Multiple industries, each with something to gain from eliminating or greatly reducting prescription opioids, joined forces to create what we now call the opioid elimination industry.

At the center of it all? Money.

Once lawyers and AG’s realized how much was made from the tobacco settlements, they began pushing for a massive opioid MDL (multi-district litigation), and openly said they wanted to make opioids “the next tobacco.” (That’s a direct quote from one of the lawyers involved in both).

To win those lawsuits, they needed to manufacture a “standard of care” that would label opioid prescribing as excessive, dangerous, or negligent. That’s what the 2016 CDC Guideline provided.

But that was just the start.

Here’s how the entire system was constructed to make opioid prescribing look like a crime, and profit off the fallout.:

• Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) were hired by lawyers in the early 2010s to serve as expert witnesses and influence public policy.
• The group PROP (Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing) was formed, and its members would go on to influence the CDC Guideline, testify in court, and profit as litigation consultants. They’re still at it today.
• PDMPs (Prescription Drug Monitoring Programs) were expanded so the government could track prescribing in real time, and use that data to identify “overprescribers” to investigate or prosecute.
• NarxCare and other risk scores were layered on top of the PDMPs to further automate the surveillance and label patients as “high risk.”
• The DOJ and DEA ramped up pressure on doctors, launching criminal cases, surprise audits, and license threats, often for nothing more than treating pain.
• Surrounding it all was an ecosystem of financial interests:
  • The addiction treatment industry is pushing Suboxone and false OUD diagnoses on pain patients
  • The interventional pain industry is pushing spinal cord stimulators, ablations, injections, and other expensive and often harmful procedures
  • The alternative health industry is pushing non-opioid therapies, often promoted as “solutions” while opioids were taken away, including things like Pain Reprocessing Therapy

What we’re living through now, the mass abandonment of pain patients and forced or abrupt opioid tapers, is the fallout of all of this. It didn’t happen by accident. It was coordinated. It was all done for money.