PELOSI’S
OPEN BORDERS FOR MORE CHEAP LABOR
The Mexican
Army made two seizures in Ensenada on August
17 (1,036 pounds of meth, heroin, and fentanyl) and August 18 (1,653 pounds of
meth, fentanyl, and marijuana).
The Mexican
Army discovered an
active drug lab on August 25 in Tecate and seized four tons of methamphetamine.
The Mexican
Federal Police seized 350 pounds of
methamphetamine in an active drug lab in Tijuana on August 26.
U.S. Life Expectancy Declines Again as Fentanyl Rampage Continues
7:18
American life expectancy declined again last year according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), adding up to the worst four-year decline since 1915-1918, when mortality rates were driven by the infamous meat grinder of World War One and a deadly flu pandemic. Astonished medical experts pointed to drug overdose deaths as a major reason for the decline.
Overdose deaths have, in turn, reached epidemic levels due to fentanyl and other powerful synthetic opioids imported and distributed by street gangs.
The Washington Post quoted CDC data that makes the role of street drugs clear, specifically noting that legal painkillers – the focus of much attention in Washington – are not causing mortality rates to increase:
Overall, Americans could expect to live 78.6 years at birth in 2017, down a tenth of a year from the 2016 estimate, according to the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. Men could anticipate a lifespan of 76.1 years, down a tenth of a year from 2016. Life expectancy for women in 2017 was 81.1 years, unchanged from the previous year.Drug overdoses set another annual record in 2017, cresting at 70,237 — up from 63,632 the year before, the government said in a companion report. The opioid epidemic continued to take a relentless toll, with 47,600 deaths in 2017 from drugs sold on the street such as fentanyl and heroin, as well as prescription narcotics. That was also a record number, driven largely by an increase in fentanyl deaths.Since 1999, the number of drug overdose deaths has more than quadrupled. Deaths attributed to opioids were nearly six times greater in 2017 than they were in 1999.Deaths from legal painkillers did not increase in 2017. There were 14,495 overdose deaths attributed to narcotics such as oxycodone and hydrocodone and 3,194 from methadone, which is used as a painkiller. Those totals were virtually identical to the numbers in 2016. The number of heroin deaths, 15,482, also did not rise from the previous year.
Experts quoted by the Post suggested efforts to combat the abuse of prescription painkillers, particularly their purchase and resale by gangsters, have been fairly effective. Unfortunately, this created even more demand for street drugs. “The opioid market has been completely taken over by fentanyl,” former Maryland health secretary and Johns Hopkins vice-dean Joshua M. Sharfstein lamented.
A report published Wednesday by CDC made it clear fentanyl is now the Number One cause of overdose deaths, adding more evidence to the “third wave” model of the opioid crisis: a surge in prescription painkiller abuse during the first decade of the 21st Century, followed by explosive growth in the use of heroin after prescription drug abuse declined in 2012, and now a tidal wave of fentanyl killing addicts who don’t always realize they are consuming it because street dealers mix it with heroin.
CDC researchers noted deaths from heroin have been steadily rising for years, but deaths from fentanyl doubled every year from 2013 to 2016, and 2017 was not much better. Fentanyl victims have other drugs in their system in over two-thirds of overdose fatalities, a statistic that offers grim support for the idea that addicts don’t realize cheap and deadly fentanyl has been mixed into their illicit purchases by opportunistic dealers.
This also makes it difficult to count the number of fentanyl deaths precisely, since medical examiners don’t always detect fentanyl or note it was the true cause of death in heroin and cocaine overdoses, so researchers are always careful to note fentanyl could be even more deadly than it appears.
Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle noted the pleas from medical professionals for more resources to treat addicts and suggested a radical course of action: offering mild opioids as prescription drugs to addicts to satisfy their uncontrollable craving without sending them to the streets, where fentanyl-laced heroin bombs await.
