The Daily Mail reports having successfully completed an undercover ‘sting’ operation, complete with hidden camera video, showing a licensed pharmacist selling dangerous, highly addictive drugs, with side effects including hallucinations and heart failure, to a customer ‘for prices higher than those on the street.’
Oh wait a minute. That’s not actually a crime. That’s business as usual.
The transaction caught on video—60 Xanax tablets for £ 150—was only a ‘crime’ because the person soliciting the drugs did not have a scribble of paper rubber-stamped by a Western medical doctor. And for the Daily Mail, this act exemplified an insidiously growing trend on the part of pharmacists who are circumventing the law for profit:
Pharmacists acting like ‘street drug dealers’ are flooding the black market with potentially dangerous prescription drugs such as Xanax. The drugs can then be swiftly sold on through social media to young people in schools and universities where they are increasingly being abused with devastating consequences.
Student Misuse
Drugs like Xanax in the hands of a young person who takes the drug in unsafe doses, or who suddenly stops taking the drug, certainly puts that young person at severe risk. The Daily Mail made sure to include a sidebar article about a female student who hanged herself after cutting off her unauthorized use of the drug after six weeks. Apparently, she had gotten it from a fellow student and started taking it to quell her anxiety.
But while there are grounds for genuine concern about the illegal trafficking and abuse of these dangerous drugs, these concerns should not be blatantly used as a smoke screen to obfuscate the root problem: the fact that these drugs are being manufactured at all, and are made readily available for human consumption.
Controlled Narrative
When the mainstream media voices concerns over illegal prescription drug trafficking, it serves to legitimize the ‘legal drug trade’ that is going on over the counter everywhere. Here’s how the narrative is framed:
Julie Cooper, Labour’s community health spokesman and a former pharmacy owner, said: ‘Every decent pharmacist will want to get to the bottom of this issue because it could bring the whole profession into disrepute.’ The Government’s Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority [MHRA] is working with the police to crack down on the diversion of drugs from the legitimate supply chain.
This statement makes the distinction between so-called illegal procurement of these pharmaceutical drugs and what is called ‘the legitimate supply chain,’ a fancy way of describing a drug trade that carries with it an air of respectability, based on decades of careful planning on the part of the controllers of medicine in Western society.
Pharmacists are starting to see that they are just pawns in this drug trade—so some of them have decided that they want to get in on the action a little more. Some of them even know that the National Health Service sees profit, not public health and safety, as its prime motive. One pharmacist in Manchester who did not sell the drugs to the reporter without a prescription actually told him to buy the drugs from the internet. He said they wouldn’t be fake because ‘people get them from the NHS and sell them on eBay.’
‘Treating’ Anxiety
The core problem is that, as a society, we have been inculcated by the idea that personal difficulties such as anxiety are cause by a chemical imbalance in the brain, and consequently a person with anxiety should take pharmaceuticals that will supposedly restore that balance.
In fact, the chemical imbalance is not at cause, it is a symptom of something deeper: the way a person’s mind is interpreting the world and guiding their actions. Anxiety is a person’s mind and body calling on them to pay attention to their habits of thought and action, and make changes that will restore balance in their lives and alleviate their suffering.
Material Limitations
However, most Western doctors are completely unequipped to do this, because they are trained in material science only, and so don’t go beyond trying to impact material processes. And this is fully by design. What is the Western doctor to do? Well obviously, they have to prescribe something to change the situation the client is complaining about, so that they can actually justify the time and trouble the patient took to go and see them.
Doctors rampantly prescribing dangerous drugs to patients in need will one day be seen as the systemic crime that it is. At best these drugs only mask symptoms and prevents a person from being encouraged and motivated to find the root cause of their anxiety at its source. At worst, the drugs themselves cause debilitating addiction, painful side-effects, and even death.
Taking Back Our Power
For thousands of years, human societies have dealt with issues like personal anxiety through care, love, support, and encouraging a sense of belonging. Practices and habits around eating, sleeping, exercise, work and leisure were the sources of restoration for mental and emotional imbalance. As we awaken, we are starting to notice just how much we’ve surrendered our own healing capacities to the Western medical establishment.
Should we be worried that revelations of pharmacist malfeasance ‘could bring the whole profession into disrepute’? That could actually turn out to be the best thing for our collective health.
