Biblical Faith, Medicine, and the State: Repairing the Breach During the Spreading Epidemic (12)

This is the twelfth in a series of articles about addiction treatment pioneer Dr. Punyamurtula S. Kishore and his ongoing battle with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which shuttered his fifty-two clinics in late 2011, dramatically increasing the state’s death tolls due to opioid addiction. Space forbids repeating the story developed in the first eleven articles. Readers new to this story are urged to catch up before reading on (links/references are provided at the end of this article).

After crushing this Christian physician’s clinically superior success rates (7.5 to 30 times better than status quo programs), and thereby consigning its populace to rising death rates, Massachusetts exported this madness to the federal level (in the person of drug czar Michael Botticelli) to inflict similar damage nationwide. It is therefore significant that a university economics professor familiar with this series has begun analyzing the data to test a claim made in the last article that the rising death rates in Massachusetts are linked to the takedown of Dr. Kishore’s clinics. We hope to share that data once that in-depth analysis has been concluded. The moral culpability of the state in light of the pending results, for better or worse, is obvious on the face of it.

Dr. Kishore’s incarceration ended on December 10, 2015, with his street-cleaning commitments expiring a month later. For those who know this doctor’s life-saving achievements first hand, the deliberate squandering of his skills and knowledge at the hands of the state is both frustrating and tragic. Most people facing a ten-year probation replete with malicious restitution burdens would simply capitulate. Dr. Kishore is made of sterner stuff, as my visit with him in late December 2015 was to prove. This was a man who hit the ground running, despite how viciously the state had kneecapped him.

Past Behavior Shapes the Future

There is wisdom in the command to “look to the rock from whence ye were hewn; look to the pit from whence ye were digged” (Isa. 51:1, freely translated). As an early pioneer in addiction medicine, Dr. Kishore was one of the few who fully paid his dues. He is the best narrator of his own story in this respect:

I was the only doctor practicing addiction medicine for a long time—continuously, since 1977. All the insurance companies took me in as the preferred provider for addiction services. Project New Life at Bromley Heath was a program I helped develop. I was hired there in 1993 or 1994 as physician to bring my model into play. With the Bromley Heath [housing development], I went in to clean up the place. There was at least an 80 percent drug/alcohol addiction rate at Bromley Heath, a grim figure that’s arguably on the low side.
I was the only one rolling up his sleeves, going into the communities to help them. Other doctors simply sit and stroke their chin. Most doctors don’t set foot into this business.¹ They don’t want to take on addicts—addicts are on the path to death and are seen as a statistic waiting to happen. There’s no clear path to “success.” This spooks MDs.
A lot of moms used to bring their kids to my practice. Ages fourteen, fifteen, sixteen. I’ve dealt with children as young as eight-years-old—an Oxycontin-addicted eight-year-old black child, a boy who was being used for sex. The family had sold the eight-year-old into sexual slavery. He was moved to the Italian Home, but the nuns didn’t know what to do. The kid had serious emotional problems.
How do you define “a friend”? We have bad definitions for the wordfriend, confusing cliques with friendship. Cliques are a social phenomenon arranged around appetites and behaviors. We didn’t just write a prescription and send the patient out the door. We were a talking practice. We would go over the definition of “a friend” with our patients and stick with them through the long haul.

When asked what restrictions the authorities have since placed on him, Dr. Kishore was to the point:

“No doctor-patient relationship. I can’t have that anymore.”

Although maliciously stripped of his medical license, Dr. Kishore was the only community doctor at the Boston premiere showing of the film, Heroin: Cape Cod, USA. The doctor recalls the screening:

“I met with many prominent political leaders there. I thought I’d just hide in the shadows, but I didn’t have to. The goodwill toward me was apparent.”

This brings us full circle to where we are today. The nature of the problem became easier to discern during a roundtable discussion between Dr. Kishore and Dr. Paul Jehle, the pastor who had first introduced me to Dr. Kishore in 2013. We met in Plymouth in late December 2015 to discuss the prospects for Massachusetts.

