I have written many blogs about the food industry creating ‘food’ in the loosest sense of the word, which has ingredients, often chemical in nature, which make the products addictive.
https://borderslynn.com/2021/06/25/corporates-accessing-science-perpetuating-conscious-disregard
QUESTION: Why does it get approved for human consumption, though it has been proven to cause obesity, cancers, fatigue, muscular-skeletal chronic problems and so on?
ANSWER: because those products generate bucketloads of money and so makes shareholders very rich, whilst slowly decreasing the quality of life for each consumer. There is a revolving door between corporates and governments.
Drugs are consumed by addicts because they are designed to turn non addicts into addicts to create wealth for unscrupulous characters.
Here is one article (of many) to illustrate the revolving door for government officials being rewarded for service to a corporate whilst in office with a lucrative job in the corporate world after official job ended:
Example: Purdue Pharma and Sackler marketing ploy:
Model of planned addiction: patient to take OxyContin every 12 hrs, (Sackler knew withdrawal begins before 12 hours). Suffering withdrawal and experiencing dysfunction, many users would ask medical practioner for help, and the Purdue sales force had prepared the practioner to increase the dose (saying relief would last longer), but increased dose equalled more financial reward for salesperson and doctor.
An FDA official, Curtis Wright, refused to approve OxyContin until, after many months, the Purdue company used a form of persuasion which caused him to approve and accept a high paying job for the company. ‘Everyone’, so they say, ‘has a price’.
The price consumers paid was often premature death.
https://time.com/6303583/painkiller-netflix-true-story/
Laundered drug money is said to have saved the banks during the 2008 Global Financial Crash, providing much needed liquidity:
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims
Although there are people working hard to track down and stop the criminal activity of supply, these efforts are not funded to match the ilegally gained massive profits and sophisticated global infrastructure which has grown over the past decades. Perhaps the answer lies in governments aquiescing to the threatening power of these entities which hide behind layers of shell companies, enabled by ‘respectable’ legal establishments?
The influence of power through illicit money deals corrupts all would be democratic processes designed to protect civilians from the violence these criminals inflict on their fellow humans.
Ecuador recently hit the news when a popular journalist and politician wanting to rid the newly established drug supply routes going through his country, was shot 3 times in the head after a rally in Quito.
The latest scourge is the painkiller Fentanyl. Efforts to stop the manufacture by dubious gangs in the first place is being formed but seems too hard to implement:
Placing the precursors of the most common synthesis routes used in illicit fentanyl manufacture under international control, gives governments the necessary legal base to seize illicit shipments of these chemicals. Moreover, governments can take stronger measures to prevent their diversion from licit industry and collaborate more closely across international borders. Consequently, more risk and costs for traffickers are involved to source these chemicals for their illicit business.
To assist the work of law enforcement, forensic drug testing and toxicology laboratories, UNODC provides analytical information on NPS in the UNODC EWA as well as assistance in the areas of quality assurance, provision of manuals and guidelines, field detection, and training.[ii]
https://www.unodc.org/LSS/Announcement/Details/b152bda5-5d71-4f7e-9d68-1bdd9af04a83
Fentanyl is 50 times more powerful than heroin and is the cause of death of an alarming and increasing number of people across America. Yet the supply is multiplying and the future victims are easily found.
Manzanillo is home to Mexico’s largest port, the third busiest in Latin America – nearly 3.5 million containers from across the globe arrived there last year.
All sorts of cargo pass through, including the chemicals that come mostly from China and India that are used to produce organised crime’s most lucrative earners – synthetic drugs like fentanyl. As a result, the port has become the primary source of bloodshed and strife in Colima state.
In 2022, this small western state had the highest per capita murder rate in Mexico, with the Sinaloa and Jalisco New Generation cartels fighting for dominance.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65111226
A theory has been put forward why the transitioning from autocratic to democratic leadership opened up opportunities for drug cartels. This example is across Mexico:
Postauthoritarian elites did not reform the military, the police, and the judicial system and did not dismantle the gray zone of criminality. Electoral mechanisms thus became catalysts of criminal violence. Subnational alternation and the rotation of parties in the gubernatorial seat undermined informal networks of protection that had allowed Mexican cartels to thrive, so they created their own private militias to defend themselves from rival groups and incoming opposition authorities, and to conquer rival territory. We use in-depth interviews with the first opposition governments and new data on historical patterns of government repression to show that state-level police and judicial authorities were key to developing informal networks of protection, allowing cartels to become major players in the international drug trafficking industry in the late 1980s. Using time-series, cross-sectional, and synthetic control models, we show that party alternation in the 1990s and early 2000s caused inter-cartel violence
This theory seems to be applicable to many nations dreaming for true democracy but instead receiving horror and gang violence which is never ending.
And here in Scotland, the drug problem still persists historically through dealers taking advantage of people living in poverty:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/aug/22/scotland-records-largest-fall-drug-deaths
The types of controlled drugs used in overdose deaths in Scotland are discussed here:
https://blog.nrscotland.gov.uk/2023/08/22/what-actually-counts-as-a-drug-death/
And the NHS is faced with these tragic results of addiction on a daily basis:
https://www.nhsinform.scot/healthy-living/drugs-and-drug-use
Scotland has yet to find a sensitive solution to this heartbreaking loss of people who could otherwise be valued and enjoy being part of society. The international drug trade has other plans.
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