The Zombie Opiocalypse and the Human Reduction Movement
The Zombie Opiocalypse and the Human Reduction Movement
William Walter Kay BA JD
June 19, 2024
Here are the titles of about-to-be-posted articles on the opioid scourge and its usher, Harm Reduction:
1. Vancouver’s Downtown Auschwitz
2. The Forecastable Fentanyl Fiasco
3. Big Opioid and the Pain Movement
4. Trebach’s Solution
5. Safer Supply Lessons From the Kuomintang
6. Taking Out the White Trash
7. Forebearers of Harm Reduction
In the mid-1990s I helped organize drug-users in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. This involved holding bi-monthly meetings for addicts and running an unsanctioned safe-injection site.
The Downtown Eastside was Harm Reduction’s North American launchpad. Harm Reduction projects I engaged in were preceded by only the DEYAS Needle Exchange – North America’s first.
Travis Lupick’s rendition of the Downtown Eastside Harm Reduction saga, Fighting for Space, spares a chapter on activism I participated in. I’ve conversed with 17 Harm Reduction pioneers profiled in that book; some I knew well.
Although I later rejected Harm Reduction, I stayed in touch with former colleagues and continued to study the movement’s advance locally and globally.
Harm Reduction seeks to increase mortality rates among unemployables through the methodical, piecemeal legalization and popularization of addictive, life-shortening drugs. Harm Reduction is sociologically comprehensible via three intersecting contexts:
Firstly, neoliberalism’s nemesis is the ever-growing population of chronically unemployed persons. Maintaining this swelling army in accustomed lifestyles, including medical care, grinds against sacrosanct economic and property frameworks. Modern social safety nets are fiscally unsustainable in a globalized open-border market economy featuring high labour mobility. Allowing the unemployable cohort to balloon in size as they perceptibly endure immiseration risks perilous social dysfunctions and political turbulence. Such dreads inspire programs aimed at psychologically neutralizing this demographic whilst discreetly culling its numbers through apparent self-destruction.
Secondly, medical establishments have fought a hundred years war versus law enforcement agencies over control of addictive narcotics, especially opioids. (“Opioid” herein refers to both opium-based drugs and their synthetic rivals.) Harm Reduction represents a renewed power-grab by doctors against police forces which, in certain jurisdictions, exhibit faint resistance. Harm Reduction’s seemingly innovative and radical initiatives, notably prescribing heroin to treat heroin addiction, were tried extensively before – and failed. Pro-Harm Reduction doctors hail not from the benign medicines of antibiotics and corrective surgery but rather from the malignant medicines of ideologically-motivated psychiatric experimentation and triage-based mass euthanasia.
Thirdly, wherever opioid merchants operate with impunity masses are enslaved and opioid magnates conquer the state. Conjoined legal and illegal opioid industries comprise a constrained genie consisting of a myriad of privately-owned, profit-maximizing, customer-seeking enterprises each possessing marketing, advertising and lobbying prowess. The greater freedom given this genie the more power it wields. While Big Pharma’s manipulations of governments are well-recorded, organized crime’s intrigues are not – yet they remain material. Harm Reduction is subservient to the public relations/government relations arms of the opioid industry. Cui bono?
These articles draw from too many news stories and government reports to innumerate. Key sources are footnoted. Treasures are buried in books. Here are some that informed my views on Harm Reduction and the narcotics industry:
1. Bonosky, Phillip. Afghanistan: Washington Secret War, International Publishers, New York, 1985.
2. Burroughs, William. Junky, Ace Books, New York, 1953.
3. Epstein, Edward. Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America, Verso, New York, 1990.
4. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash, Penguin Random House, New York, 2017.
5. Keefe, Patrick. Empire of Pain, The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Penguin, New York, 2021.
6. Labeviere, Richard. Dollars for Terror, Algora Publishing, New York, 2000.
7. Lee, Martin. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties and Beyond, Grove Press, New York, 1985.
8. Lovell, Julia. The Opium War, Picador, London, 2011.
9. Lupick, Travis. Fighting For Space: How a Group of Drug Users Transformed One City’s Struggle With Addiction, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, 2017.
10. Lupick, Travis. Light Up the Night: America’s Overdose Crisis and the Drug Users Fighting For Survival, The New Press, New York, 2022.
11. McCoy, Alfred. The Politics of Heroin, Harper and Row, New York, 2003.
12. Mills, James. The Underground Empire Where Crime and Government Embrace, Doubleday, New York, 1986.
13. Pardo, Bryce et al. The Future of Fentanyl, Rand Corporation, Santa Monica, California, 2019.
14. Quinones, Sam. Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic, Bloomsbury, New York, 2015.
15. Seagrave, Sterling. The Soong Dynasty, Harper & Row, New York, 1985.
16. Snyder, Timothy. The Road to Unfreedom, Penguin Random House, New York, 2019.
17. Trebach, Arnold S. The Heroin Solution; Yale University Press, New Haven, 1982.
18. Westhoff, Ben. Fentanyl Inc., Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, 2019.