Rambling on the 'Opioid Crisis'

Geoffrey Bailey-Gates

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00:00-23:34

Audio portion of a video rant (which appear on YT and TikTok). https://youtu.be/qkybL2fOFFI

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TitleRambling on the 'Opioid Crisis'

AuthorGeoffrey Bailey-Gates

CategoryPodcast

Duration23:34

FormatAUDIO/WAV

Bitrate3072 kbps

Size543.05MB

Uploaded29 Mar 2023

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The speaker is disheartened by the news that local pharmacies are making it difficult for patients to get pain medication. They speculate that this may be due to a potential turn to the right politically. The speaker believes that opioids are necessary for chronic pain, which can be physical or emotional. They argue that opioids should be available over the counter with an ID after a certain age. The speaker criticizes the negative portrayal of drugs in media and believes that the focus should be on providing accurate information rather than fear-mongering. They also express concern about the possibility of war and urge for better choices to be made. So, you know, I'm very disheartened about the news, the news article that I read in the Chronicle today, and apparently local pharmacies are making it more difficult for patients to get their pain medicine, and yeah, I mean there are ways of, in the past it was always like something in response to like a DEA, kind of like crackdown, you know, they would see the opioids over-prescribing, and then they would, you know, start throwing doctors in prison, and that would freak everybody out, and yeah, doctors would have to cut back, and you know, whatever, but this time there doesn't seem to be any impetus for why they're doing that. It's just sort of like, I don't know, maybe they're preemptively making steps, taking steps, because they're expecting like a turn to the right, and there could be one, it could be a very serious one, and you know, with a new, with a right-minded, maybe right-politically-minded, you know, spectrum, right-winged president, could choose a new drug seller, and the whole DEA concept is an executive thing, executive power, so is the EPA. Nixon was a mixed bag, I mean, he was, some of his ideas were not so bad, and he was kind of a Keynesian guy at the end of the day, so he'd be a Democrat, he'd be actually a progressive almost. We're getting to the point where I think if he was, yeah, I think he'd be kind of progressive, some of his ideas, at least on the fiscal side. He was socially conservative, yeah, and I think that's what people remember the most about him, because that's what everyone talks about in the mainstream media. They love the social issues, they don't want to talk about the fiscal issues, because they know they're wrong, and they're mostly mouthpieces for people that are benefiting from their current system the way it is. So yeah, they just love talking about social shit, and so whenever Nixon gets brought up, it's always the social stuff, and even with Trump, it was largely just social stuff, really. I mean, there's a lot of criticism, I mean, he was an infinite source of criticism, I think his loss in 2020 probably put a lot of comedians out of business. You know, many of them had to file for bankruptcy, because yeah, there was a whole industry developing of comedians. I'm just making fun of him, doing impressions of him. It's not over yet, you know, there's still kind of a remnant of it, but it's going to fade eventually, and you know, we're going to get over the fact that, yeah, that doesn't mean we're going to stop moving right, and we do seem to keep moving right. And this is the Bay Area of California, and they're making it more difficult to get prescribed medication, prescribed by their physicians for chronic pain. There are chronic pain states where taking an opioid on a daily basis is your only option. It's either that, or you're going to be in pain. There's a lot of them, there's a lot of them. Unfortunately, we don't have anything better. It's the same crap that we've had for thousands of years. It's not new. We're treating it like it's a new thing. It's not a new thing. We've had it for freaking ever. For as long as we've had writing, we've had it. And by we, I mean the West. But, you know, I think many in the East had it, too, for a long time. And the fact, given that it's like no likelihood it probably originated in Afghanistan, it might have been a kind of equal timing to arrive in both. But there wasn't a concept of East and West back then. That didn't really start until the Roman Empire split. I'm sure there was a concept in terms of, like, the direction, but there wasn't, like, the West and, like, the East as in, like, two teams. We're now talking about two teams. And we're just assuming that the two teams are going to go to war eventually, because teams always do. And historically, yeah, that's what they have done. They usually