AMERICAN PAIN SOCIETY received ONE MILLION DOLLARS to push opioids and thereby contributed to America’s opioid crisis which has killed more than ONE MILLION AMERICANS.
As such, the simple math is that the AMERICAN PAIN SOCIETY received ONE DOLLAR FOR EACH AMERICAN KILLED by the opioid addiction crisis that it created.
Since tracking began in 1999, drug overdoses have killed over 1.25 million people in the United States, with opioids accounting for roughly 75% to 80% of those fatalities in recent years.
DEATHS: Over 1 million Americans have died from drug overdoses since 1999, with opioids driving the vast majority of the surge.
ANNUAL: In recent peak years, total drug overdose deaths surpassed 105,000 annually, with about 54,000 to 80,000 of those deaths specifically involving opioids (prescriptions, heroin, synthetic opioids like fentanyl).
DAILY: At the height of the epidemic, roughly 220 people died each day from an opioid-related overdose.
OVERDOSES: For every fatal overdose, multiple non-fatal overdoses require emergency medical intervention, hospitalization, or the administration of reversal medications like naloxone.
ADDICTION: Millions of people suffer from opioid use disorder (OUD) or misuse prescription and illicit opioids annually—estimated at nearly 9 million individuals in the U.S. alone
Everything we see in the mainstream news and medical headlines is always the printable and acceptable “tip of the iceberg”—by the time a systematic multibillion-dollar scandal is made known to the public, the news made public is the whitewashed version acceptable to the power structure because—obviously—the self-same power structure owns the means of “news” and historical documentation.
In 2019, the medical organization AMERICAN PAIN SOCIETY (APS) was forced into bankruptcy and dissolution because of relentless legal attacks against the organization for receiving bribes from the drug/opioid industry and then misleading doctors, patients, hospital systems and government departments into thinking that pain treatment deserved holy priority in healthcare and that opioids were “safe, effective, and nonaddictive”—the complete reverse/opposite of the truth.
The single best descriptive and predictive article on this topic was written in 2017—two years prior to the APS collapse that duly occurred in 2019:
Hirsch R. The Opioid Epidemic: It's Time to Place Blame Where It Belongs. Mo Med. 2017 Mar-Apr;114(2):82-90. PMID: 30228543; PMCID: PMC6140023
Dr Hirsch’s insightful article is remarkably similar to the Topol editorial following the Vioxx scandal in 2004, which I will review separately.
Hirsch clearly lists the guilty parties in the following order:
The problem is the doctors: Doctors are overly willing to sell any drug that is easy and “approved.” Hirsch of course gives doctors a beneficent pass for their contribution to this crisis because he assumes they are innocent and simply participated from the goodness of their heart. Hirsch can’t bring himself to talk about indoctrination, adoration of the drug paradigm, and doctors’ laziness to prescribe whatever is easy and approved so they can get paid and go home with the most profit and least effort possible. Of course, Hirsch makes no mention of nutritional alternatives to pain management because he himself is deaf and blind to such concepts, let alone their tactical implementation.
The problem is the drug industry: The drug industry will do whatever it wants to do and break whatever laws are available in order to make more money in the short term for it owners, administrators, and stockholders. The financial system – especially in the United States – incentivizes death, damage, and destruction in exchange for short-term profiteering. They will not hesitate to bribe a politicians, medical organizations, and individual doctors in order to sell their drugs.
The problem is the medical organizations: We're not surprised that medical organizations will sell whatever drug in order to make some money on the side; the only surprise here is that it took such a small amount of money—only about $1 million—in order to destroy this organization after they took the bait and ruined their claim to ethics and professionalism.
The problem is the Hospital accreditation and insurance reimbursement cabal: After doctors and medical organizations have been bribed by the drug companies, now these policies begin to take take on formality because they become part of the new "standard of care” which may have started as a suggestion and then became a habit and then became a routine and then became the law of the land. Stupid is as stupid does and now hospitals will be forced to enforce the fakery and bribery imposed by the drug companies.
The problem is the profiteering patient-advocacy groups: Now we are going to complete our hall of mirrors and echo chamber by creating fake "patient advocacy groups" that appear to be grassroots organizations, but in fact are just extensions of the marketing department of drug companies. Everybody wants money and—like I've said since 2019— the drug companies have more cash available to them then most national governments so they can buy whatever they want, and obviously patient advocacy groups love to gain some official recognition and usable cash by gaining the endorsement of drug companies and medical organizations.
The problem is the government enforcers of corrupt policies: Getting government organizations to enforce bogus drug policies is easy because most politicians are already friendly to drug companies and heavily invested in their stocks, as well as being the recipients of bribes which Americans call "lobbying.”
Overall, I think Hirsch did a great job in this outline. And his ignorance about and therefore failure to mention nutritional alternatives for chronic pain management would've been a nice addition, but we can't expect him to be integrative. You would expect him to be ignorant about his own blind spots from his own education, and so his failure to mention anything about nutrition is ironically appropriate.
Hirsch makes no mention of nutritional alternatives to pain management because he himself is deaf and blind to such concepts, let alone their tactical implementation.
Now, to take this exercise another step farther, I want you to go back and look at that list of six items—6 points of corruption—but instead of thinking about corruption in pain management, I want you to think about corruption in
1. psychiatry—the horrid overuse of drugs known to increase the risk for suicide, especially in children, and then
2. cardiovascular disease prevention—statins for the masses, and then
3. government endorsed experimental injections for 80% of the global population starting in 2020: No benefit, billions of dollars in wasted effort and millions of injured patients, hundreds of thousands of suicides, divorces and bankruptcies and countless trillions of hours and years of lost education, occupation, and human advancement.
You will see that this same six-point structure of incompetence, corruption, and damage to the public applies across the board to many if not every aspect of medicine and public health.
American Pain Society accused of being pawn of big pharma—Group took nearly $1m from leading opioid manufacturers:
A leading medical society, described by a US Senate report as a pawn of the pharmaceutical industry for its prominent role in pressuring doctors to prescribe opioids, is to shut down in the face of lawsuits blaming it for America’s worst drug epidemic. … Last year, a Senate report named the APS as part of a web of organizations it said were turned into “cheerleaders for opioids” by drug manufacturers’ money. The society took nearly $1m from the leading opioid makers over the five years to 2017, including Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin – the drug that kickstarted an epidemic that has claimed more than 400,000 lives.
In 1996, the society issued an influential statement saying opioids were safe and effective for treatment of chronic pain and that the risk of addiction was low, a claim that has since been discredited. The co-author of the statement and chair of the committee that agreed it was a doctor, David Haddox, who was a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma.
Former APS presidents include Dr Russell Portenoy, a pain specialist who has since admitted to overstating claims for the safety and effectiveness of opioids in order to break down what he regarded as unwarranted resistance within the medical profession to prescribing them. Portenoy was then paid by Purdue Pharma to help drive sales of OxyContin. He has now agreed to testify against the drugmaker and other companies, and accused them of overstating the benefits and understating the dangers of opioids.1
American Academy of Neurology recommends AMITRIPTYLINE for MIGRAINE despite that MELATONIN is safer, more effective, more affordable, more available, and does not cause AMITRIPTYLINE’s WEIGHT GAIN
American Academy of Neurology 2026 “Migraine Prevention Guidelines” recommend AMITRIPTYLINE despite evidence that MELATONIN is safer, more effective, more affordable, more available
