This is what happened. Prince got in an elevator at Paisley Park, a private elevator, after ingesting a fatal overdose of vicodin laced with fentanyl. He died in the elevator with the door closed and went undiscovered for 6 hours. The coroner ruled death by misadventure (OD) however if you look at the circumstances suicide should not have been ruled out. At an event a couple of days before his death Prince reportedly told people not to waste prayers on him for the next few days. The remark was interpreted as meaning that Prince was in recovery and would be better in a few days. However the other real possibility was that he had already decided to kill himself and prayers for his return to health would be wasted. He was at the pharmacy 4 times in the 24 hours before his death.
By the way, this is obviously a condensed version. The full version is on An Evening with Kevin Smith. It's fucking hilarious.
There were rumors of a suicide note, but I don't know how true that is. If I recall correctly he got started on the whole painkiller thing after injuring his back on stage years before. It just infuriates me. I don't care if you're famous, I don't care if you're rich, I don't care if you're poor, I don't care if you're a nice guy or a bad guy or an average Joe or a nobody, at what point do you not say that unscrupulous physicians are guilty of criminally negligent homicide? How about yesterday? Because they are. Everybody in the medical community - and I do mean everybody - knew how seriously addictive opioids were all along, or, if you're not in that camp, alternatively, it at least became screamingly apparent very early on. And I'm talking about the good guys who said fck the perks from Big Pharma for RXing this poison, I'm not doing it. Why? Hippocratic Oath, do no harm. People knew, I don't care what anyone says. It's possible that it was suicide, but who is to say. Sometimes people get so sick of struggling with their pain that of course became compounded by their opioid addiction. Ray Lucas almost became a statistic for this very reason. You should hear some of his interviews on the subject. It's brutal. I'm glad he's still here. He's good now but he has a lot of residual anger and I don't blame him one bit. Although the 4 pharmacies in one day is not beyond the realm of possibility, it's extremely difficult to pull off now even if you're a dirtbag Dr.: https://forums.theganggreen.com/threads/foo-fighters-drummer-taylor-hawkins.97222/#post-4192951 For the record, whatever Prince took at the end was made by a POS lab rat. They were counterfeit pills made to look like the real thing, so no way what killed him in the immediate sense came from a pharmacy. Could be because he was Prince somebody IN a pharmacy knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy who knew another guy. That still doesn't absolve the other assholes in the long term equation. Handcuffs, please.
Before they jail the first doctor they need to lock the Sacklers up and take their fortune that was made by dealing drugs to main street. This will never happen so I think the medical profession who worked as their frontline pushers should have the same immunity.
Why do you think. Money. However keep in mind that not as many doctors were 'misled' as you may think. Research and data was also manipulated and the clinical trials were performed by the same company that was trying to get it approved by the FDA. The Sackler's knew exactly what was going on, they knew how addictive it was, and they were all for it. They're scum bags of the worst kind. You should check out my cousin's documentary 'Prescription Thugs'. Ignore the jackass who runs Cliffside Malibu. He's a shill and a ripoff artist who should be cut from the movie. It's one of my only complaints about the film.
I’m all for locking up doctors but this country loves it. “Pain management” doctors are nothing more than legal drug dealers. Methadone clinics are just state sponsored drug addiction. But even before we look inward at our own country maybe we should stop all the fucking fentanyl flowing into this country by way of the southern border. It’s gotten exponentially worse in the past year and a quarter.
If you want to really understand the problem study addiction of all kinds. We're wired towards patterns to start with, which is what makes us the pre-eminent tool using species. Then there's a neurochemical imbalance in our physiology that automatically swings us away from the extreme we are experiencing to the opposite extreme. We're kind of addiction pros by the time we're toddling around, long before any dealer of any type has connected with us. If we're lucky we get addicted to healthy things.