go to war at some point. But why do we need to do that? How? What's the reason? Don't we know better? I mean, everyone figured that one out. I bet that's not a fun time for anybody. It's like, kind of like the worst thing ever. War. Yeah. It's gotten really ugly. The last two major ones were pretty bad. And they ended with a lot of people dying. A lot of people died throughout in pretty horrible ways. So do we want to do that again? I don't think we want to do that again, do we? We do get to choose, you know. It is kind of up to us. Can we remind ourselves of that? Is there some choice going on here? We have some decisions that we can make to avoid having to do that again? And we can maybe make some of those? Maybe we should. Because, yeah, I think World War III would not be fun. But, you know, I don't see what the problem is for someone being on opioids. You know, what? They're in pain. Even if they don't have physical pain, there's a reason why they're reaching for them in the first place. Yeah, okay. There's a handful of people that get, it's more than a handful, there's a handful of the percentage. When you compare the addiction rates, it's comparable to alcohol. It's a little bit more opioids. But that's because, and I think that's because alcohol is not prescribed by physicians for therapeutic effects. And we have better things than alcohol for anxiety. If you add benzo addiction to alcohol addiction, and then, yeah, you start to see that, yeah, there's a bigger problem there. Like pain isn't as much of a problem as anxiety states are. But it's a big problem. And then there's always going to be the group that are just addicted because they made bad choices and they used it recreationally too much. But that's always going to, I think that's going to be, it used to be the minority of people using these things to the extent that they do. I don't know that that's true anymore, but that didn't start happening until we made them illegal. How did it? As soon as we made them illegal, the message that we're giving our youth is that, oh, these substances are so good. Like they're so addictive. You just can't, can't, you'll never stop. So we're just making the choice for you. You can't have any. They're too good. But then they're simultaneously surrounded by them because they're every fucking where. And yeah. So what do you think they're going to do? A certain percent are going to hear you or listen to you. And a certain percent are going to be like, that sounds pretty interesting. Especially if they're not having like the best home life. Things are a little bit hard for them. Being abused. They're suffering killers at the end of the day. They're not pain killers. They're emotional pain killers. Suffering is emotional pain. Or it's the emotion that we experience as a consequence of pain. Usually as a consequence of pain. Of some kind of pain. It's an emotion. Opioids don't change the signal level of the pain that you're in. If it's inflammation or if it's a neuropathy, especially if it's a neuropathy, it doesn't do, it actually really doesn't do anything to that. It hardly helps. I mean, it helps but not nearly as much. But we do have other options for neuropathies, thankfully. And they are better. And the combination is usually enough to make people, you know, relatively comfortable. But that's a difficult kind of thing. But fortunately, most chronic pain states are due to inflammation of some kind. It can be some kind of chronic inflammation or whatever. Or it's emotional. And that's a kind of pain too. If you've been traumatized, if you've been abused, then yeah, there's an emotional pain there. And I think we can stop being such dicks about when people self-medicate. They should just be available with an ID over the counter after a certain age that we can agree upon. And yeah, we should just play them down. Just tell the truth. They suck. They're not fun. No one likes being addicted to them. No one likes being hooked on anything. No one's like, oh, yeah, I'm so glad I'm an addict. Yeah, I'm so glad that if I don't take this stuff, I'm gonna, you know, throw up or have to run to the bathroom. You know, no, no. Start getting flu-like symptoms and aches and pains or whatever. No, that's not fun. It's not a good time. I don't know. They spent so much time when I was in middle school. So much of it was spent on my PC. Angel dust? What are we talking about angel dust for? There wasn't one mention of alcohol during that whole program. Not one. They talked about marijuana, angel dust, cocaine and heroin and probably LSD too. I think, yeah, they talked about the hallucinogens. Yeah, definitely did. And they painted them out like the worst ones were actually the hallucinogens and like marijuana, practically. They were like on par, at least with heroin and cocaine, the way that it was described. Like if you take these substances, you'll think you're like a tomato forever. You'll never stop thinking that. And you'll