“I think the answer is paying attention to people’s needs in the first place.” — Lisa Al-Hakim, Harm Reduction Alliance, Seattle, Washington.
Several major lawsuits against major opioid manufacturers and distributors are making their way through the courts. They reveal that the opioid crisis is a social crisis engulfing workers of all colors, producing a breadth of devastation and death largely lost in the fragmented reporting. Poverty is the common denominator.
These trials are unmasking the system the pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors created to flood the country with billions of prescription opioids over the last twenty years. Federal, State, and local governments are bringing the cases to force opioid pharmaceutical producers and distributors to pay for the devastation government has been left to clean up.
Just three companies manufactured 88 percent of the pills, and six companies distributed 75 percent of the pills. They were distributed through shady clinics called “pill mills” or direct-marketed to patients. Physicians were encouraged in various ways to provide unjustified prescriptions, and pharmacy chains such as CVS, Walmart, and Walgreens all profited from it.
Opioid prescription and distribution spread like wildfire throughout the country, especially targeting the South, Southwest, and the Rust Belt states. Between 2014 and 2018, 300,000 people died from a drug overdose, 70 percent involving opioids of some form. Nearly 500,000 people have died from opioid overdose since 1999. More than 70,000 Americans died from a drug-involved overdose in 2019 alone, including illicit drugs and prescription opioids.
After the Drug Enforcement Agency was forced to reveal its ARCOS database, The Washington Post reported that it documents “a virtual roadmap of the nation’s opioid epidemic that began with prescription pills, spawned increased heroin use and resulted in the current fentanyl crisis.” Yet, instead of prosecuting these murderers on criminal charges and shutting them down, the DEA, Food and Drug Administration, and Department of Justice let them off with millions in fines, treating the deaths and fines as just a cost of doing business.
“The victims themselves didn’t realize they were victimized,” Edward Neiger, an attorney for individual victims bringing claims. “They thought of themselves as drug addicts, of their parents or their kids as drug addicts. They did not realize they were addicted to opioids because there were people in a boardroom conspiring to market these drugs to them and lie about the potential harm these drugs would cause.” “I didn’t realize what they’d do until it was too late,” a West Virginia miner wrote. “Within a couple of months, you don’t want to admit it, but one pill won’t do, and you’re running around the streets trying to buy one.”
Workers of color face a disproportionate rate of overdoses and lack of access to medical treatment. The opioid crisis is not a crisis of “white America.” It is directed at our entire class. Criminal law professor Ekown Yankah has pointed out that at the murder trial of killer cop Derek Chauvin, Courtney Ross’s testimony showed that she and George Floyd were “ordinary people struggling with drug use. Black people end up hooked on drugs for the exact same reasons white people do.”
Settlements proposed for the lawsuits do not even propose adequate funds for addiction treatment nor remedies for the larger problems our class faces today — inequality of wealth, the deterioration of our lives accelerated by COVID, the accelerating clamp down on our rights, and our ability to protect ourselves from the rulers. Instead, the money will go straight to the governments and corporate institutions that brought the suits.
It remains for those on the front line of this battle to pick up the pieces. That includes the mothers and fathers, and the decent health care providers and advocates. It also includes the chronic pain victims with little choice but to buy illegal in the face of an inhumane health care system, and the addicts struggling to stay clean, and those who don’t make it.
Millions support health care as a human right, free drug treatment programs instead of mass incarceration, helping families to cope with addiction and stepping in to help if we lose our loved ones, and the rebuilding of their communities. By demanding that the government meet our basic needs, we have already given voice to a vision of society that makes a healthy and cultured life its first priority. Is this not the definition of a cooperative, communist society?
Our strength lies in uniting around what we have in common as a class — our demands for life, love, health, and a future for our families. Our strength lies in the vision that arises from those demands. Only our class can make this vision a reality. RC
July/August 2021. vol.31. Ed4
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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