates by suicide or from alcohol than from drugs in Montana, Nebraska, the Dakotas, Oregon and Wyoming.
Just a few months ago, I received one of those phone calls that one never wants to receive.
My mother was calling to let me know that a friend I had grown up with during the early 1980’s had passed away.
While I’ll always remember a huge number of us sitting around with ‘Ed‘, watching every Clint Eastwood movie ever created as Eastwood’s characters were the embodiment of who ‘Ed‘ wanted to be, I was further saddened to learn in the phone call with my mom that ‘Ed‘ had committed suicide, taken his own life at a time in America where our nation was suffering from record numbers of suicide all across the country. None of us would have ever seen it in ‘Ed‘.
Yet as Mac Slavo also reports in this new story over at SHTFPlan, America is now witnessing a massive surge in ‘deaths of despair‘; suicides, deaths from drugs and deaths due to alcohol, and as we’ll see in the excerpt below taken from his new story, all of this is happening at a time when the government had abandoned America, funnelling money away from the American people to themselves and putting trillions of dollars and great time and energy into creating their ‘global new world order‘. They’ve left the American people behind and this is what tens of millions have gotten in return.
In the United States, which is obviously not the happiest nation on Earth, Americans are committing suicide or “deaths of despair” in record numbers. There are many issues that can rightly take the blame, but lack of personal freedom and the manipulated economy are creating generations of hopelessness.
Feelings of hopelessness and despair are overwhelming many in the U.S. So much so, that people are turning to alcohol, drugs, and suicide to numb the pain of their lives. Government enslavement and the stranglehold on the economy are making life even more difficult on those already struggling to get by. And this is seen in new death numbers released.
According to a report by RT, the suicide rates among teens and young adults aged 15 to 24 (the older end of “Generation Z”) spiked in 2017, reaching their highest point since 2000, according to a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). “Deaths of despair” have risen 51 percent in the past 10 years, buoyed by rising rates of anxiety and depression that comes along with social media use. Drug use, hopelessnesses, and a lack of free will are taking their toll on people. And the statistical figures may be even higher since some intentional drug overdoses are not counted as suicides.
The rise of millennial and Gen Z “deaths of despair” can be traced to the gap between reality and expectations. Raised on the myths of the American Dream and Freedom, these are the first Americans to experience a markedly lower standard of living than their parents and an increase in the authoritarian control on their lives. The Baby Boomers who grew prosperous on the fruits of the postwar economic boom had far more freedom and paid a loss in taxes that the newer generations, who have effectively sold their children and grandchildren into slavery.
Young people aren’t the only ones afflicted by suicide. Life expectancy nationwide is down for the third year in a row, and a report from Trust for America’s Health published last year projects that this “epidemic” – which they define as drug and alcohol deaths plus suicide – is on track to kill more than 1.6 million people by 2025 if it continues to grow at its current rate.
None of this will change until people are free to make their own decisions – including the bad ones – and the economy is no longer manipulated by the elitists who funnel money to themselves away from the masses.
As Fox News had reported back in April of 2017, America’s up and coming generation the Millennials are far less likely to hold religious beliefs than any other generation, with over 60% of that generation believing Christianity is too ‘judgemental‘ while 64% of Millennials claim that ‘anti-gay‘ was the best way to describe most churches in America today.
As FaithWire had reported back in April of 2019, while 77% of Americans believe that America is suffering from a ‘moral crisis‘ according to a Pew Research poll, Americans were still turning away from God in near record numbers. From their story.:
Our nation’s moral compass is spinning out of control, and it will only get worse as we continue to turn away from True North.
A recent survey from the Pew Research Center shows a stunning 77 percent of Americans are at least “fairly worried” about the country’s morals, with 43 percent describing themselves as “very worried.” But despite their concern, 50 percent of everyone surveyed said religion — the source of absolute truth and morality — will be “less important” in 30 years. Forty-three percent said faith will be equally important in 2050 as it is today.
The survey also showed 56 percent of Americans believe faith in God is not necessary to have good values and to be moral.
Interestingly, I think that number reveals something quite incredible: God’s general revelation and His imprint on humanity is so strong, we don’t even need to believe in Him to see His impact on the world. The problem, though, is the longer we separate truth — the absolute morality of right and wrong — from the source of all truth, the sooner our moral compass will come apart completely.
