Recovered from Addiction

A doctor in Los Angeles County, California is being charged with murder in the deaths of three of her patients who overdosed on drugs she prescribed for them. It is being reported that she wrote an average of 25 prescriptions per day for addictive painkillers such as Vicodin, OxyContin, and others. She is currently being held on a $3 million bail.

The ongoing investigation linked her to three patients whom she prescribed drugs to and died of an overdose in 2009, and she also has nearly two dozen other charges.

KABC-TV said the DEA suspended the doctor’s license to write prescriptions in 2010, and she eventually surrendered her license to the Osteopathic Medical Board of California’s Department of Consumer Affairs, as there were additional complaints and associated deaths.

Millions of people become addicted to prescription drugs each year, and painkillers are not only the most commonly abused but also the most deadly in terms of overdoses. Prescription drug abuse and addiction is at epidemic levels and continues to rise in America.

The FDA has failed to protect consumers from pharmaceutical company tactics to persuade doctors, and the only way to reduce the number of addicts and casualties is for all parties to be held accountable for their actions. This would include the substance abusers themselves, the FDA and other regulatory agencies, doctors, drug companies, the American Medical Association, local law enforcement, schools and communities as a whole. There is no one part or person to blame, despite some like the doctor mentioned here evidently being more culpable than most.

Back in March of 2007 HBO aired a multi-part documentary film series called Addiction.  It was co-produced by two governmental agencies and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.  It won an Emmy Award.  It was a monumentally successful campaign to bring the subject to light, but I found myself turning it off after a while because what I watched was more like a promotion for pharmaceuticals. The part specifically on opiate addiction pushed methadone and buprenorphine so much that I felt like I was watching an infomercial promoting Suboxone.  At was almost blatantly obvious to me at that time, and since it aired, the number of prescriptions for Suboxone more than doubled over the following two years.  It continues to increase.

Even more, one of the first sentences on the page of HBO’s site promoting the film reads, “Addiction is a chronic relapsing brain disease.”  So, despite the successful efforts to raise awareness about the issue, the film wound up giving millions of people false ideas.  Therefore, we have set out to produce a documentary about curing addiction that directly combats some of the statements made in the HBO documentary and are also incorrectly spread as being “facts” by many thousands of treatment centers around the country that are merely treating the symptoms of addiction rather than helping someone permanently overcome it.

We will be interviewing several leading addiction experts who are able to disprove the addiction theory and who do not follow the pharmaceutically-based treatment protocols – and are getting much better results.  There are many types of programs out there that fit into this category, and we will try to be all-inclusive to the best of our abilities.

We need your help.  To contribute to this activity, you can place a donation to help support the production costs to bring this life-saving information to hopefully millions more people around the country.  To lend your financial support visit IndieGoGo.com/Curing-Addiction/.