Bad Drug Companies/ Good Drug Companies

For a couple of hundred years, Americans celebrated the genocide of the original inhabitants of this continent. Native Americans were called savages, and other names, and the slogan was "The only Good Indian is a Dead Indian". Dozens of movies were made celebrating their deaths. After the 19th century Indian Wars, only 200,000 survivors remained by 1900, delegated to reservations in the most inhospitable parts of the US, living in poor conditions and discriminated against by the rest of America. (Even today, the average life expectancy of a man living on Pine Ridge is lower than men living in much poorer countries. Many people still do not have running water or electricity).


During the 60s, though, after WW2, it suddenly occurred to Americans that, just maybe, celebrating genocide was not the most politically attractive stance for a country to take. So, the story changed. As it turns out, in the revisionist history we are now fed, no indigenous people were actually killed in the making of this country. They died of smallpox, you see, and measles. (Be sure to get your shots!). The massacres never happened, there were no Indian wars, no broken treaties, and Custer? Who is Custer? When the Europeans traveled across the continent, they came upon whole tribes dead of the measles, and simply moved onto that empty land.

We are now going through a similar historical revisionism with the heroin epidemic. In 2001, when the US invaded Afghanistan, they emptied the Taliban prisons of drug warlords, and let them plant opium poppies. Since 2001, heroin production has skyrocketed and Afghanistan now supplies over 90% of the world's market. There are now heroin users in every city, small town and rural area in the US, and drug overdoses are rampant.

Thanks to social media, many people have seen pictures of heavily armed US soldiers guarding poppy fields in Afghanistan, and many, many people were drawing the obvious connections. Our ruling overlords were starting to get nervous. Time for some revisionism.

Hey, guess what? It turns out that the "opiate" problem in the US, and the overdoses, have nothing to do with the tons and tons of heroin coming from US-controlled Afghanistan. Nope. It is your doctor, and Big Pharma that are the problem, not the CIA and its documented drug running.

I can't remember when this revisionism started, but it seems to me to have been in the last year. And it is interesting. It turns out that they are counting on the fact that most Americans hate the drug companies that profit so handsomely from illness, both acute and chronic. And so they are turning the blame onto them, secure in the knowledge that we are impotent to do anything about the sickness profiteers.

Odd, though, that they are fanning the flames of resentment and anger against the greed and lack of humanity of the drug companies while at the SAME TIME assuring us that the vaccines they provide us are safe and effective. No matter that a 1986 law immunizes them from lawsuits if their products are not safe and effective. No matter that the drug companies have produced dozens of new vaccines since the law was passed, with no requirement of safety or efficacy required. No matter that the reaction of the government to the reluctance of the people to use their children as guinea pigs to new vaccines is to mandate them by law.

They count on our societal-wide sense of learned helplessness, and lack of any sense of hypocrisy, to push the idea that drug companies are simultaneously greedy mass murdering pushers of dangerous opiate drugs AND also selfless benefactors of mankind, manufacturing money-losing vaccines in a benevolent attempt to save lives and make a difference. This is Double Think.