Yet as we had reported on ANP back on June 8th in this story titled “With The World Teetering At The Edge Of The Abyss, Nearly At The Point Of No Return, The Implementation Of The Globalists ‘Total Control’ System Is Ripping Out The Heart And Soul Of America“, with America’s smaller communities quite literally dying as the Survival Blog had reported in this June 19th story which Steve Quayle had linked to on his website Wednesday, America needs a ‘Revival‘ and there has never been a more important time than now for us to rise up and fight to restore America’s soul.
Back in January of 2018, we published this story on ANP titled “‘We Are On A Very Dangerous Path Of Self-Annihilation’ Warns Head Of Russian Orthodox Church: ‘If Evil Prevails, End Times Will Be Upon Us‘” within which we shared a dire warning from the Head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, that the world was approaching ‘end times‘, largely due to the normalization and global acceptance of evil.
Patriarch Kirill warned back then that evil was driving away the good from society and while warning that the world was on a very dangerous path towards self-annihilation, he also said its the church’s duty to warn of what they see unfolding.
As Patriarch Kirill stated, never before have evil and righteousness been put upon the same level as we are witnessing now and the Patriarch issues this firm warning, “if evil prevails, the end times will be upon us.”
When asked about the apocalypse and if ‘the end is near’ and what would bring about such a scenario, Patriarch Kirill tells us “In the case when the human society stops to be viable, when the resources to exist will be exhausted which would happen in the case when we have absolute dominance of evil”. Warning us that evil is not viable and in cases where systems are taken over by evil, those systems will fall, Kirill continues “If evil drives away good from human society, then the end will come”.
When asked by the interviewer “why do we have to talk about this today?”, Patriarch Kirill replies “Because we are now living through a special period in history. Never before did human society put good and evil on the same level. There were attempts to justify evil but never to say that good and evil are relative and not absolute truths. People’s perception of good and evil was that they were absolute truth. But today they are relative. When can evil unrestrainedly grow in human society? EXACTLY when this point of view that good and evil are the same triumphs globally. And we are currently not at the beginning of this process but a certain amount of time has passed. History as we know it is exhausted, so how can the church keep silent? How can it avoid sending up an alarm? How can it avoid warning that we are on a very dangerous path of self-annihilation? If the church will not say this than who will?”
Yet, should we really even be surprised about all of these ‘deaths of despair‘ coming at a time when Western Civilization is itself committing ‘suicide‘ as we hear in the final video at the bottom of this story from Infowars? It’s clear that a huge spiritual vacuum has struck America and only America returning to God will get our nation out of the mess we’re in.
And with the mainstream media helping to push America into mass insanity with their lies and fake news triggering ‘Trump derangement syndrome‘ and great panic among many Democrats, should they be held responsible for the mass explosion of ‘deaths of despair‘ across America? Those who are still getting their news from the mainstream media, and believing their never-ending lies, are setting themselves up for a major fall ahead as truth finally comes to light.
In the first video below, videographer Martin Brodel talks with us about the soaring ‘deaths of despair‘ amongst ‘Generation Z‘ and the Millennials while the 2nd video below from the Wall Street Journal originally published back in February of 2018 warned that the growing number of ‘deaths of despair‘ were a very loud and clear warning sign for America, a warning we now see coming true before our eyes: America is on the edge of disaster.
These young men need the Gospel of Jesus to be free from Addiction
Lake County Judicial Court Drug Court Judge James Manley shares a laugh with Drug Court graduates and CSKT members, Bradley Cannon, 22, and Dale Joseph of Elmo. Graduates completed the yearlong day-to-day program. “It was hard in the beginning,” said Joseph. He added that the past four months got easier. “I’m so happy now. I didn’t really think I’d do this.” Joseph was proud to announce he received his driver’s license a week before graduation. His plan is to complete his HiSet test and work for the Tribes. Cannon said he kept his mind set on “not giving up” and praises the support he got from the program team and his family. “The counselors really cared,” said Cannon. The next step for him is to get a job wild land firefighting. (Click to Source)
Monday, May 20, 2019 by: S.D. Wells
(Natural News) When a medical doctor prescribes drugs for symptoms, those warning signs may “go away” for a short while, but the root of the problem always festers. That’s because nearly all medications are chemically concocted in a laboratory and then “assigned” to bad health symptoms, and are doing nothing more than sweeping the “dust” and “germs” of serious problems “under the rug.”
