How painkillers are becoming the biggest cause of death in America
Tom Petty’s autopsy report revealed that he died of an overdose of Fentanyl.
It’s the truth about cliché – once someone puts a label on you, it sticks for life. This is especially true of rock stars. To keep it human, let’s show some empathy and call them musicians.
The American and British media keeps reporting on “troubled” artistes, their stints in rehab, their drug overdoses. The public is shown photos of celebrities on “a night out”, “looking the worse for wear”. And then the celebrity singer dies.
This is seen as a kind of comeuppance for the life of excess that they led. You burn briefly, then burn out and fade away. The talentless –the consumers of culture – find succour and solace in the idea: Thank god I’m not a troubled artist! Keep it simple, Simon.
The romance of the troubled artist is an old one. They used to be called tortured artists. In the mid-twentieth century they died of alcoholism, in the late twentieth they succumbed to heroin overdoses. This roughly was the trend for over fifty years, from Dylan Thomas to Kurt Cobain.
Recently, and I mean since very recently, one has been hearing of a new American addiction. I became aware of it because famous accomplished musicians we have all loved, or at least heard of, have started dying like flies. None of have them were either tortured or troubled in the orthodox tabloid sense of the word.
This month Tom Petty’s autopsy report revealed that he died of an overdose of Fentanyl. There are hushed rumours that Cranberries singer Dolores Riordan could be the latest victim. She died suddenly, while working on new material. Before that we had Prince, and before that Michael Jackson, who also succumbed to a painkiller overdose administered by his doctor.
Fentanyl by all accounts is the number one killer in the USA right now. It shows us how the war on drugs is a completely futile effort. New drugs, invented by big pharma and prescribed by family GPs, have Americans hooked for life, until there is no life left to live.
At the heart of the malaise is pain. Musicians are burdened by heavy tour dates. Their bodies take a toll night after night, month after month. Prince, a teetotaller, suffered from chronic hip pain. When he died, Tom Petty had played the biggest tour of his career, across more than a hundred cities.
By the end his cracked hip was broken in two. He kept popping the opioid painkillers, and meeting his obligations, until the day when he popped one too many.
Ordinary Americans are being prescribed Fentanyl to alleviate pain for the simplest procedures, like the extraction of a wisdom tooth. Those who become addicted have no history of addiction. It’s a powerful drug, 30 times more powerful than heroin.
In 2016, of the 64,000 who died of drug overdoses, the biggest slice belonged to Fentanyl and common opioid painkillers like Oxycontin and Percocet. That’s a larger death toll than what guns, car crashes and AIDS/HIV killed in that one year in the US.
According to Vox, 650,000 people can be expected to die from opioid overdoses in the next 10 years, more than the population of the city of Baltimore.
In 2017, in his NYT column, Nicholas Kristoff wrote of the mindboggling scale of the tragedy: “About as many Americans are expected to die this year of drug overdoses as died in the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars combined.”
Death rates in America, on the down for the last century, are rising again. Fentanyl is the leading cause of death for Americans under fifty.
Obama twiddled his thumbs until the last year of his presidency. In this, he has been compared to Ronald Reagan who let the AIDS epidemic tick under his watch. Trump has declared it a national health emergency but stopped short of pumping public money into the fight.
Under fire, pharma giants have taken to putting out full page adverts in national broadsheets, discreetly shifting the blame to consumers abusing the drug. Purdue Pharma, the makers of Oxycontin, are reported to have paid $600 million in fines for misleading marketing claims.
And so, while the Chinese mafia is blamed for flooding America with cheap Fentanyl, American pharma itself hard-sold these painkillers marked as safe and effective for treating pain, even though the evidence pointed to the contrary: that the harmful effects far outweighed the benefits.
Some of this has been attributed to the American resistance to the idea of pain, ingrained in the culture. The Japanese, it’s pointed out, never succumbed to opioid painkillers as a solution, even though it was an accessible option.
The truth is that in the new century, American doctors started prescribing these pills of death on an industrial scale. Doctors were under pressure to take pain more seriously and to come up with quick fixes.
Anna Lembekke, author of Drug Dealer MD, is credited with having come up with the widely-used explanatory of “the Toyotisation of medicine – tremendous pressure on doctors within large integrated health care centres to practice medicine in a certain way and get patients out in a timely fashion to be able to bill insurers at the highest possible level and to make sure that their patients were satisfied customers.”