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90% of heroin addiction starts in high school. Opiate addiction is more than likely genetically triggered not created like other types of addiction: alcohol, cocaine and amphetamines. Treating early will prevent deaths. How do you identify addiction early? A simple question all prescribers need to learn to avoid lawsuits and the horrors of opiate addiction using Heroin
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There has been a lot of talk about tolerance, dependence and addiction. We are going to give you the facts about the confusion and refute physicians who restrict opiate prescribing and how the invalidity of cause and effect harming millions of the nations ten million chronic pain patients.
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The assumption of feckless doctors “overprescribing” an undefined government term, leading to more overdose deaths and addiction is incorrect. CDC has told us doctors what to do, to make prescribing “safe” give less pain medicine to those who need it. CDC, a non medical agency dissimilar from
medical agencies like FDA and NIH, has medical views of “safe prescribing” – unfounded in fact.
The concocted “safe prescribing” initiative has “harmed many patients” in the words of the AMA. Overdose deaths are up anyway by refusing to consider the truth. Addiction is the same as always, not less as planned by CDC and their advisors Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing or PROP a group of dedicated “lunatic fringe” doctors as mentioned by a previous FDA official.
Tragic consequences have occurred from the “safe” (reduced dose) prescribing plan of the CDC/PROP coalition and they shoulder the burden of responsibility for harm caused.
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I wonder if the “damages” have to be directly or could they be INDIRECTLY for the federal officer(s) to be found guilty. Let’s looks at a hypothetical situation. Say the DEA raids a practitioner’s office… a practitioner who specializes in high acuity pts… each dealing with very severe incurable painful health issues. All are ultra fast metabolizers, dealing with very painful diseases like sickle cell, CRPS, adhesive arachnoiditis for starters.
Typical scenario, DEA agents show up at the practitioner’s office and confiscate all their pts’ medical records, may get the practitioner to surrender his/her DEA license, no charges filed… BUT… the DEA refuses to return the practitioner’s pts medical records – or copies of the pts’ medical records, to the practitioner or to the pts. Basically, the pts have no records of their health issues and no clinical records of how their health issues were treated… or how their health conditions improved or deteriorated over the years.
Imagine Tom Frieden who was the head of the CDC June 8, 2009 – January 20, 2017.. Did he exceed the statutory authority of the CDC by putting together a supposedly “secret committee” to come up with the infamous CDC opiate dosing guidelines and omitted a public comment period and assigned seats on the committee that was known to have a anti-opiate agenda and the committee used studies that were mostly designated as having a “poor quality” of data to come to the individual studies’ conclusions.
One can only guess the untold millions of pts that have had their health – or life itself – compromised because of the actions of Frieden and the committee members. Once those guidelines were published how many in the DEA, VA, insurance/PBM companies and large healthcare facilities adopted these guidelines and a few years later the CDC itself has stated that that guidelines were misapplied.
https://www.wnd.com/2020/12/supreme-court-rules-people-can-sue-government-agents-damages
The Supreme Court has ruled unanimously that individuals may personally seek damages from a federal officer who violates their civil rights and causes harm.
The case centered on FBI officials putting three Muslims on the no-fly list after they “refused to cooperate with the FBI by spying on their own communities.”
According to the Institute for Justice, which submitted arguments in the case, because of their refusal to spy, “these individuals were placed on the No-Fly List, which caused significant hardship, such as the inability to travel to visit family or for work.”
They sued, and now the Supreme Court has ruled the federal officials responsible could be liable for damages.
“We first have to determine if injured parties can sue government officials in their personal capacities. [The Religious Freedom Restoration Act]’s text provides a clear answer: They can. Persons may sue and obtain relief ‘against a government,’ which is defined to include ‘a branch, department, agency, instrumentality, and official (or other person acting under color of law) of the United States,” the opinion said.
New Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not participate in the ruling, but it was decided unanimously by the other eight.
Justice Clarence Thomas authored the opinion.
“Not surprisingly, in the lawsuit against the FBI agents, the government argued that the words ‘appropriate relief’ do not include damages,” the Institute for Justice said. “According to the government, damages might be an appropriate remedy against private actors, but damages should not be allowed if the person who violated your rights happens to work for the government.”
Its friend-of-the-court brief argued damages against government officials are the historical cornerstone of government accountability. It contended damages are often the only way to vindicate constitutional rights and that none of the government’s policy justifications against damages have a basis in reality.
That essentially was the ruling of the court.
“In the context of suits against government officials, damages have long been awarded as appropriate relief,” the ruling said, including local, state and federal officials in the decision.
The court pointed out damages are often the only remedy available.
“The court today has provided its full-throated endorsement of damages as a necessary and historic mechanism for constitutional accountability,” noted Scott Bullock, IJ’s president and general counsel. “In doing so, the court also reiterated its support for the foundational principles of this country, such as that damages can be awarded to check the government’s power and that it is Congress’ job to engage in policy making. The court’s job is to interpret the law, not to do policy.”