have to be in an insane asylum. That's what happens. It's like 50%. You wanna play with those odds? You wanna think you're a tomato for the rest of your life? I don't think you do. Or, worse, they'll make you jump off a building. You'll think that you can fly and you'll jump off a building. I mean, that happens. So, yeah, go ahead and try it. Yeah, it could be fun. But yeah, you'll probably think you can fly and jump off a building. They don't make you think you can fly? Come on. They don't change your sense of...anyone that's done them knows that they don't do this. The person that started that was some media mogul. But he was powerful and well-known enough in the media. And he had some platform. He was an anchor or something. And his star committed suicide by jumping out of a building. And it's tragic. It's a friggin' tragedy. And he couldn't accept it. And I have a shit-ton of empathy for that, you know? But we should've not listened to his rantings about who's at fault. We should've just, you know, given him a collective hug and not, like, you know, follow his commands and get outraged and, like, you know, join him in his outrage and lead his crusade against LSD, because clearly it was LSD's fault. She had done LSD, like, a week before. She broke up with her boyfriend the day she jumped off of that roof, or whatever, however she did. It was very clear that she was depressed about that, and that's why she did it. But he chose to just demonize LSD instead. And yeah, enough people bought it that it got such a bad rap, and it still has a bad rap in a lot of places. This is stupid. I wish I would just stop being stupid. Why? I'm including myself in that statement. I'm not a genius. I've already had rants about intelligence. I have a rant about intelligence, but I don't need to make a note of it. That was not a video. This one I wanted to do, because this one is personal. The opioid crisis is killing people. It's killing a lot of people. It's not the people getting prescribed medication that are dying. It's people that are using illicit versions that are dying. It is the illegality of them that's killing people. It is not overprescription of them. Okay? The cartels do not label their products. We cannot expect them to. They never will. They don't have the answer to the FDA. So no one knows what they're getting, and they don't know the dose. That's why they're dying. There's a correlation. Yes, at the same time that's been happening, largely because of fentanyl being added to the product to make it seem stronger than it is. It's a business trick. They are like capitalists to the extreme. That's what you get if you follow supply side long enough, far enough. If you pull away and do the ANCAP thing, the anarcho-capitalist thing, no regulation at all, no laws, period. Eventually Coke starts sending hit squads after Pepsi. It will, eventually. But it happens a lot faster in the drug trade because there's a lot more money involved. So, we need to provide them, we need to make them available with an ID, they need to be regulated, they need to be brought into the light. And then people will stop dying. There will still be suicides, okay? People use them for suicide. Don't get confused. Not every overdose is accidental. But, I mean, do we really want to have all these deaths that are, and all these other problems, just to remove one way for people to kill themselves? They can still kill themselves in hundreds of other ways. It's not like we're, what? That's not a justification. So, what is? What's the justification? What's the harm? They don't get more violent. They don't. You always make people like this. I'm on one right now. Do I look like I'm positive violent? I'm not on a high dose, I'm on a very small dose of something. But I have chronic pain. I have to, I'm not going to talk about it. People I know might see this. I take a very minimal amount. But it's not the point. The point is that they don't make people violent. I mean, alcohol makes people violent. We all know this. Okay? And that's the one that's legal. So, we can stop demonizing, can we please just stop demonizing these things and pretending that they're more than they are? They're not. Don't blame fentanyl either. I've got another rant about that. I'm going to go into that. There's no, it's just insane to attack a chemical for being a chemical. It seems insane to me. I think we should attack policies for being bad policies. I'm tired of losing people that mean something to me. That care about people close to me. People I know. To heroin, or to opioid overdose. I'm tired. And I know I'm not the only one. I know many people out there have lost loved ones too. Come on. We've got to stop this. You know that I'm right. I think this intersection with money and politics and all that. I think that might have to happen first. I don't know. It's another article 5 thing. Perhaps. We can even beat off with that. I don't know. But it has to stop. That's all I have.