Sooner or later, those real health issues will rear their ugly heads, and the next piece of advice won’t be so non-invasive, my friends, because after the prescription drugs fail you comes surgery and/or chemotherapy, psychotropic drugs, and eventually, if you live and can suffer long enough through all that, dementia sets in. That’s the final “financial” and mental avalanche.
The AMA (American Medical Association) has been making sure, in America, for 100 years, that medical doctors offer zero nutritional advice to their patients, and only prescribe “medications” that are laboratory created. This ensures any person with chronic health conditions will not ever recover, and become a client for life (a shortened life at that). That was the end game from the very beginning, and the FDA and CDC play right into that arena like a tri-fecta of partners in crime.
Half the country takes at least one of pharma’s “prescription” poisons daily. Did you know? That includes one in every five children. If ANY of those drugs really worked, wouldn’t THEY be the healthy half? Think about that real hard for a minute, after you mute the commercial on TV that says the side effects are worse than the condition being treated. That’s hundreds of billions of dollars wasted on drugs that don’t work. Wow.
Notice how they turn up the commercials on TV so you can hear them from the kitchen while you’re eating that genetically mutated food, drinking that tap water, and wondering why your other medications aren’t working, even though you take them exactly “as prescribed.”
Wait, the cholesterol medications is just quack remedy? What’s that – your heart medication is making you dizzy? So you’re saying the blood thinner can cause you to die of internal bleeding if you simply bump your head? That’s not “natural.”
Your M.D. is a snake oil salesman. A huckster. A con artist. A shill. He knows that lab-concocted junk isn’t going to cure you. That’s why Allopath only checks your symptoms and conditions, but never questions what you ate the past day, month, or year.
Why is it that nearly all people who don’t take pharmaceuticals ARE healthy, or at least in much better “condition” than those who do? Pharma “users” are involuntary abusers, and they never get cured of anything. Oh the irony.
Some acute health conditions do require “Western” medicine’s help, but those cases are literally rare when you look at the statistics. Nature provides antibiotics. Nature provides anti-viral “serum.” Nature provides immune system boosters. You can even beat the flu with things like oil of oregano, but no M.D. in America can ever say that, or the AMA will “remove” them from their station.
Sure, there are situations that require high-strength pain killers, anesthesia during operations, antibiotics for critical-stages of bacterial infections, and a handful more situations, but those are always acute illnesses. Even infectious diseases are better treated with natural remedies, and it’s obvious from the propaganda the vax-fanatics spread and spew in their “herds” of desperation and narrative-based fear.
Then there’s opioid abuse. Those long-term health crises include depressed breathing, which eventually just becomes cessation of breathing, which then gets termed “overdose” by the CDC and FDA. Can you say financial settlement and media blackout?
Opioid addicts discover their dependence (even in the brain) and tolerance for the drugs happens in just days after beginning the “cycle” the quack doctor recommended “just for you.” Your pill-pusher is a good actor. She/he’s very “nice.”
Anti-anxiety medications and depression medications are no different. Neither are stimulant meds. They all breed dependence, tolerance, and eventually, total uselessness. Actually, beyond useless, because the prescription drugs do REAL chronic health damage all while decreasing any effectiveness they may have once had.
From statin drugs to asthma meds, and from anti-depressants to amphetamines for kids, American medicine is the worst on the planet, and it’s planned that way. The only reason 150 million Americans still take them is they’re too dumbed-down and sick to figure it out now. We’re a nation of “prescribed” druggies. The kids and the seniors are doped to the max. Americans have lost their “drive” or spirit to work, to save money, to create, to run their own business, to stay prepared, to seek longevity. But not all of us. You have the choice to be healthy. You really do. You have complete control.
Tune in to NaturalCures.news for updates on the most powerful superfoods on the planet that will cure you of all these preventable ills, and you can help us expose the long-term health detriment being spoon-fed to America under the guise of “medicine.” (Click to Source)
Sources for this article include:
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By Mac Slavo
Sleeping drugs such as Ambien have been making people kill themselves in their sleep, says the Food and Drug Administration. Drugs that supposedly help people sleep are linked to falls, burns, poisoning, limb loss, drowning, and even suicide.
According to The New York Times, this could all be solved by adding warning labels to the bottles of the pills instead of people trying to get off Big Pharma’s drugs.