McArdle argued that addiction to opioids is so powerful that “tough love” policies of cold turkey detox and unsatisfying medical substitutes like naloxone amount to freeing the slaves of heroin by killing them:
That leaves two options: Keep doing what we’re doing and let addicts keep dying as they’re dying, until the opioid epidemic burns itself out. Or start talking about ways to make safe, reliable doses of opiates available to addicts who aren’t ready to stop. That would mean opening more methadone clinics and making it less onerous for doctors to prescribe buprenorphine, a relatively mild opioid that’s difficult to overdose on. But lowering the death toll may well require a more drastic step: legalizing prescriptions of stronger opiates.Prescription heroin? Remember, I said you might not like the solution. I don’t like it, either — and frankly, neither do the drug policy researchers who told me it may be necessary. But when fentanyl took over the U.S. illicit drug markets, it also got a lot of addicts as hostages. We’ll never be able to rescue them unless we can first keep them alive long enough to be saved.
Olga Khazan at the Atlantic made a supporting case that the campaign to stigmatize opioids in the medical profession is making it harder for addicts to get the treatment they need, pushing them into rehab programs that offer no medication at all, or provide ineffective meds and doses that send hungry patients back to the streets in search of a better fix.
Khazan mentioned France bringing heroin overdose deaths down substantially by allowing primary care physicians to prescribe buprenorphine, a heroin substitute also highlighted by McArdle as a promising resource. She talked to addicts in hard-hit New Jersey who were aware of medical heroin substitutes and desperate to give them a shot but were unable to do so because supplies are scarce and the programs are difficult to get into.
Khazan frankly acknowledged public and medical resistance to keeping addicts alive by feeding them taxpayer-subsidized “safe” drugs to keep them from buying heroin and fentanyl on the streets, but quoted doctors who believe a gentle and forgiving strategy of “harm reduction” with plenty of second chances for relapsed addicts is preferable to stern abstinence programs that kick patients out if they don’t stay clean.
“They remain clear-eyed about the fact that some people will continue using heroin, and they try to minimize the dangers associated with its use,” she said of these kinder and gentler clinics, praising the opioid bill signed by President Donald Trump in October as a positive but insufficient step toward making harm reduction programs more widely available.
Hard-hit states like Maryland are attempting to attack the supply chain of fentanyl by seeking tougher penalties for dealers and pushing fentanyl cases into federal court – an effort that will, unfortunately, run afoul of the new mania in Washington for reducing drug sentences and releasing convicts from prison.
Those on the front lines of the drug epidemic warn that dealers are making a big push to get their deadly products into schools and hook young customers. The treatment programs endorsed by McArdle and Khazan won’t do anything to prevent new addicts from falling into the clutches of street dealers. They represent a grim but maintenance program for a terminal social disease, not an inoculation against the problem growing even worse.
If dealers don’t have to worry about long prison sentences, the only way to stop the fentanyl epidemic is to choke off the supply of drugs and gang muscle flowing across the border. It is simply the only logical course of action remaining to us. Otherwise, we may have little choice but to keep addicts alive by giving them taxpayer-funded alternatives to fentanyl, and we had better be ready for those programs to expand massively in the years ahead.
OBAMA’S OPEN BORDERS
SOARING DEATH IN AMERICA: MEXICO DELIVERS THE HEROIN.
http://mexicanoccupation.blogspot.com/2015/03/la-raza-mexican-drug-cartels-in.html
The main objective of “political animals” like Obama and the Clintons is to
The ruling elite has dismantled the bulk of the country’s industrial infrastructure, destroying decent-paying jobs by the millions, and turned to the most parasitic and criminal forms of financial speculation as the main source of its profit and private wealth. Untold trillions have been squandered to finance perpetual war and the maniacal self-enrichment of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent.
The basic infrastructure of the country has been starved of funds and left to rot, to the point where uncounted millions of people are being poisoned with lead and other toxins from corroded water systems. Flint, Michigan is just the tip of the iceberg.
Under Obama, this social counterrevolution has been intensified. The financial meltdown of 2008 has been utilized by the same forces that precipitated the crash to carry through a reordering of social relations aimed at reversing every social gain won by the working class in the course of a century of struggle. A central target of the attack is health care for working people.