The plaintiffs were Muhammad Tanvir, Jameel Algibhah and Naveed Shinwari. They alleged the FBI put them on a No-Fly List for refusing to act as informants against their religious communities.
They lost money, wasted airline tickets and lost income from job opportunities.
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MySafe is a vending machine that dispenses a heroin substitute called hydromorphone to patients whose biometrics have been programmed into it as part of a unique Vancouver program aimed at preventing overdoses. (January 22, 2020)
I wouldn’t exactly call Hydromorphone a “Heroin Substitute” … Heroin (diamorphone) is metabolized in the body into MORPHINE, in fact in some countries diamorphine is used as a good (legal) pain management tool. I wonder if any chronic pain pts will be among those whose BIOMETRICS will be programmed into the system ? Somehow, I doubt it !
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They just announced on TV that the COVID-19 death account just reached 500,000… That is just a little shy of the number of annual deaths from the use/abuse of tobacco & alcohol… but… I don’t see any media listing the names of all those deaths that could have been prevented. Could it be that those deaths have just become “socially acceptable” ?
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Before those in the chronic pain community get their “shorts in a twist” … in many country Heroin – otherwise known as diamorphine – is used as a legal form of pain management… It converts in the body to MORPHINE- on a mg to mg basis – 2-3 times more potent than MORPHINE. There are more people who die every year from the use/abuse of alcohol – abt 100,000 – but only about 1,000 die of alcohol toxicity – which is normally a BAL > 0.4 -0.5 +. Could that be because alcoholics ‘know their limit'” because they are able to purchase a legal “known strength” of their drug of choice ? Other countries have legalized/decriminalized all drugs/substances and in those places the number of OD’s have dropped dramatically. Does this suggest that the DOJ/DEA are continuing – or expanding – those drawing a pay check from fighting the war on drugs just to keep all those paychecks flowing. All of the OD’s from illegal substances/drugs coming from China/Mexico is just collateral damage to keep the war on drugs moving forward ?
https://www.foxnews.com/us/columbia-university-professor-carl-hart-heroin
A heroin-using psychology professor at New York City’s Columbia University is laying out a constitutional argument for legalizing recreational drugs in his latest book.
In “Drug use for Grown-ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear” (Penguin Press), Dr. Carl Hart calls for the legalization of all drugs, arguing that it is a fundamental American right for responsible adults to decide what to put into their own bodies.
“It’s the original American promise,” he told Fox News Friday, referencing the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Recreational drug use, ostensibly, requires liberty and is conducted in the pursuit of happiness.
“I wrote this book to present a more realistic image of the typical drug user: a responsible professional who happens to use drugs in his pursuit of happiness,” Hart explains on his website. “Also, I wanted to remind the public that no benevolent government should forbid autonomous adults from altering their consciousness, as long as it does not infringe on the rights of others.”
Although reluctant to summarize the arguments laid out in his book for people who haven’t read it, he said there are other dangerous aspects of daily life that are not criminal and that legalizing and regulating drugs could make using them safer.
“Think about car accidents,” Hart said. “There are 40,000 Americans every year who lose their life on the highway because of cars. Nobody’s saying, ‘aren’t you concerned about that we have these cars available?’ No, what we do, is we try to enhance the safety of that activity.”
Hart, the Ziff Professor of Psychology in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Columbia and an award-winning author, has been researching psychoactive drugs and their effects on humans for decades.
“My heroin use is as recreational as my alcohol use,” Hart wrote in the book. “Like vacation, sex, and the arts, heroin is one of the tools that I use to maintain my work-life balance.”
“Heroin is just another opioid, no more or less scary than other drugs,” he told Columbia Magazine, which is published by the university’s Office of Alumni and Development.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, on the other hand, says heroin-involved overdoses in the U.S. increased from 3,036 in 2010 to 14,996 in 2018. (Although deaths in 2018 were slightly lower than in 2017.) More than 115,000 Americans died from heroin-linked overdoses between 1999 and 2018.
Columbia’s drug policy prohibits students and faculty from using or possessing illegal drugs on school property, within a “university workplace,” or during university activities. The policy defines a university workplace as “any site at which employees perform work for the University, whether or not such site is owned by Columbia University.”
The school did not immediately respond to questions about whether Hart’s activities were in violation of this policy.
Hart also criticized the media’s coverage of his book as “bulls—” and said that people should read it for the full context.
“I took a long time to develop these arguments,” he said, brushing off questions as “remedial” topics that are answered in the text.
Legalized drugs would be safer, regulated like alcohol, free from contamination and a source of tax revenue, he has argued.
“This is about our liberty,” he said Friday. “It’s about me protecting your liberty, you protecting mine.”
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https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/91274
When they made their bold announcement in mid 2018, three corporate powerhouses — Berkshire Hathaway, Amazon, and JP Morgan Chase — were going to revolutionize the healthcare delivery system. They would lower costs and improve quality and overall outcomes for their 150,000 workers.
After all, they had author, innovator, and surgeon Atul Gawande, MD, at the helm. It would show the rest of the country and world how healthcare should work.
