/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

I'm studying what is called the "opioid epidemic" and I want to reflect on the mistrust people have toward the scientific establishment regarding COVID. For those who didn't know, opioids are extremely addictive painkillers that will kill you if you take too much and make you think you’re gonna die if you stop taking them after a while. The opioid crisis is defined by the overuse of those meds which did a lot of damage all over.

Unlike other drug catastrophes, this one is particular in the sense that it was engineered completely above the ground between legit businesses and the US state. Basically, pharmaceutical companies like Purdue Pharma made new patents on old drugs (OxyContin in the case of Purdue) and had them approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use against any sort of chronic pain. Where it gets messy is that a fair amount of scientific and medical personnel was involved in the creation of this crisis. You see to make people accept the use of hardcore drugs against any sort of injuries the pharmaceutical companies created a massive marketing campaign, financing and using (pseudo)medical organizations, publishing papers in scientific journals etc. all this to push a narrative that could create an ideal ideological substrate for widespread painkiller consumption. This process began in the beginning of the 90’.

But it doesn’t stop there, those companies sent salesmen, gifts and whatnot to a large number of physicians to get them to prescribe those drugs more and more, pandered to pharmacies to make them sell their products, sometimes used the threat of lawsuit against the recalcitrant. Their marketing pamphlets and material became ubiquitous in some hospitals and medical facilities. You may have seen some sort of pain scale if you ever went in ER, well it’s most likely a product of the marketing campaign I talked about, so now you must realize how far this went.

There are 10 million of people hooked on this shit in the US, half a million dead at the very least, with nobody really capable of estimating how much social and economic devastation between them. So, what we have here is a 30 years process of mass poisoning by pharmaceutical companies with the help of state, the complicity of most of the medical personnel, the support of good chunk of the scientific community, and a media disinterest.
A lot of people ask why there’s no trust in the science and the experts among certain parts of the population, pointing their fingers at backward right-wing retards cultivating an anti-science mindset. But what they must understand is that there is a lot of people who live with the constant destruction the blind trust in medical and state institutions brought in their friend circles, families, communities since decades.

And plenty of those people are not educated enough to read and understand peer reviewed studies so to truly believe in various covid related policies such as vaccine, but they’re not blind to what’s been happening around them and they’re smart enough to be skeptical of all this shit. While they’re likely not fully informed of the mechanism of the crisis I described, they’re aware “the establishment” can “conspire” with the ensemble of the medical and scientific community to literally kill them and destroy everything.

If the point I tried to make didn't get to you here it is: people are distrustful of all authorities because they remember well being fucked by those.