Obamacare is the spearhead of a worked-out strategy to reduce the quantity and quality of health care available to workers and reorganize the health care system directly on a class basis. Corporate and government costs are to be slashed by gutting employer-paid health care, forcing workers individually to buy expensive, bare-bones plans from the insurance monopolies, and rationing drugs, tests and medical procedures to make them inaccessible to workers.
The rise in mortality for workers and the widening of the life span gap between rich and poor are not simply the outcome of impersonal economic forces. In corporate boardrooms, think tanks and state agencies, the ruling class is working to lower working class life expectancy. In late 2013, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank with the closest ties to the Pentagon and the CIA, published two policy papers decrying the “waste” of money on health care for the elderly. The clear message was that ordinary people were living much too long and diverting resources needed by the military to wage war around the world.
The social and economic chasm in America finds a political expression in the vast disconnect between the entire political establishment and the masses of working people. Neither party nor any of their presidential candidates, the self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders included, can seriously address the real state of social conditions or offer a serious program to address the crisis.
In his final State of the Union Address last month, Obama presented an absurd picture of a resurgent economy. “The United States of America, right now,” he declared, “has the strongest, most durable economy in the world… Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Sanders are seeking to outdo one another in seizing the mantle of the Obama administration and praising its supposed social and economic achievements.
They cannot address the real conditions facing the masses of working people because they defend the capitalist system, which is the source of the social disaster. The remedy must be based on an understanding of the disease. It is the building of an independent socialist and revolutionary movement uniting the entire working class, in the US and around the world.
The main objective of “political animals” like Obama and the Clintons is to
get elected; it’s not to fix a broken America, nor to protect her. There are
people who govern and there are people who campaign; Obama and the
Clintons are the latter. Just look at the huge Republican electoral gains under
Obama and the Clintons. It’s amazing that Democrats who still care about
their party still support the very people who have brought it down.
Inequality, class and life expectancy in
Inequality, class and life expectancy in
America
A study by Brookings Institution economists released Friday documents a sharp increase in life span divergences between the rich and the poor in America. The report, based on an analysis of Census Bureau and Social Security Administration data, concludes that for men born in 1950, the gap in life expectancy between the top 10 percent of wage earners and the bottom 10 percent is more than double the gap for their counterparts born in 1920.
For those born in 1920, there was a six-year differential between rich and poor. For those born in 1950, that difference had reached 14 years. For women, the gap grew from 4.7 years to 13 years, almost tripling.
Overall, life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent improved by just 3 percent for men born in 1950 over those born in 1920. For the top 10 percent, it soared by about 28 percent.
Life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent of male wage earners born in 1950 rose by less than one year compared to that for male workers born 40 years earlier—to 73.6 from 72.9. But for the top 10 percent, life expectancy leapt to 87.2 from 79.1.
The United States ranks among the worst so-called rich countries when it comes to life expectancy. But its low ranking is entirely due to the poor health and high mortality of low-income Americans. According to the Social Security Administration, life expectancy for the wealthiest US men at age 60 was just below the rates for Iceland and Japan, two countries with the highest levels. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, on the other hand, ranked just above Poland and the Czech Republic.
Life-expectancy is the most basic indicator of social well-being. The minimal increase for low-income workers and the widening disparity between the poor and the rich is a stark commentary on the immense growth of social inequality and class polarization in the United States. It underscores the fact that socioeconomic class is the fundamental category of social life under capitalism—one that conditions every aspect of life, including its length.
The Brookings Institution findings shed further light on the catastrophic decline in the social position of the American working class. They follow recent reports showing a sharp rise in death rates for both young and middle-aged white workers, primarily due to drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide. Other recent reports have shown a dramatic decline in life expectancy for poorer middle-aged Americans and a reversal of decades of declining infant mortality.
It is no mystery what is behind this vast social retrogression. It is the product of the decay of American capitalism and a four-decade-long offensive by the ruling elite against the working class. From Reagan to the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans alike have overseen a corporate-government assault on the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of working people.
For those born in 1920, there was a six-year differential between rich and poor. For those born in 1950, that difference had reached 14 years. For women, the gap grew from 4.7 years to 13 years, almost tripling.