But less than three years later, the companies acknowledged the effort known as Haven would dissolve by the end of this month. Gawande had already stepped down as CEO in May 2020. What went wrong?
In an hour-long “grand rounds” discussion Thursday with Robert Wachter, MD, chair of the University of California San Francisco’s department of medicine, Gawande provided a post-mortem.
In a nutshell, the concept was fatally flawed, he said, in so many words.
On the good side, he said, the effort accomplished a lot. In its two and a half years of existence, Haven’s thought leaders designed a coverage model with no co-insurance, no deductibles, no cost for 60 critical drugs, and low-cost mental health services and primary care.
But the pandemic brought home a critical point. “We have an employer-based system. A job-based system is a broken system in a world where people are moving every couple of years to different roles and many, many, kinds of jobs,” he said.
“The pandemic has really brought this out in spades,” he said, as the lockdowns cost many workers their jobs, and thus the health insurance that came with them.
“The vulnerability we have of tying your healthcare to your job, that remains still a big hill to climb, and the government has to solve it. That is a public core issue that we still have not faced up to,” Gawande said.
A job-based healthcare system, he said, only cares about costs this year, not over the life of the worker. “That’s why we have fights over whether we’ll pay for a hepatitis C treatment that costs $50,000 and up but avert $1 million in costs over the course of a life. We need that life-course commitment and view, and we have not aligned around that,” he said.
That wasn’t the only reason Haven is dissolving, however. Making an insurance plan work for three different companies whose employees were in different cities, with different populations and organizational cultures, was a daunting task.
“Once that became clear, then Haven threatens to become a very expensive think tank,” Gawande said. The original thought was that it would assume responsibility for benefits management at the three companies, he explained. But it eventually became clear that “didn’t have the potential to say we’ll take over all of the benefits and running of the insurance for all you three organizations and then add more and more and more and more.”
But Gawande doesn’t think Haven was a failure. Not at all.
“It definitely did not become what we thought it would be,” he acknowledged. But it did give him certain skills and organizational knowledge that enabled him to start a new effort, called CIC Health, which launched COVID testing efforts in the Boston area last fall and now has major COVID vaccination efforts at Fenway Park and another site later this month.
Gawande has written several best-selling books about healthcare and numerous articles for The New Yorker. His latest, from Feb. 8, describes the conflicts in a North Dakota county where politics and resistance to mask-wearing and physical distancing through this fall led to the highest rate of COVID spread and hospitalizations in the country.
He also was a member of the Biden-Harris COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board until last month.
Gawande remains heavily involved in Ariadne, a research lab run jointly by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital that designs and tests healthcare delivery innovations. Gawande, who founded and was former executive director of Ariadne, is now the chairman.
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https://www.foxnews.com/politics/curing-cancer-up-next-for-biden-after-defeating-coronavirus
President Biden said Friday that ending cancer will be his next big scientific endeavor after overcoming the coronavirus pandemic.
“I want you to know that once we beat COVID, we’re gonna do everything we can to end cancer as we know it,” Biden said in Michigan after touring a Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant.
Biden was in charge of President Obama’s “Cancer Moonshoot” initiative launched in 2016 to double the rate of progress toward a cure. The priority is personal to Biden, who lost his son Beau Biden to brain cancer in 2015. He was 46.
President Joe Biden walks with Albert Bourla, Pfizer CEO, right, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, second from right, and Jeff Zients, White House coronavirus response coordinator, as he tours of a Pfizer manufacturing site, Friday, Feb. 19, 2021, in Portage, Mich. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci) (AP)
Biden drew parallels between fighting the pandemic and taking on cancer, the second-leading cause of death in America behind heart disease.
“This is a case of life and death,” Biden said. “We’re talking about people’s lives.”
He mentioned his January nomination of Eric Lander as Presidential Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a Cabinet-level assignment. He praised Lander as “a renowned Harvard, MIT scientist” and said he’ll help bring together the country’s top scientists to conduct advanced research on cancer and other diseases.
“This administration is going to be guided by science to save lives and to make life better,” Biden said.
Biden’s comments came as he visited the Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant outside of Kalamazoo and touted progress his administration has made in speeding up the distribution of the shots.
“I can’t give you a date when this crisis will end,” Biden said. “But I can tell you we are doing everything possible to have that day come sooner rather than later.”
Biden drew parallels between fighting the pandemic and taking on cancer, the second-leading cause of death in America behind heart disease.
“This is a case of life and death,” Biden said. “We’re talking about people’s lives.”
He mentioned his January nomination of Eric Lander as Presidential Science Advisor and Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, a Cabinet-level assignment. He praised Lander as “a renowned Harvard, MIT scientist” and said he’ll help bring together the country’s top scientists to conduct advanced research on cancer and other diseases.
“This administration is going to be guided by science to save lives and to make life better,” Biden said.
Biden’s comments came as he visited the Pfizer vaccine manufacturing plant outside of Kalamazoo and touted progress his administration has made in speeding up the distribution of the shots.
“I can’t give you a date when this crisis will end,” Biden said. “But I can tell you we are doing everything possible to have that day come sooner rather than later.”
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