Incidents related to sleeping pills have included “accidental overdoses, falls, burns, near drowning, exposure to extreme cold temperatures leading to loss of limb, carbon monoxide poisoning, drowning, hypothermia, motor vehicle collisions with the patient driving, and self-injuries such as gunshot wounds and apparent suicide attempts,” according to the FDA’s own research. But rather than tell people not to use such drugs, the FDA simply wants people to know they could kill themselves after taking the pills.
The FDA announced Tuesday that a prominent warning would be required on all medication guides for Ambien, Lunesta, Sonata, and the generic version of Ambien, which is called zolpidem. The FDA also mandates a separate warning against prescribing the drugs to anyone with a history of sleepwalking. –Futurism.
That’s a lovely side effect…
“Patients usually did not remember these events,” the agency wrote, according to Futurism. Bizarre actions have been widely reported after using sleeping pills, and the FDA has warned about this in the past – 12 years ago, in fact. That means this isn’t exactly new information. Big Pharma’s drugs have been problematic for quite some time now, but it is comforting to see others take note of just how disastrous some of these medications can be to humanity.
Some have expressed their surprise at the FDA’s admission that these pills may not be all that safe for people to use. “I am surprised to see this warning come out now,” University of Pennsylvania physician Ilene Rosen told The NYT.
This is something I’ve been telling my patients for the last 15 years, and in the sleep community, this is well known. And I’d like to think we’ve done a good job putting the news out there, that these drugs have some risks.
But all drugs have risks; hopefully, people will begin to realize that medications simply treat the symptom not the underlying problem that caused the issue to begin with. Western medicine is about management, not treatment. And it isn’t just Ambien and sleeping drugs humanity should be worried about; it’s all the drugs pushed on the public every single day.
Ben Goldacre’s book Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients is great at explaining the dilemma we as a society have found ourselves in. We like to imagine that regulators have some code of ethics and let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. This book shows the true scale of this murderous disaster. Goldacre believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct in the medical industry affects us on a global scale. (Click to Source)
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Imagine you’re looking around at a bustling city square, complete with shopkeepers and heavy foot traffic. But swirling jewel tones cover the ground, a muted haze flows through the air, and flowing, bulbous images of dogs and birds are attached to the people passing by. You know you’re neither dreaming nor drunk. It’s entirely possible, thanks to new research, that you’re hooked up to the “Hallucination Machine.”
The Hallucination Machine was built by a team researchers from the Sussex University’s Sackler Center for Conscious Science, including the center’s co-founder, neuroscientist Anil Seth, Ph.D. In a paper published Wednesday in Scientific Reports, Seth and his colleagues explain they created the Hallucination Machine as a means to study the mechanisms underlying altered states of consciousness without needing to use psychedelic drugs. This tool, they claim, is like a drug in its ability to make people feel like they are hallucinating.
Creating this altered state in human subjects, they explain, is tricky. Typically, people reach altered states because of psychopathological conditions or psychoactive substances, like LSD and psilocybin. Scientists have induced altered states in study participants with these drugs before to study the neural underpinnings at play, but the process is far from perfect. The Sussex University team explains that, because psychedelics have many physiological effects, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what’s changing in terms of consciousness.
With the Hallucination Machine, the researchers write, they are able to “simulate visual hallucinatory experiences in a biologically plausible and ecologically valid way.” The tool, which, unlike a drug, does not directly alter the person’s neurophysiology, combines virtual reality and machine learning. When a person wears it, they are immersed in “hallucinations” by watching 360-degree panoramic videos of video scenes with a VR head-mounted display. These videos are modified with an algorithm called Deep Dream, a computer program created by Google engineer Alexander Mordvintsev that modifies natural images to reflect images categorized by a neural network.
Deep Dream happens to insert a lot of images of dogs into the video, but researchers aren’t quite sure why. “One thing people always ask us is why there are so many dogs,” co-author David Schwartzman, Ph.D., told The Times on Monday.
“The short answer is we don’t know.”
In their study, the researchers used two experiments to demonstrate that the Hallucination Machine creates “visual phenomenology” — hallucinations — similar to those induced classical psychedelics. In the first, 12 participants used the machine, experienced the trippy VR, and then were asked how the experience altered from watching normal videos and being on a psychedelic drug. The participants overwhelmingly reported the experience was much different than watching a control video but qualitatively similar to being on drugs, especially psilocybin.