The Pastor and the Doctor Share Notes

How does Pastor Jehle see drug addiction in his state? “It’s the bubonic plague of our day,” he told Dr. Kishore. “The authorities can’t handle this tsunami. Just Google the phrase Cape Cod Addicted Infants and see.” The crisis also represents something equally critical to the man of God: “When tragedy strikes, God uses it to plow up the soil. We need to be ready to walk behind the plow. As we move forward on this tsunami, the opportunities are going to increase.”

Pastor Jehle, in effect, is confronting the societal wreckage generated by the destruction of Dr. Kishore’s clinics. It is fitting that his efforts and those of other stakeholders are radiating out from Plymouth, as he explains it to Dr. Kishore:

Here’s what’s happening. In Plymouth itself, they’re now sectioning the city off into three sectors. They want to know if I can get pastors involved in these sectors and form smaller committees to filter into the communities … Sadly, some pastors are not connected to their community at all and are isolated—and some pastors like it that way.
Plymouth is the model right now for the state, because Plymouth gathered everybody in the community: police, educators, and pastors. The issue is so serious, it’s all hands-on-deck. Everybody in the community is in the same room and on the same page. People are dying, so everyone is willing to listen. If you care about the community, you’re in that room. It caused very frank discussion. The EMTs, the principals of the schools, the educators are all there, and their hearts are broken. Very teary meetings with frank talk. I’m there to deal with the internal, the heart, from the faith perspective, as well as to connect them with ministries like Teen Challenge that have high rates of success due to their belief that regeneration by the power of God changes the heart.

But the church itself is implicated in the social disaster it finds itself embedded in, often failing the people as badly as the state has failed them in the Kishore case:

We’re losing the culture. The city’s at stake here, guys. A door’s opening. But the church’s view of grace is often one of license, which cripples her moral authority. That attitude spiritually curses their community. Lawlessness—lack of self-government—is a huge problem. For example, the attitude to alcohol in the community will be no better than the church’s attitude toward it. If believers individually and the church corporately are unwilling to restrict their use of alcohol—a known gateway drug to more serious addictions—how can we truly be salt and light in today’s culture?

Where Alcohol, Methadone, Statism, and Scripture Meet

Current dogma from on high (the office of the drug czar) puts methadone and Suboxone®, not sobriety, on the approved list of “treatments” for opioid addiction. In that light, it is instructive to note that there is Biblical authority for linking the effect of these substitute narcotics with the effect of more ancient intoxicants, such as alcohol. And the Bible is by no means silent on this issue, there being nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9–10) while man, who was created upright, craves new inventions (Eccl. 7:29). We’ll see the big picture at the conclusion of this article when we bring Dr. Kishore’s prison pencil sketch to life, but we must first understand the dynamics revealed in Scripture to see what drives the meshed gears in Dr. Kishore’s prescient drawing.

Edward Marbury wrote his commentary on Habakkuk² in the years 1649 and 1650. The truths exhibited in it have gone wanting for 350 years, particularly in regard to his handling of Hab. 2:15–16 and the great woe denounced upon those who put the bottle to another man’s lips to make him intoxicated (verse 15). Marbury points out what few recognize, that King David committed three crimes, not two: between the adultery and murder he sought to get Uriah drunk,³ “to perish his understanding, to rob him of the use of reason, which should distinguish him from a brute beast.”⁴ In this act, the man who oversees the intoxication of his fellow man becomes “his neighbor’s devil.”⁵ Marbury references additional instances where the state has been the primary actor in this evil.⁶

Marbury draws attention to the wording of Luke 21:34, where the verb used in conjunction with drunkenness is barinthoosin (rendered “overcharged” in KJV, but more accurately as “weighed down” in Young’s Literal Translation). Marbury says the term used is clearly “signifying the laying on of a burden upon the heart.”⁷ Far from liberating a person, an intoxicating level of consumption pins him down with a heavy weight upon his heart—his core being—to his increasing harm. Between “weighing down of the heart” and the word “drunkenness” is another Greek term, kraipale (only occurring here in the New Testament), rendered crapula in Latin and crapulence in English by Hendriksen⁸ signifying (he says) “drunken headache, dissipation.” Better, however, is Lenski’s translation, referring to “hearts weighted down in drunken nausea and drunkenness.”⁹ The sense of an oppressive, sickening weight upon the mind, the heart, is at the heart of this association.

