There are parts of this book that literally forced me to close the book and my eyes and just suffer for a few minutes. Then I’d gather my courage and resume reading. The end of Chapter 2 was like this. Kennedy throws facts at you all through these chapters and then at the end, he…
It would seem obvious to the dimmest of average citizens that government employees should not collect hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for supporting and endorsing the products of pharmaceutical corporations. Even a child could understand that this would lead to dishonesty, favoritism and criminality at the expense of public health. But that’s the…
Fauci in a 2015 interview: I mean, if a parent really feels strongly against [vaccination], that parent can get an exemption. So there’s never a situation where someone is going to tie you down and vaccinate you or say you can’t go to any schools at all if you’re not vaccinated. Nowhere should you force…
After reading this book, I was forced to the conclusion that American and international medicine is not what I thought it was. And I already thought that it was corrupt, seriously misguided and often barbaric. Actually, it’s much worse than that. It is an incestuous, exclusive, closed system dedicated to the profits of pharmaceutical companies…
The story told in Empire of Pain is not just about the opioid painkiller OxyContin and its devastating effects on millions of pain sufferers. That story has been told several times by very competent writers. Instead, Patrick Radden Keefe traces the lives of the Emperors of Pain—the Sackler family—from their beginnings in America right up…
While there have been several books written on the influences and factors that brought America to its current struggles with opioids, the 2021 book by Patrick Radden Keefe is arguably the most thorough. His book, published in April, is titled Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Mr. Keefe reaches back to…
Sam Quinones is the author of the book Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, published in 2015. In my humble opinion, without Sam’s book, we would not have consolidated our confront of our opioid epidemic and the architects of that disaster, the Sackler family, as soon as we have. Sam has published a…
I’m in the middle of reading Unsettled: How the Purdue Pharma Bankruptcy Failed the Victims of the American Overdose Crisis. The words above from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address give me chills. They are engraved on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial. Lincoln was envisioning an ideal world, one that is far removed from this one…
Somehow, it seems totally wrong that the companies we trust with our health are driven by their need to show profits. All but one of the major pharmaceutical companies are owned by shareholders who want to receive dividends. The companies’ reputations rise and fall by their profitability. Right away, without any further examination, this skews…
I’ll tell you something that frustrates me on the subject of getting well. And that is the idea that ONE THERAPY alone is all that’s needed to enable a person to get well. I believe that it CAN happen that way, when that therapy happens to hit a very specific nail right on the head….