In the second experiment, 22 participants used the Hallucination Machine and then watched a control video. As they watched each video, they completed a task to test their perception of the passing of time. Neither using the Hallucination Machine nor watching the video caused temporal distortion. This was an important discovery, the researchers point out, because in previous studies on altered states of consciousness in which people did take drugs, they reported being confused about the passing of time. The new observations suggest to the researchers that it’s not being in an altered state that causes temporal distortion, it’s the drugs.
Examining the brain in an altered state of consciousness is important to scientists who are still are seeking to understand the biological basis of consciousness as a whole. A major hurdle to this area of study has been the use of and accessibility to psychedelic drugs. The Hallucination Machine may change this, and in turn, allow us to learn more about the unknown ways our minds can perceive ourselves and the world. (Click to Source)
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Today’s narcotics abusers may be turning to cocaine in part “because there’s been a lot of bad press about other drugs.”
The bitter lessons about the dangers of cocaine from the disco era in the 1970s may be lost on a new generation of drug abusers.
A phenomenon known as “generational forgetting” may be one of the reasons for the deadly uptick in cocaine deaths that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported this week, experts said.
“Certain drugs seem to go in and out of style,” Daniel Raymond, deputy director of the Harm Reduction Coalition, said. “Right now we’re seeing an uptick in cocaine use, and we’re hitting that point in the cycle where we’re starting to see more fatal overdoses.”
“Absolutely, there is a generational piece to this,” said Hans Breiter, a Northwestern University psychiatry professor and one of the world’s leading experts on how cocaine stimulates the human brain.
Today’s narcotics abusers may be turning to cocaine in part “because there’s been a lot of bad press about other drugs,” Breiter said.
Just like the generation that dealt with the horrors of AIDS was followed by another that was less afraid of the scourge and thus more likely to have unprotected sex, today’s drug users aren’t afraid of cocaine like they should be, he said.
“We see this kind of forgetting in politics all the time, for example,” he said. “People resurrecting ideas like trickle-down economics, even though it’s been pretty much invalidated.”
On Thursday, the CDC reported that overdose deaths involving cocaine began rising around 2012 and jumped by more than a third between 2016 and 2017.
CDC researchers also found that almost three-quarters of the deaths involving cocaine in 2017 were among people who had also taken opioids.
But deaths involving cocaine alone also increased, said the CDC’s Lawrence Scholl, who was one of the study’s authors.
That could be because there’s more cocaine on the streets, Raymond, of the Harm Reduction Coalition, said.
“We have a greater supply of cocaine now than we did 10 years ago,” he said. “My understanding is production had fallen off in Colombia and it has been increasing again.”
Sheila Vakharia of the Drug Policy Alliance wrote in an email “there is definitely something to be said for cyclical theories of drug use because when we focus a lot of time/energy/resources on restricting the ‘drug du jour’ it opens the market for alternative drugs and encourages suppliers to diversify.”
Of late, the drug du jour wreaking havoc across America has been opioids, which have killed tens of thousands nationwide, with the addiction cutting like a scythe through states such as West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and the District of Columbia, according to the CDC.
But the Drug Enforcement Administration also reported in its National Drug Threat Assessment last year that cocaine availability has increased steadily in the United States since 2012, especially on the East Coast and in the South.
According to the CDC report, 10,131 out of the 13,942 cocaine-involved deaths (almost 73 percent) also involved an opioid.
Heroin is an opioid made from morphine. But drug dealers have been boosting profits by cutting their drugs with synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is 25 to 50 times more powerful than heroin.
Breiter said drug addicts often get high on something known on the street as a “speedball,” which is a combination of cocaine and heroin.
“People will use heroin to blunt the severity of coming down from the high of cocaine,” he said. “It can be quite severe.”
The problem is that when the heroin is cut with an opioid, it can make this drug cocktail even more lethal, the experts said.
Vakharia said there have been reports of drug dealers cutting cocaine with opioids and “cocaine users naïve to opioids are overdosing because they have no tolerance.” But neither she nor her colleagues at Drug Policy are convinced that is the case.
“It makes little sense,” she wrote. “Why would a seller want to kill off a customer.”
Raymond agreed that he didn’t believe that fentanyl-contaminated cocaine was intentional, given the opposing effects of the two drugs.