What then do we make of the state funneling countless thousands of people into a program giving them daily doses of methadone to drink? Methadone is now served in a small plastic cup rather than the putative “bottle” of Scripture, but that cup’s contents are far more potent than any alcoholic beverage had ever been. State authorities, in effect, are putting the bottle to their fellow men every single day, imprisoning them in a substitute narcotic that generates profits while failing its subjects in the most spectacular way possible. Our drug czar champions the continued intoxication of our fellow citizens, posing as his neighbors’ savior but acting, as Marbury says, as “his neighbors’ devil.” This entire industry (see Dr. Kishore’s illustration below) has already received the verdict of God upon its principal promoters: Woe unto them who do the things they do (Hab. 2:15). That woe extends to the “shameful spewing” (vomiting) of the next verse, echoes of which continue to detract from the “miracle” of Narcan nasal spray discussed below.

Dr. Kishore had been fighting against the now-national policy of hair-of-the-dog opioid replacement therapies like methadone and Suboxone®. These therapies (for those who have ears to hear) are what trigger God’s active denunciation: woe unto them who inflict these things on their fellow men. For Dr. Kishore’s promotion of sobriety, of making the path to sobriety a safe one, of delivering men from modern chemical snares, he was rewarded with withering legal persecution and his landmark clinical successes were buried under the deadening hatred of his own state.

What was so important that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts would go down a path long known to be dehumanizing, demoralizing, and ultimately deadly for all involved? When Dr. Kishore studied the drug ecosystem (see the first article in this series), he had seen only a part of the picture. Having cycled into subsequent phases of the criminal justice system when imprisoned, he was able to discern a much bigger picture, which he had reduced to a sketch showing the various “industries” that, like gears, interlock to create a self-perpetuating economic engine that makes its own self-protection job one. We now turn to the sketch he made, which I’ve rendered more clearly for the sake of legibility.

The Wheel of Death

For Dr. Kishore, the Addiction Industry gear refers to the sources of addictive substances (legal¹⁰ and illegal¹¹—the endnotes provide the doctor’s highly detailed description for the ten teeth he sees constituting each gear). This dual-nature gear feeds into the Criminal Justice Industry¹² and Correction Industry,¹³ leading to the Ex-Offender Industry,¹⁴ which is a primary gateway to homelessness and the Homeless Industry.¹⁵ These all create the problems to be “solved” by the Addiction Treatment Industry,¹⁶ the machinations of which are inherently newsworthy, creating an unhealthy symbiotic relationship with the News/Media Industry.¹⁷ A parallel symbiosis connects the media gear to the Political/Bureaucracy Industry,¹⁸ which drives both the licit and illicit components of the original Addiction Industry gear (and more so now that the drug czar applies pressure throughout this ecosystem).

It is remarkable that Dr. Kishore developed these insights in prison, in ignorance of the recent work by controversial author Roberto Saviano, who, in a book that The Guardian declares to be “the most important book of the year,” says that the markets “must rotate around cocaine” and not the other way around.¹⁹

Unlike Saviano, however, Dr. Kishore has actively and successfully waged war on the constellation of interlocked interests by enlarging the bulwark of primary care medicine. It was because of his success that he was bulldozed—a story already explicated in detail over the last eleven articles. So now we should ask, in whatother ways is the wheel of death, the interlocked industries in the above illustration, acting against reform-minded trends and hostile scientific research? How does this system maintain its “refuge of lies” (Isa. 28:15)?

