Those polices were, imho:

• The licensing of oxycontin in 1996, which came in very high doses

• The push to get doctors to prescribe more opioids, which immediately followed the licensing of oxycontin

• The ending of heroin eradication in Afghanistan in 2009-10

• Ignoring illicit fentanyl until 2014

• Ignoring public use of iv drugs as police claimed they did not have sufficient manpower to arrest users

________

Oxycontin was licensed in 1996, and was supposed to be safe and effective. I am guilty of prescribing my share of it at that time. We were REQUIRED to attend continuing medical education on pain relief—in retrospect, I would guess the federal government or the Federation of State Medical Boards got paid off by Purdue Pharma to recommend to state medical boards to require this training. We were required to consider pain the “5th vital sign” and inquire about it at all visits, and then relieve it.

Oxycontin became very popular. Many people became addicted.

It got expensive. Patients later told me they moved to heroin because it only cost half as much for the same high.

After Obama became President, the State Department’s program to eradicate poppy fields was essentially cancelled. Large amounts made their way to the US, and so heroin deaths jumped up starting in 2010.

Some of the heroin was offloaded to local lobster boats. We saw a huge epidemic here in Maine. You can see how heroin overdoses rose starting in 2010 in the graph below.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db522.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html

The graph above shows the initial rise in deaths from prescription opioids, followed by deaths due to heroin, and then followed by deaths due to fentanyl. CDC until 2014 placed fentanyl deaths into the “prescription drug” category, denying there was a huge problem of illicit fentanyl from 2010-2014—which helped their narrative that the deaths at that point were due to doctor prescriptions. However, by 2010 doctors already knew the widespread opioid prescribing had been a terrible idea, and we had stopped.

I began studying the surge in addiction and death in early 2015, and wrote the following 3 articles about it, which shed a lot more light on the subject.

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/extensive-heroin-use-in-us-the-real-afghanistan-surge-is-in-opium-production/5476345

2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/media-disinformation-and-the-us-heroin-epidemic/5504312

3. https://www.globalresearch.ca/narco-state-afghanistan-leeds-to-heroin-addiction-in-the-usa/5519104