“We’re not seeing a huge trend of cocaine intentionally mixed with opioids like fentanyl,” he said. “Why? I think that’s probably because fentanyl is very sedating, cocaine is very stimulating.” (Click to Source)
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“In the name of Jesus the Messiah, I now repent of my involvement in the use of illegal and legal soul destroying drugs, and ask You, Abba Father, to forgive me for using them. I repent of this sin of using alcohol, marijuana, addictive prescription drugs, cocaine, crack, acid, speed, heroin, meth, etc, to dull and cripple my will, my mind and sensibilities. I only want to use my mind to serve and honor You, Lord.
“I speak now in the authority of the name of our Lord Jesus the Messiah, to all the strong-men and principalities over the drugs I took and declare that you have no power over me anymore, for I am bought and paid for by the Blood of Jesus shed on Calvary. I especially come against the spirit of divination, and any other demonic spirits, which came into me though my use of drugs. In the name of the Lord Jesus the Messiah, I bind you all present together. I command you to go where the Lord Jesus the Messiah tells you to go by the voice of His Holy Spirit”.
CINCINNATI – They were medical professionals but they traded prescription pain pills for sex, prosecutors say. Others let untrained office workers examine patients, leaving a blank prescription pad at the clinic, their indictments reveal.
One dentist extracted the healthy teeth of patients as an excuse to give them painkillers, the feds say. Two of the prescribers charged in this week’s federal opioid sweep caused the deaths of five patients because of overprescribing, court papers show.
All of the 60 doctors, nurse practitioners, office staff, pharmacists and dentists charged in an Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioids Strike Force investigation face felonies for prescribing opioids when they shouldn’t.
The accusations in some of the indictments go beyond making money off people with addiction disease or acting to obtain drugs to feed their own addictions.
For example, Dr. Thomas Ballard III is accused of giving pain pills to people in exchange for sex and prescribing opioids to at least one pregnant woman, who died.
Court documents say Ballard, of Ballard Clinic-Family Practice in Jackson, Tennessee, didn’t monitor his patients for addiction as required. He also prescribed the deadly combination of opioids and benzodiazepines, a sedative, despite Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA warnings. He was charged with maintaining a drug-involved premises and aiding and abetting, as well as unlawfully distributing and dispensing controlled substances.
Combining opioids and benzodiazepines, which are sedatives often prescribed for anxiety disorder or depression, is deadly. In 2016, the CDC issued new guidelines recommending that clinicians avoid prescribing the two kinds of medications together.
Ballard’s case wasn’t the only drugs-for-sex case in Jackson.
The Appalachian Regional Prescription Opioid Strike Force announced that they have charged 60 individuals, including 53 medical professionals, with crimes related to illegal distribution of opioids and other dangerous narcotics. Albert Cesare, acesare@enquirer.com
\There was also Jeffrey Young, the self-nicknamed “Rock Doc,” who actually is a nurse practitioner, accused of trading opioids for sex.
A federal grand jury indictment says that Young prescribed about a half-million hydrocodone pills, 300,000 oxycodone pills, 1,500 fentanyl patches and 600,000 benzodiazepine pills over three years. His supervisors, Dr. Alexander Alperovich and Dr. Andrew Rudin, were also indicted.
Young even had a radio show about his clinic at one point.
In Kentucky, there was an absent doctor. Dr. Mohammed A.H. Mazumder of Prestonsburg, owned Appalachian Primary Care in Prestonsburg. A federal indictment says he told his employees, who weren’t doctors, to receive patients at the clinic when he wasn’t there. The indictment says that a medical technician evaluated patients, then two receptionists called pharmacies with prescription orders for pain pills and other drugs under Mazumder’s name. The clinic billed Medicare and Medicaid, as if Mazumber had done the job.
Dr. Denver Tackett ran a dental clinic in McDowell, Kentucky. An indictment accuses him of prescribing oxycodone and hydrocodone that were not reasonable for the treatment of patient’s illness or injury. He also is accused of pulling teeth out of six patients from 2016 to 2018 who had no need for extractions, as well as submitting claims to Medicare and Medicide for procedures he did not perform.
Tanya Mentzer, an office manager at a family medicine clinic in the city of Hoover, Alabama, also faces federal charges. She had no medical education, license or medical experience, say the feds, but she is accused of distributing and dispensing controlled substances illegally to gain money.
The indictment claims that she and co-conspirators operated their business as “a pill mill, frequently providing dangerous, addictive, powerful opioid cocktails” for no medical reason. (In this indictment, the co-conspirators are unnamed.) The clinic was often open at odd hours, including after midnight, the feds say.