Overall, life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent improved by just 3 percent for men born in 1950 over those born in 1920. For the top 10 percent, it soared by about 28 percent.
Life expectancy for the bottom 10 percent of male wage earners born in 1950 rose by less than one year compared to that for male workers born 40 years earlier—to 73.6 from 72.9. But for the top 10 percent, life expectancy leapt to 87.2 from 79.1.
The United States ranks among the worst so-called rich countries when it comes to life expectancy. But its low ranking is entirely due to the poor health and high mortality of low-income Americans. According to the Social Security Administration, life expectancy for the wealthiest US men at age 60 was just below the rates for Iceland and Japan, two countries with the highest levels. Americans in the bottom quarter of the wage scale, on the other hand, ranked just above Poland and the Czech Republic.
Life-expectancy is the most basic indicator of social well-being. The minimal increase for low-income workers and the widening disparity between the poor and the rich is a stark commentary on the immense growth of social inequality and class polarization in the United States. It underscores the fact that socioeconomic class is the fundamental category of social life under capitalism—one that conditions every aspect of life, including its length.
The Brookings Institution findings shed further light on the catastrophic decline in the social position of the American working class. They follow recent reports showing a sharp rise in death rates for both young and middle-aged white workers, primarily due to drug abuse, alcoholism and suicide. Other recent reports have shown a dramatic decline in life expectancy for poorer middle-aged Americans and a reversal of decades of declining infant mortality.
It is no mystery what is behind this vast social retrogression. It is the product of the decay of American capitalism and a four-decade-long offensive by the ruling elite against the working class. From Reagan to the Obama administration, Democrats and Republicans alike have overseen a corporate-government assault on the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of working people.
The ruling elite has dismantled the bulk of the country’s industrial infrastructure, destroying decent-paying jobs by the millions, and turned to the most parasitic and criminal forms of financial speculation as the main source of its profit and private wealth. Untold trillions have been squandered to finance perpetual war and the maniacal self-enrichment of the top 1 percent and 0.1 percent.
The basic infrastructure of the country has been starved of funds and left to rot, to the point where uncounted millions of people are being poisoned with lead and other toxins from corroded water systems. Flint, Michigan is just the tip of the iceberg.
Under Obama, this social counterrevolution has been intensified. The financial meltdown of 2008 has been utilized by the same forces that precipitated the crash to carry through a reordering of social relations aimed at reversing every social gain won by the working class in the course of a century of struggle. A central target of the attack is health care for working people.
Obamacare is the spearhead of a worked-out strategy to reduce the quantity and quality of health care available to workers and reorganize the health care system directly on a class basis. Corporate and government costs are to be slashed by gutting employer-paid health care, forcing workers individually to buy expensive, bare-bones plans from the insurance monopolies, and rationing drugs, tests and medical procedures to make them inaccessible to workers.
The rise in mortality for workers and the widening of the life span gap between rich and poor are not simply the outcome of impersonal economic forces. In corporate boardrooms, think tanks and state agencies, the ruling class is working to lower working class life expectancy. In late 2013, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank with the closest ties to the Pentagon and the CIA, published two policy papers decrying the “waste” of money on health care for the elderly. The clear message was that ordinary people were living much too long and diverting resources needed by the military to wage war around the world.
The social and economic chasm in America finds a political expression in the vast disconnect between the entire political establishment and the masses of working people. Neither party nor any of their presidential candidates, the self-described “socialist” Bernie Sanders included, can seriously address the real state of social conditions or offer a serious program to address the crisis.
In his final State of the Union Address last month, Obama presented an absurd picture of a resurgent economy. “The United States of America, right now,” he declared, “has the strongest, most durable economy in the world… Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction.”
In the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton and Sanders are seeking to outdo one another in seizing the mantle of the Obama administration and praising its supposed social and economic achievements.
They cannot address the real conditions facing the masses of working people because they defend the capitalist system, which is the source of the social disaster. The remedy must be based on an understanding of the disease. It is the building of an independent socialist and revolutionary movement uniting the entire working class, in the US and around the world.
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