My brother was addicted to pain killers. He had a doctor that would write him the prescriptions. He had a back surgery go bad years ago and they ended up putting a screw into a nerve. He was in constant pain. The did a corrective surgery but the damage was done. My ex-wife has worked for a pharmacy for years. I found out what my brother was taking (and the dosages) and told her. She said that it would kill a normal person. He was taking pills and using patches. It's a miracle he didn't OD. He eventually went to a clinic in CA to get himself clean of the opioids. He's faltered a few times since but never to the extent that he had in the past. Scary stuff. His "pain doctor" should be in jail.
If you go to any general practitioner and tell them you have pain and there is a legitimate reason for the pain they will keep upping your prescription until it would reach unhealthy levels - at which point most will punt and send you to a specialist because they know they are out of their league. In parts of the country that do not have specialists, and there are vast stretches of country out there that do not have doctors, let alone specialists, the doctor will keep upping your pain medication until it reaches unhealthy limits. If you fix the medical system in the USA many truly fucked up things based on the dysfunction will begin to regulate more effectively. I saw a documentary a few years ago, maybe along about 2017, that was about one Kansas county that had no doctors and just two clinics for the entire county. The clinics were both manned by a single nurse who basically lived next to the clinic so they could be available 24/7 if necessary. The line in that documentary that has haunted me over the years is the 24 year old nurse, 2 years out of nursing school, who wonders what will happen when a really bad flu season comes around. She has 6 beds and no ICU capability and the nearest hospital is almost 100 miles away. The reason she has only 6 beds for the 8,000 people in her cachement is that state law allows for no more than 6 beds per nurse per facility. The reason she is the only nurse is that's all the state will fund and the 8,000 people in her cachement don't pay enough taxes to support more. That's Kansas for you. She is in a totally rural area, BTW, poor white people who used to make money (or lose it) farming and are all employees of one agricorp or another. The agricorps don't pay for health insurance because what's the point? There are no doctors in the area anyway.
Legalizing marijuana should help curb some of the opiod use. The last time I went to a dispensary there were quite a few older people who were clearly suffering from pain issues like arthritis and bad backs.
Took them 7 years to correctly diagnose me and in that time, and even after my surgery, they just kept giving me scrips, multiple docs, multiple meds. Percocet, darvocet, hydrocodone, morphine, valium, vicodan, I know some of those are the same just different names but they kept giving them all to me. Finally had enough and took myself off them, with help from @jetophile getting me a list of some supplements that helped with the pain. What I figured out was that much of the pain I got was when I was almost due for my next dose so I was getting withdrawal pain not my actual neck/back pain. That was not brought up even once by any of these doctors and I am sure it is a common link between almost all long term opioid users. Still have some of the pain but I'll deal with that rather than going on the pain pill merry go round. The aha! moment for me was when I was discussing taxation of the very well off, $5-$10M income a year types, with my pain doc. When he said, "Why should I have to pay more taxes because I make $10M a year?", it opened up my eyes a bit more. This was in an area of Florida that was ok but not big money area or high population so I can't imagine how much a NYC pain doc would be making.
We all have, or almost all of us. With me it started at 9 months old when my mom, who was a high achiever stuck at home with an infant in 1961, used to feed me baby food desserts on demand. My dad would get home from a day in the lab and my mom would show him the 6 jars of whatever she had managed to stuff into me while he was away. I was a *very* chubby baby for awhile until my parents (dad) decided baby food was off limits during the day. I graduated to bazooka joe bubble gum by 5 or 6 and spent most of the day with a wad of it in my mouth. Not surprisingly I started smoking cigarettes when I was 11 and was up to a pack a day and smoking weed by 13 - a pace I maintained with a few desperate attempts to quit until I was 20. It was my mom passing away from cancer that made me quit finally. She asked me on her deathbed to stop and that kind of message sticks with you. I managed to quit by not letting my hands touch cigarettes again. After a few weeks my friends stopped giving me cigarettes and lighting them for me and I was done. It took years for the dreams to go away. Nightmares where not only was I smoking but I was smoking in bed. There have been other sequential addictions in my life, including to work. The point is that addiction to various substances and habits is something that most of us share to some degree. It is the hardpoints of alcohol, cigarettes and drugs that make us sit up and take notice however there are a million ways in life to be unhealthily addicted to something and that's just part of the human condition.