Also in Alabama, Dr. Celia Lloyd-Turnerof Choice Medicine Clinic near Huntsville, is accused of prescribing excessive amounts of drugs, giving patients as many as 15 pills a day and leaving blank forms to be filled out by staff when she wasn’t at the clinic. She was the sole physician at the clinic, the indictment says.
Dr. Darrell Rinert, an internist with a license to practice in Tennessee, is accused in a federal grand jury indictment of causing the deaths of four people, after prescribing them hydrocodone repeatedly from 2014-2016. An indictment claims that Rinert routinely prescribed “highly addictive opioids” including morphine sulfate, hydrocodone, oxycodone and dextroamphetamine for patients without a legitimate medical reason.
The state medical board suspended him in November 2018 through May 2019, when his license will expire.
On Friday, U.S. Attorney General William P. Barr released a statement calling the investigation “outstanding.” He added, “The opioid epidemic is the deadliest drug crisis in American history, and Appalachia has suffered the consequences more than perhaps any other region.”
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said stopping the illegal sales of opioid prescriptions is a crucial goal for President Donald Trump.
Azar also referred to the operation’s first-of-its-kind effort to get treatment to the patients left behind.
“It is also vital that Americans struggling with addiction have access to treatment and that patients who need pain treatment do not see their care disrupted, which is why federal and local public health authorities have coordinated to ensure these needs are met in the wake of this enforcement operation,” he said. (Click to Source)
More: See the full list of those indicted.
DEA tracked every opioid pill sold in the US.
And the results are horrific.
Between 2006 and 2012, 3 opioid drug makers and 6 distributors flooded the country with 76 billion pills of oxycodone and hydrocodone.
These highly addictive opioid pain medications that sparked the epidemic of abuse and overdoses that killed nearly 100,000 people in that time period.
As the epidemic surged over the seven-year period, so did the supply. The companies increased distribution from 8.4 billion in 2006 to 12.6 billion in 2012, a jump of roughly 50%.
In all, the deluge of pills was enough to supply every adult and child in the country with around 36 opioid pills per year.
Just a 10-day supply can hook 1 in 5 people into being long-term users, researchers have determined.
The stunning supply figures were first reported by the Washington Post and come from part of a database compiled by the Drug Enforcement Administration that tracked the fate of every opioid pill sold in America, from manufacturers to individual pharmacies.
A federal court in Ohio released the data this week as part of a massive consolidated court case against nearly two-dozen opioid makers and distributors, brought by nearly 2,000 cities, towns, and counties. The local governments allege that the opioid companies conspired to saturate the country with the potent painkillers to soak up billions in profits. The companies deny the allegations, arguing generally that they were serving the needs of patients.
According to an analysis of the data by the Post, just three companies made 88% of the opioid pills: SpecGx, Actavis Pharma, and Par Pharmaceutical, a subsidiary of Endo Pharmaceuticals. Purdue Pharma ranked fourth, making 3% of the pills. Just six companies distributed 75% of the pills: McKesson Corp., Walgreens, Cardinal Health, AmerisourceBergen, CVS, and Walmart.
The Post also noted that the distribution was concentrated in certain places, finding that West Virginia, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Nevada had the top pill-per-person-per-year rates of all states, ranging from 66.5 to 54.7. West Virginia, which had the highest distribution rate, also had the highest opioid death rate during this period.
But certain rural areas were also hard hit, with Norton, Virginia, receiving 306 pills per person per year and Mingo County, West Virginia, receiving 203.
While the local governments suing the companies have had access to this data during the litigation, it was only released to the public after the Washington Post and HD Media, publisher of the Charleston Gazette-Mail of West Virginia, sued and waged a year-long legal battle. The drug companies had fought to keep the data hidden from the public, arguing that it revealed “transactional data” that could be used by competitors. The Department of Justice also argued against the release, saying it could compromise investigations.
A three-judge panel sided with the media organizations last month. This past Monday, US District Judge Dan Polster removed a protective order allowing the release of part of the DEA’s database, called Automation of Reports and Consolidated Order System, or ARCOS. Data from years beyond 2012 are still being withheld to protect the companies and DOJ investigations.
From 1999 to 2017, nearly 400,000 people in the US died from an opioid overdose, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Just three drug makers and six distributors were behind the flood. And I am sure you know people that were dramatically hurt by this epidemic. Killing for billions of dollars. A terrifying evidence of today’s pharmaceutical companies. (Click to Source)