Maintaining the Assault on Vivitrol, a Component of Dr. Kishore’s Model

Non-narcotic Vivitrol is being reintroduced in Massachusetts²⁰ in tacit acknowledgment that methadone and Suboxone® are false solutions to the problem. Vivitrol is an incomplete solution to the problem, the experimenting authorities being unaware they’re reinventing a wheel perfected years earlier by Dr. Kishore. Consequently, while results will improve (for those in such programs), they will fall far short of the success rates Dr. Kishore had pioneered within the Massachusetts Model of sobriety maintenance, in which Vivitrol played but a part²¹ of a carefully integrated whole.

In ugly opposition to this struggling pro-Vivitrol (and thus pro-sobriety) trend, we have anonymous sources affirming that the Department of Public Health has moved to eliminate Vivitrol from their testing matrix so as to improve the apparent quasi-success of conventional solutions like methadone and Suboxone®. Such preemptive filtering falls little, if anything, short of crony capitalism under color of neutral health authority policy. The methadone failure is hidden about as well as the emperor was hidden by his new clothes.

Such structuring of the tests amounts to a conflict of interest, as officially defined in such clinical contexts. We are informed that “those knowledgeable about the study must take the Conflict Of Interest into account when judging the validity of the study.”²² What if the conflict of interest is concealed in the very structure of the study to gain a predetermined result? Nobody can properly judge a study’s validity when its conclusions are the result of coercion rather than open inquiry.

Conflict of interest adds another layer on top of the increasing unreliability of scientific studies, such as was exposed on January 8, 2016, in a story titled “Errors and fraud multiply in journals.”²³ After citing the National Academies of Science’s statistic that such fraud has increased ten-fold since 1975, the reporter cites three examples from the pharmaceutical field showing dismal levels of fraud between 75 percent and 88 percent.²⁴ Imagine what adding conflict of interest on top of such ethically challenged results leads to.

Then add the amplification of error, as when Sam Quinones showed how a 101-word letter written to The New England Journal of Medicine in 1980 by a Massachusetts doctor (who calculated that only four out of eleven thousand hospital patients became addicted to narcotic painkillers) over time morphed from report to study to landmark report to landmark study without anybody ever reading or vetting the original letter. “How can one little letter … have changed so many minds?” he rightly asks.²⁵ But nobody would debunk the error because they weren’t willing to kick over their own rice bowls.

Limiting Media Leaks About Cracks in Industry Solidarity

There are chinks in the otherwise monolithic armor of methadone treatment and the PR spin placed upon it from those in high places. We’ve referenced how addicted physicians are treated for their condition without methadone in the previous article in this series (and how well Dr. Kishore’s program compares to such treatment programs for addicted doctors).

In September 2015 (during Dr. Kishore’s incarceration), the Canadian media ran a story entitled Methadone program pioneer now says it isn’t working.²⁶ Ron Fitzpatrick, who had high hopes for methadone treatment in 2005 when he pushed to put such programs in place, has since seen through the emperor’s clothes by observing methadone’s dismal ten-year track record first hand. Despite being among the first to promote methadone vigorously in Newfoundland and Labrador, Fitzpatrick “said he would no longer encourage anyone with an opioid addiction to join the methadone maintenance program.”²⁷ This same anti-methadone counter-narrative has also arisen in the mecca for methadone, Massachusetts.²⁸

Regrettably, America’s drug czar continues to wear very dangerous blinders in pursuing his commitment to bad medicine and (as documented thoroughly in the last article) affixing blame upon everyone but himself for the escalating catastrophe.

Narcan the Non-Miracle Drug and the Illusion of “Doing Something”

As reported in previous articles, Narcan is being hailed—wrongly—as a panacea to save lives during an opioid overdose. This nasal spray, when used upon someone suffering an overdose, is supposed to bring the patient back from the edge of disaster (restarting their breathing). This aspect is hyped to the exclusion of three other factors that are rarely mentioned (as they conflict with the optimistic narrative used to support the idea that the authorities have workable solutions). What are the three most significant downsides to administering Narcan?

