United States: Tragedy of its Drug Addicts

Doubt grows even more regarding the prospect of stopping the huge narcotic consumption that dominates that country.

Last Saturday the column Trasfondo in the New Herald newspaper, published an article in Miami that helps to better understand the situation.

Under the title: "The Big Business of Pain: how and why North Americans die with Drugs."          

The writer was the well-known specialist Jorge Dávila Miguel.

It begins by telling that the drug consumption incrementally grows, although the alarmed is not going off.

Even President Donald Trump, he says, mentioned the fact when he recently spoke "of the deadly outbreak of drugs that lashes the country"

Dávila Miguel remembered that in 2016 more than 59 000 people died of drug overdose, a figure far higher than the total of fallen soldiers in the aggression against Vietnam.

And among those victims drugs killed 17 536 human beings.

Two months ago the governor for Florida, Rick Scott, proclaimed an alert and gave 27 million dollars in favor of those who are cornered by the epidemic.

What’s new?

The enemy, highlights Dávila Miguel, doesn’t come from the Coca plantations of South America, or from poppy fields in Afghanistan, and has nothing to do with drug dealers.

Then, who is the enemy? "The U.S. pharmaceutical industry", asserts the author of the article.

He adds, as well as white neck executives in the states of Connecticut or Manhattan.

Then Dávila Miguel tells shortly of his records:

They began in 1996, when the Firm Perdue Pharma launched to the market OxyContin, an opioid which profited in the first four years 1,100 million dollars.

Before this success, other corporations launched to the market similar products.

In 2016, nearly 300 million prescriptions were already distributed, enough to offer a bottle of sedatives to each American, including newly born children.

What’s the outcome? A thriving market of 24 000 million dollars a year.

That is a seemingly harmless sedative had already become an addiction.

The New Herald assured this Saturday in its section Trasfondo:

"Big Pharma had attained the dream of any drug enterprise owner, to distribute the drugs legally and even with a prescription."

Everything on an ideal scenario for their gigantic and trivial business, the American society is very sick with an uncertain prognosis.