Anna Chen – 5 October 2023 opioid crisis
The United States of Amnesia is at it again. Blasting China with a whole new round of sanctions and indictments, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s claim on Tuesday, that China is responsible for the fentanyl crisis, diverts from the opioid epidemic caused by American companies Johnson & Johnson and others, “profiting from a flood of addictive painkillers that devastated communities”. As a result, J&J faced a $26 Billion lawsuit in 2021 but we’re encouraged to forget this as the social and health damage deepens.
Blame shifting includes: “The companies have maintained that they were filling orders of legal drugs placed by doctors – so they shouldn’t shoulder blame for the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis.”
From US doctors to China, the blame game goes on while the conditions of poverty and despair that breeds drug addiction are allowed to continue. China manufactures the precursor chemicals for fentanyl, a synthetic opioid pain-killer used legitimately in medicine but there is no widespread fentanyl abuse in China. Why is America incapable of tackling criminal drug production and trafficking? What next? Making China culpable for producing steel that makes guns?
This is a useful ploy by western elites to rewrite history, deleting their own role in the 19th century Opium Wars atrocity, when Britain forced vast quantities of mass-produced opium, grown in Bengal using industrial methods, on to China at gunpoint.
It turned an aristocratic vice into a nationwide addiction, massacred Chinese and made huge profits for British, American and other western narco-capitalists which helped finance their industrial revolutions.
US profits in the richest country on the planet could have been spent over the years on creating a model society for all its people. Instead, wealth was gobbled up by the elites like a giant Pac-Man until the top one percent owns as much as the bottom 90 percent … and it shows.
As rationalisation for war with the successful rising superpower, it’s primitive, crude and relentless. Prepping for Opium Wars 2 and the hoped for carve-up of the China Golden Goose by the declining West builds like some dark age Berserker raid.
Which all goes to show that the western capitalist system of putting profit before people’s needs is doomed to destroy itself. I believe someone else made this observation nearly 200 years ago, 18 centuries after another seer kicked out the money dealers from some temple.
We can do better than this.
Shakedown Timeline of America’s 21st century war on China
Video: more info at Jerry’s Take on the US and opioids