The risk of the patient vomiting (and choking on his/her vomit) when the Narcan takes effect is given short shrift. The potentially violent resentment of the patient upon those who pulled him/her down from the high they were enjoying is not given adequate press. Finally, recent statistics show that the more dangerous Fentanyl-laced heroin has become predominant. Narcan, at best, provides a brief window of opportunity to transport the overdose patient to an emergency room, as it wears off much faster than the overdosed drug does. Narcan does not reverse the overdose—it only buys a little time.

And sometimes, it doesn’t even do that! A discussion thread run by the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland includes a January 4, 2016, entry about a fact “that seems to have been lost over time,” namely, that Narcan cannot reverse a Suboxone® overdose!²⁹ Who will take responsibility for the resulting deaths when the false panacea, Narcan, is used in cases where it is actually the wrong thing to administer to the overdose victim?

But at least people were “doing something” about the overdose. Even if it made matters worse, they can feel good about themselves, and the wheel of death can spin yet a little faster.

The Proven Fragility of the Wheel of Death

The reader might well wonder, What can anybody do about so entrenched a system as is depicted in the wheel of death graphic, with multi-billion dollar industries funneling money, resources, and victims into the vortex? It is surely beyond any one person’s ability to change it. It’s too huge, too well funded, too powerful, and the news stories about rising death tolls prove its march is inexorable.

But there was one key element in this story that changes the entire picture: Dr. Kishore’s rising success rates, which were gradually approaching the success rates for programs that treat addicted doctors. Such a program like Dr. Kishore’s Massachusetts Model of sobriety maintenance and sobriety enhancement removes the resources that feed the wheel of death. The more clinics use Dr. Kishore’s model, using the core principles outlined in the first article of this series and elaborated thereafter, the more the wheel slows down and deflates (while primary care medicine, family, and the community are strengthened).

When Dr. Kishore’s clinical achievements are coupled with the work of the pastorate, which the doctor had been integrating into his program almost from the outset, the slow but certain demolition of the wheel of death would proceed apace. Instead of rising death rates, there would be falling death rates and falling recidivism rates and rising rates of involvement by Christians in the healing of the nation. When Dr. Paul Jehle spoke of opportunities, it was not empty rhetoric or whistling in the dark. And for the sake of our fellow man, we should move sooner than later, so the opportunities that arise spring from hope rather than from grieving over loved ones lost.

There was a time in Massachusetts before September 2011 when the local version of the wheel of death was being steadily decapitalized all along its rim by a doctor who sought to avoid the Woe pronounced in Habakkuk 2:15 upon those who put and keep their fellow man in an intoxicated state.³⁰

We are facing problems that cannot be solved by the national drug czar. He will only pour more gasoline on the fire because he wants to. But our problems can actually be solved. We know this because for a brief season, someone had lit the way, slowly bringing life back into dozens of communities under siege.

The pioneer is invariably the man with the arrow in his back. For all the attacks Dr. Punyamurtula S. Kishore has suffered, and continues to suffer, he stands by his integrity. He refused to weigh down and enslave his patients with substitute narcotics that burden the hearts of the people or divert into black markets.

You don’t have to be a Christian to appreciate Dr. Kishore’s achievement since secular authorities independently confirmed his world-class clinical results. But Christians, of all people, should be clamoring to help restore what the statist locusts have consumed, for Dr. Kishore’s work represents spiritual capital that can reverse the present darkness. Every month we see articles about researchers slowly fumbling their way in the right direction, but always piecemeal, haltingly reinventing the wheel. In that light, what can you do, in God’s strength and by His grace, to help turn this slow trickle of healing water into a river so powerful that nobody can pass over it (Ezek. 47:1–5)? If Pastor Jehle has anything to say about it, that river may well start in Plymouth.

But why can’t it also start with you?

The First Eleven Articles in This Series:

Article One: “Massachusetts Protects Medical-Industrial Complex, Derails Pioneering Revolution in Addiction Medicine.”

Article Two: “Massachusetts Derails Revolution In Addiction Medicine While Drug Abuse Soars.”

