To the editor:
A few weeks ago, I was excoriated in Townbroadcast for asserting that the opiate crisis was not fueled by the criminal doctors in collusion with the criminal drug companies. To those good folks please read the following:
“Officials with New York’s Special Narcotics Prosecutor indicted Quiroz-Zamora. Officials allege he arranged for 44 pounds, or nearly 20 kilograms, of fentanyl to be shipped to New York — a haul of drugs that had the potential to kill 10 million people.
“Fentanyl is about 50 times more powerful than heroin, and just a few grains can kill. Fentanyl, which is made in clandestine labs with cheap chemicals, has become a lucrative business for traffickers. It is often cut into heroin or pressed into counterfeit pills made to resemble legitimate prescription drugs, including OxyContin and Xanax.”
According to the article, Quiroz-Zamora, an infamous Mexican drug kingpin, was moving the drugs from Mexico to the US. This was in the radical right-wing Washington Post, March 27.
It is politically correct to blame big everything (but not big government) for all the ills of the world; however, the over-prescription of opioids fueling the crisis just failed the common-sense test. Over-prescribing may have aided folks in becoming dependent, but it could not feed an addiction for long.
The numbers we are discussing, some 20 million addicts, just can’t be supplied by me selling the 20 or so pills I had leftover from two major surgeries and ongoing cancer treatments. The blame for the opiate crisis must be set at the doorstep of American business, to validate the holy grail of the left that big pharmaceutical and big medical care providers are evil.
Come on now folks, at least go to the New York Times and read the story. It will not matter that trainloads of drugs, opiates, are crossing into the Unites States from Mexico. After all, the real evil is big medical treatment facilities; that’s your story and you are sticking to it. And you say the right is closed minded? Got to wonder how that works.
Robert M. Traxler, Dorr