bitter-badfem-harpy:

butchcommunist:

One of the worst things I ever learned in my 4 years at Starbucks is what someone looks during early opiate withdrawal, like how absolutely haunted and empty and sick it makes people look. I think about that look and seeing it every single day for years, seeing regular customers waste away from fit young men to whispers of themselves over a few months, and it infuriates me that nobody is being held responsible for manufacturers selling the lie to doctors that opiate pain killers came with little risk when they knew that not to be the case, for doctors pushing pills they knew some patients didn’t need at outrageous rates for the kickback and because they knew their patients trusted them with their care, etc etc etc. One of the most heartbreaking things I ever had someone tell me was that he liked buying Frappuccinos because it was 6 less dollars he could spend on heroin that day and he was desperately trying to quit- for a while I even noticed him using in our bathroom, which I never told people I knew were about to use they couldn’t use unless they left me blood or needles, less often. I saw that man many times a week for over a year and then one day he stopped coming- the next time I saw him, about two years after he had stopped coming, he was barely conscious and didn’t recognize me, and he asked me for change for a bunch of $20 bills that were counterfeit and that I couldn’t even touch directly because they were dotted with blood from his hands that were swollen to quite literally the size of baseball gloves. He seemed genuinely surprised they were counterfeit and I would bet that someone scammed him/paid him for something in fake bills. That one person could end up in that state because someone wanted to make money is bad enough but at least I could understand writing this off as a marginal problem. But thousands of them, and many many people literally dead who otherwise would not be, is so unthinkable.

Pharmaceutical companies have orchestrated the second heroin epidemic in the last half-century.