Article Three: “The Pioneer Who Cut New Paths in Addiction Medicine Before Being Cut Down.”

Article Four: “The Addiction Crisis Worsens after Massachusetts Pulls Plug on Dr. Kishore’s Sobriety-Based Solution.”

Article Five: “Why Did They Do It? Christian Physician with a 37% Success Rate for Recovering Addicts Gets Shut Down by the State.”

Article Six: “Martha Coakley and Her Tree of Hate”

Article Seven: “Keeping Big Pharma in Seventh Heaven is Keeping Addicts in Hell”

Article Eight: “Massachusetts Completes Its Takedown of Addiction Pioneer Dr. Punyamurtula S. Kishore”

Article Nine: “A Brief Update on Dr. Punyamurtula S. Kishore”

Article Ten: "Dr. Kishore Encounters the Dedication of the State"

Article Eleven: “Puncturing the Boundary Between Medicine and Politics: How the State Condemns Addicts to Disaster.”

1. Observe the Pew Memorial Trusts lamenting how few doctors enter addiction medicine (a code word for signing up to dispense methadone, etc.) on January 16, 2016: http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/re...

2. Edward Marbury, Obadiah and Habakkuk (Minneapolis, MN: Klock & Klock, 1979 [1865, 1649–1650]).

3. ibid., pp. 512–513.

4. ibid., p. 514.

5. ibid., p. 515.

6. ibid., p. 504.

7. ibid., p. 507.

8. William Hendriksen, New Testament Commentary: Luke (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1978), p. 948.

9. R.C.H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Luke’s Gospel (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Publishing House, 1946), p. 1029.

10. For the licit addiction industry the ten teeth or spokes are: 1) Substitution Therapy with Methadone—Clinic Based. 2) OBOT—Physicians Out Patient Practice Based Opioid Therapy—Suboxone. 3) Overdose prevention service—one and all—families, Good Samaritans with Naloxone. 4) Emergency Care Services—Police/Ambulances/ER Visits. 5) Crisis Management Services—Crisis Clinician/Social Worker. 6) Evaluation Services—Case Matching based on ASAM Criteria—Insurance Industry (http://www.asam.org/publications/the-asam-criteria/about/) 7) In Patient Detox Services. 8) Emergency Psychiatric Evaluation for the Suicidal/Homicidal/Section 12 patients. 9) Dual Diagnosis Unit Admissions. 10) Psychopharmacotherapy with Pharmaceuticals.

11. Ten teeth of the illicit addiction industry: 1) Farmers in Columbia/Afghanistan/Mexico, etc. 2) Clandestine labs in China. 3) Container ships that smuggle. 4) Money laundering banks (illicit wealth). 5) Mercenaries to protect the supply chain. 6) Cartels—Big Guns—Operators—decision makers. 7) Allied ancillary parallel service industries: trap houses, white slavery, gun-running, etc. 8) Protectors: compromised law enforcement and politicians who are in the know. 9) Mob or local entrenched organized crime figures (kingpins). 10) Street level (dealers and resellers).

12. Ten teeth of the criminal justice industry: 1) Paid criminal defense lawyers at $600/hour. 2. CPCS—Committee for Public Counsel Services for the indigent at taxpayer expense (i.e., public defenders armed with Green Sheets for plea deals). 3) Criminal Court physical plant (infrastructure)—the theater of operation. 4) Tenured judges with overcrowded dockets; revolving door. 5) Probation officers/monitors. 6) Court officials to keep the dockets full. 7) Pre-trial detention facilities (for those who could not afford bail). 8) GPS monitoring services. 9) Attorneys general/district attorneys. 10) News media that feeds on the cases.

13. Ten teeth of the correction industry: 1) County facilities—huge physical plants. 2) State facilities—max facilities. 3) Work programs (e.g., as Richard P. Pacitti CWP). 4) Brooke House-type pre-release centers. 5) Deputy sheriffs who supervise Community Supervision programs. 6) Drug testing labs.

