I recently checked the TV show Dopesick which is about the opioid crisis in the US; its birth, growth, and consequences. I've previously seen a documentary about the same topic and I've read numerous articles regarding it as well, but for some reason I'm only now seeing the alarming similarities between the opioid crisis and the current push for "gender affirming care."

I want to underline that I'm not equating the two. The opioid crisis is possibly the largest medical scandal of our lifetime, taking into consideration the amount of people deceased from the drug and the number of those who became addicted (not to mention, the ripple effect this all has had in families, towns, etc.) I don't think they're directly comparable, but there are certainly some eerie echoes of the opioid crisis' mechanics in the way that "gender care" is lobbied and sold to us nowadays.

The article I'm quoting here is an edited extract from a book published in 2018. It's long-ish but worth reading through in case you're not familiar with the opioid crisis. I will quote some parts below to exemplify.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/nov/08/the-making-of-an-opioid-epidemic

To start off, the article (and the book, I surmise) describes the opioid lobbyists as "true believers" and "evangelists." These people are convinced that their way is the right way, and any criticism is just "unwarranted fear, stigmatising a valuable medicine."

Anyway, here goes.

They constructed a web of claims they said were rooted in science to back their case. -- But the evidence was, at best, thin and in time would not stand up to detailed scrutiny.

Starts off in a familiar fashion.

Portenoy toured the country, describing opioids as a gift from nature and promoting access to narcotics as a moral argument. Being pain-free was a human right, he said.

I mean, what isn't a human right these days. The man later admitted there was little truth to his claims.

“In essence, this was education to destigmatise and because the primary goal was to destigmatise, we often left evidence behind,” he admitted years later as the scale of the epidemic unfolded.

One has to wonder if any of the "gender-affirming care" lobbyists will ever come clean in this sort of way? To openly say "yeah sure, we knew there was contrary evidence but we decided to not tell you?"

As Ballantyne listened to relatives of her patients talk about how much the drugs had changed their loved ones, her misgivings grew. Husbands spoke of wives as if a part of them were lost. Mothers complained that children had become sullen and distant, their judgment gone, their personality warped, their character altered. None of this should have been happening.

Indeed it shouldn’t have…

Pain relief was supposed to free the patients, not imprison them. It was all very far from the promise of a magic bullet.

The reality with opioids was lightyears away from what was promised. In fact, in many cases it seems to have been the exact opposite of what was promised. Brings to mind detransitioners.

As the influence of the opioid evangelists grew, and restraints on prescribing loosened, the pharmaceutical industry moved to the fore with a push to make opioids the default treatment for pain, and to take advantage of the huge profits to be made from mass prescribing of a drug that was cheap to produce.

Money, of course, is the driving force for many things nowadays. It’s very odd to think health professionals would nowadays deliberately harm people yet here we are.

Then, the American Pain Society, a body partially funded by pharmaceutical companies, started pushing the concept of pain as the “fifth vital sign”, alongside other measures of health such as heart rate and blood pressure. In essence this means that a more or less pseudo-scientific idea is introduced to medical professionals as a real thing. The next bit is, in my opinion, quite important here because it speaks of how the idea of "pain as a fifth vital sign" was forced onto hospitals:

The APS wanted the practice of checking pain as a vital sign as a matter of routine adopted in American hospitals. The key was to win over the Joint Commission for Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which certifies about 20,000 hospitals and clinics in the US. Its stamp of approval is the gateway for medical facilities to tap into the huge pot of federal money paying for healthcare for older, disabled and poor people. Hospitals are careful not to get on the wrong side of the joint commission’s “best practices” or to fail its regular performance reviews.

In response to what it called “the national outcry about the widespread problem of under-treatment” – an outcry in good part generated by drug manufacturers – the commission issued new standards for pain care in 2001. Hospital administrators picked over the document to ensure they understood exactly what was required.

The pharma industry creates a problem and then wants to cure it. How very handy. The fact that they a) funded the APS to begin with and then b) got the stamp of approval as "best practice" is a genius move, I must admit. And it worked.

I want to again remind anyone reading that I don't wish to equate the horrors of the opioid crisis with gender affirming care - they're not the same. However, this next bit (again) reminds me of how suddenly there are all of these "genderbread people" and magical unicorns that are supposed to define a person's inner conflict with their sex:

Every patient was to be asked about their pain levels, no matter what the reason they were seeing a doctor. Hospitals adopted a system of colour-coded smiley faces, to represent a rising scale of pain from 0-10. The commission ruled that anybody identifying as a five – a yellow neutral face described as “very distressing” – or above was to be was to be referred for a pain consultation.

This is absolutely frightening stuff. And then this:

The commission told hospitals they would be expected to meet the new standards for pain management at their next accreditation survey. Purdue Pharma was ready. The company offered to distribute materials to educate doctors in pain management for free. This amounted to exclusive rights to indoctrinate medical staff.

Seems to me very few lessons were learnt from this horrid mess. It's still as easy as ever to indoctrinate medical professionals.

Some doctors questioned the value of patient self-assessment, but the commission’s regulations soon came to be viewed as a rigid standard. In time, pain as the fifth vital sign worked its way into hospital culture. New generations of nurses, steeped in the opioid orthodoxy, sometimes came to see pain as more important than other health indicators.

And this, too. Doctors came to rely on these smiley faces and the patient's own assessment on how much pain they felt. After this, all they needed to do was to prescribe some Oxy and ta-da.

One difference here is of course that people who go to gender clinics probably aren't asked to put themselves on a genderbread rising scale. There's not even this one teensy weensy, tiny, almost non-existent aspect of gatekeeping.

I’m stopping here just because I’m feeling too lazy right now to quote the entire article but please read through and see for yourself. Curious to hear what the American radfems especially are thinking.