{"id":90163,"date":"2017-04-10T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2017-04-10T11:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=90163"},"modified":"2017-04-08T16:00:33","modified_gmt":"2017-04-08T15:00:33","slug":"death-on-the-prescription-plan-the-white-plague-of-the-21st-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/04\/death-on-the-prescription-plan-the-white-plague-of-the-21st-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Death on the Prescription Plan. The \u2018White Plague\u2019 of the 21st Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

6 Apr 2017 – Over the past two decades hundreds of thousands of Americans have died prematurely because of irresponsibly prescribed narcotic \u2018pain killers\u2019 and other central nervous system depressants, like tranquillizers and their deadly interactions.<\/em><\/p>\n

The undeniable fact is that they have been mostly from the white working and lower middle class from rural and deindustrialized regions. The governing elite and oligarch macro-decision makers have quietly dismissed this sector of the country as \u2018surplus\u2019. The victims or their surviving family members have no chance of redress for the widespread malpractice and greed that led to their addiction or death. The government as a whole and the oligarch-controlled mass media have deliberately failed to document and investigate the deep causes for the epidemic, except to spout the usual superficial \u2018clich\u00e9d explanations\u2019.<\/p>\n

Read essay [PDF]<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>James Petras is a Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York. He is the author of more than 62 books published in 29 languages, and over 600 articles in professional journals. He has a long history of commitment to social justice, working in particular with the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement for 11 years. In 1973-76 he was a member of the Bertrand Russell Tribunal on Repression in Latin America. He writes a monthly column for the Mexican newspaper, <\/em>La Jornada<\/em>, and previously, for the Spanish daily, <\/em>El Mundo<\/em>. He received his B.A. from Boston University and Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Go to Original \u2013 petras.lahaine.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Apr 2017 – Over the past two decades hundreds of thousands of Americans have died prematurely because of irresponsibly prescribed narcotic \u2018pain killers\u2019 and other central nervous system depressants, like tranquillizers and their deadly interactions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-90163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}