7) Allied “slave labor” camps such as dish washing in restaurants that accept felons. 8) Federal Grant Managers who set up backdoor payment to the organizations that accept felons. 9) Case Manager cadres to facilitate preceding step. 10) Churches that get paid to run namesake groups.

14. Ten teeth of theex-offender industry: 1) So-called nonprofits funded by massive federal dollars (N.b., this writer visited such facilities with Dr. Kishore in December 2015 and can confirm his representations here). 2) Parole officers. 3) Probation officers. 4) Ex-felon halfway houses run by ex-felons in bed with state officials (Dr. Kishore’s example redacted for his own safety). 5) Corrupt drug testing labs (Dr. Kishore’s example redacted for his own safety). 6) Corrupt community health centers (such as one this writer visited in December 2015, its name redacted for the doctor’s safety) that serve to siphon money using Medicaid. 7) ATR—Access To Recovery (a Botticelli program with absolutely no checks and balances that Dr. Kishore regards as a money pit lining various pockets). 8) Crony pastors who are given funds to keep the denizens quiet and whitewash government programs. 9) Industrialists who need cheap labor (i.e., slave labor): Dr. Kishore’s example redacted for his own safety. 10) SNAP benefit dispensation and stores accepting food stamps for cigarettes and liquor (cui bono?).

15. Ten teeth of thehomeless industry: 1.) Shelter system (body recycling plants): Dr. Kishore invites the reader to look up Pine Street Inn on the internet. 2) Section 8 housing programs. 3) Food banks. 4) Cheap motels where drug use prevails. 5) The “Health Care for the Homeless” program. 6) Trap houses that allow prostitution. 7) Hazardous waste industries (asbestos; lead; nuclear waste) that exploit the vulnerable. 8) Day labor industry (which Dr. Kishore describes as mercenary outfits that work the weak to death). 9) Prescription doctors who keep writing narcotic scripts for the addicted. 10) The ever-present drug testing labs to “keep the workers clean” with (in Dr. Kishore’s words) fake testing.

16. Ten teeth of the addiction treatment industry: 1. Rehabs—mindless cooling of one’s heels in never-ending 28-day programs costing $300 to $1,000 per day. 2) Transitional programs (a euphemism for “wet shelters”) where drinking and drugging is allowed while residents await a bed in the rehabs just mentioned. 3) The vaunted “licensed halfway house system” with (in Dr. Kishore’s words) all the money going to a few friends of drug czar Michael Botticelli. 4) The notorious unlicensed sober houses run by “shady characters” (a claim of Dr. Kishore’s that a string of indictments seems to support). 5) The “addiction loan industry” that gouges the families that want to bypass the current mindless system endorsed by Botticelli to get their loved ones into a “real” program. 6) The underworld recruitment center (for nefarious activities, odd jobs for the mob). 7) Corrupt labs that produce the desired results on demand. 8) Fund raisers for the “poor and unfortunate” who specialize in emotional manipulation. 9) Hospitals and medical professionals that profit from liver and heart transplants on the addicted suffering from hepatitis C, cardiomyopathy etc., who thus become unfortunate subjects of medical clinical trials. 10) Fodder for false researchers generating nonsensical numbers “on which taxpayer dollars and federal dollars are bet on big.”

17. Ten teeth of the news/media industry: 1) Addiction stories serve as material for the daily dose of fear mongering. 2) Addiction stories provide fodder for producers of scary films such as Heroin: Cape Cod, USA. 3) Self-promoting figures such as Botticelli get a leg up through the news media. 4) Dr. Kishore believes that before its takeover by Red Sox owner John Henry, The Boston Globe tried to support Martha Coakley’s gubernatorial aspirations by targeting Dr. Kishore and his clinics. 5) Dr. Kishore believes the media drives people out of certain locations through sensational stories, helping secret buyers acquire those properties at lower prices. 6) The media serve as a PR arm for the drug companies (Big Pharma). 7) Regime journalists do the bidding of the politicians and bureaucrats. 8) The media covers up the truth and unscrupulously keeps the public in the dark as to real solutions. 9) Dr. Kishore sees the media as promoting the alternative lifestyle agenda, supporting communities that use drugs in greater quantities (based on his clinical experience working with 250,000 patients). 10) The media serve as a mouthpiece for various powerful interests, transmuting journalism into propaganda.

