https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-18/how-kill-300000-americans-and-get-away-it

How To Kill 300,000 Americans (And Get Away With It)
by Tyler Durden
Sun, 02/18/2018 – 11:26
Authored by Trey Goff via The Mises Institute

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If someone wanted to kill 300,000 Americans and get away with it, they could not have accomplished it more effectively than our government has accomplished it with the opioid epidemic.

If someone— let’s say good old Uncle Sam—wanted to kill 300,000 Americans, they would go about it as detailed in this step-by-step guide. This also just so happens to be precisely how our government did go about it.

Step 1 – In 1996, Uncle Sam would award a 17-year government patent monopoly to Purdue Pharma to be the exclusive supplier of OxyContin, an addictive and potentially deadly opioid painkiller. This would ensure that they had a massive multi-billion-dollar profit incentive to get as many people addicted as possible without any generic competition to keep this profit motive in check.

Step 2 – To further fuel the use of OxyContin, Uncle Sam would cover the cost of it through Medicaid and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI). This would ensure that there were billions of dollars available to fund the purchase of massive quantities of the addictive and potentially deadly substance.

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Step 16 – After vast numbers of Americans had switched to injection drug use and street heroin, and were using drugs alone and unsupervised, Uncle Sam would then make the street drugs as deadly as possible.Uncle Sam would do this by “cracking down” on the supply side of heroin, knowing full well that illegal drug manufacturers would respond by making their drugs ever more potent, or finding ultra-potent additives to substitute into their street drugs to decrease the size and weight of the trafficked substance (this is known as the Iron Law of Prohibition). That would ensure that heroin was laced with fentanyl (a substance 100 times more potent than morphine) and that eventually fentanyl was replaced by the even more potent carfentanil (a substance 10,000 times more powerful than morphine). Uncle Sam would then ban drug checking under drug paraphernalia laws, ensuring users had no idea if the substance they were about to use was laced with fentanyl. With each increase in potency and adulteration, the death rate would continue to climb higher, and higher, and higher.

There you have it: the perfect guide to killing at least 300,000 people and getting away with it. It is an absolute tragedy that this also happens to be the precise course of action the US government has taken over the past few decades to create this perfect storm of addiction and death.

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This is just Yet Another Example of “Gooferment creates a problem, “fixes it”, and creates new / worse problems; that in turn makes new problems that “only” the Gooferment can fix”!

When will “We, The Sheeple” learn that the Gooferment — at any level — doesn’t care about problems or “Unintended Consequences”.

Easy answer, end the “(pseudo) War on (some) Drugs” and treat drug addiction as a MEDICAL problem; not a legal one.

Argh!

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