18. The ten teeth of the political/bureaucracy industry(some of which are educated inferences based on direct observations made by Dr. Kishore) are these: 1) Politicians need money, and drug money from the illicit drug industry comes in handy. 2) Money and political power are bed partners, a likely reason drug dealers get released so quickly through South Bay where Dr. Kishore was incarcerated. 3) The hunger for power and the hunger for addictive drugs are similar; those who run for office tend to have addiction problems and are less willing to do what is right because they’re scared for their own skin (Dr. Kishore’s examples are redacted for his own safety). 4) The bureaucrats who wrote the so-called medical marijuana regulations have bolted to the industry side and own the clinics! Ethics disappears as greed reigns supreme. 5) The so-called revolving door brings in addicts into bureaucracy. Michael Botticelli is an example of one who in turn takes care of his own (with a $27 billion budget) with the money circulating in a tight circle (Dr. Kishore sees cronyism at work here that should never have arisen). 6) Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is the watchword, so that money continues to be spent on non-working programs to ensure job security. 7) Ignorance is the common coin of bureaucracy, which remains inadequately informed about the complex aspects of human care. 8) When politicians rattle their sabers, bureaucrats reap the benefits of the resulting political thunder. 9) Inertia disallows a business-like approach to problems. Politicians and bureaucrats follow a basis for action not defined by any conventional wisdom. 10) Narcissistic know-it-alls dominate this industry, meaning humility and the search for true, accurate information is alien to them.

19. http://www.theguardian.com/boo...

20. https://www.bostonglobe.com/me...

21. In a previous article we showed how a pro-Vivitrol media puff piece featuring a patient of Dr. Kishore’s never mentioned the name Kishore by carefully editing the patient’s quoted words.

22. https://ori.hhs.gov/education/...

23. http://www.newsobserver.com/ne...

24. ibid. The 75 percent unreproducible (read: essentially fraudulent) journal results were detected by Bayer, while the 88 percent fraudulent results (47 out of 53 journal articles) were detected by Amgen.

25. “Laying out the path from pills to heroin,” Matt Pierce, The Los Angeles Times, April 12, 2015, F14. Pierce was interviewing Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic. Pierce had asked Quinones to “explain how a single paragraph of medical literature propelled the Oxycontin epidemic.” Today’s errors travel just as quickly, and just as far and wide.

26. http://www.cbc.ca/beta/news/ca...

27. ibid.

28. http://m.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/advocates-warn-against-drug-based-treatment-for-addiction/article_31dff39d-9782-54eb-914e-4b2421bda3be.html?mode=jqm. Methadone advocate Hilary Jacobs was quick to counterattack to protect the status quo: http://www.newburyportnews.com...

29. Sidney Schnoll, VP of Pharmaceutical Risk Management at Pinney Associates, Inc., makes this critical observation about Narcan (naloxone) and Suboxone® (buprenorphine): “In discussions I’ve had with Frank Vocci, who was leading the NIDA medications development program when buprenorphine for opioid treatment was developed, he indicated that naloxone is not effective for buprenorphine reversal and they recommended a respiratory stimulant instead. This fact seems to have been lost over time. Buprenorphine has a very high affinity for the mu receptor, which is higher than naloxone’s affinity. That is why it doesn’t work.” A somewhat earlier post in the thread by another contributor had led to Schnoll’s warning. That earlier post stated, “At the NJ poison center we have seen kids get into parents’ and grandparents’ take-home methadone and Suboxone. They should have naloxone at home.” Schnoll was correct: a critical fact has been lost over time, leading to this dangerous recommendation to have naloxone (Narcan) at home, which simply “doesn’t work” for treating a Suboxone overdose.

30. The Hippocratic Oath has a faint echo of this mindset in affirming First Do No Harm.