The silence seems to say a lot.

Listening to NPR the other day, on the way to a meeting, I heard for a second time a tag line to the effect that drinking wine and taking oxycodone posed a significant risk of drug overdose death.  

This seemed profoundly improbable.  Unwise, certainly, as is the mixing of any alcohol with any drugs.  And especially unwise when combined with other co-morbidities (heart problems, obesity, diabetes, etc.).  NPR was clearly, for unknown reasons, trying to scare their wine drinking listeners, with a murky association between drug overdose deaths and wine.  Possibly they are running low on listeners and are that desperate that they are trying to ensure survival of donors (a nearly 20% decline in listeners since 2017) 

Since it was the second time I heard them make that improbable claim, I looked into the data.  

Which seems patchy, unstructured, intermittent, ill-defined.  Specifically, I was searching for deaths from drinking wine with oxycodone or any opioid (death from wine with oxycodone).  Certainly there are many appropriate warnings about the combination of alcohol and opioids given that both are depressants.

But any actual data about how many people actually die from wine with oxycodone (or alcohol with opioids)?  I am not seeing anything except warnings under multiple variants of the query.  

Lots of articles talking about how risky the combination is but with none either estimating the degree of risk or measuring the magnitude of the consequences.  

There are a couple of papers or studies which deal with the issue at the margin, ( e.g. here).  There's one study from 2017 that does a lot of speculating based on lab experiments which only support a highly constrained finding Mixing opioids and alcohol may increase likelihood of dangerous respiratory complication.  "May" lead to complications.  But no reported alcohol/opioid deaths.

I am not denying that it is unwise to mix alcohol and opioids and other medications, particularly when combined with other co-morbid conditions.  But that is basically covered by the perennial wisdom "Don't be stupid."

NPR seems to be making the claim that there are a lot of deaths from moderate alcohol intake in combination with prescribed opioid pain medications.

What does come across clearly in the research and data reporting is that we are in the midst of a national crisis of drug overdose deaths driven by mixing fentanyl with other drugs.  100,000 dead per year and rising.  And this is a relatively recent phenomena, starting its meteoric rise in 2014.  

At first it was concentrated among the lower middle class white rural and suburban populations but is now spreading to cities and minorities.  

It is unclear whether drug use per se has increased materially.  

As best I can tell, sometime in 2014, fentanyl started pouring into the US and has been mixed with the panoply of existing controlled drugs to produced a higher effect.  So high, that it causes a lot of deaths.  

Our mainstream media and national health organizations seem insistent that these increase in drug overdose deaths are due to people on prescription pain medications but all the data seems to point towards fentanyl as the driving agent.  Overwhelmingly fentanyl mixed with black market drugs.  In other words, I see no evidence that people with oxycodone prescriptions are dying from having mixed them with fentanyl and certainly not from having gone on a wine bender with oxycodone in their system.

This seems almost like a studied misdirection.  

Why? I am guessing there are many reasons ranging from MSM innumeracy to MSM scientific illiteracy.

But I can't help but wonder at a different scenario.  Were I an ambitious other nation wishing to handicap the leading nation in the world without invoking an economic crisis and without invoking a war, how might I do that?  One way would be to flood that other nation with a cheap chemical substance (fentanyl) which is easily manufactured and easily combined with other drugs to engender a more intense and prolonged high.

Basically it is a strategy to exploit an existing societal weakness.  The US has been only marginally successful at controlling/reducing or eliminating the drug trade despite fifty one years of effort (War on Drugs, 1971).  We also have not been effective at convincing our population about the real risks of drug use.  In part by squandering credibility at the beginning of the war with outlandish over-claiming of the otherwise real dangers.  

Were I that other country, I might calculate that an effective way to sabotage the successful American culture might be by killing 100,000 Americans a year from overdoses with a cheap and easy chemical (fentanyl) that would be easy to dissociate from.  Even if caught red-handed, the claim would be that the deaths are from drug addicted Americans rather than due to the fentanyl additive.

Since most of the fentanyl seems to be sourced from China and imported via Mexico, this seems like a plausible scenario.  And no one in the MSM or in the establishment political parties would want to bring attention to it owing to the exhausting failure of the 51 year old war on drugs and because (so far) almost all the victims have been among the bottom 60% of the socio/economic divide.

Public Health and MSM not discussing China and fentanyl as the drivers in the surge in drug overdose deaths (and distracting with stories about the mortal risks of wine benders and oxycodone) seems similar to another phenomenon that is under-discussed.

Think about all the divisive and destructive progressive movements of the past forty years.  Callout Culture, Cancel Culture, Identity Politics, Intersectionality, Wokeness, Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory, Postmodernism, the Frankfurt School, Deconstructionism Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter,  etc.  What do they all have in common?

They are all derivatives of Marxism.  They feel like the ultimate Gramscian destructive artifact from the Soviet Union.  The Soviet act of war on the West which survived the fall of the Soviet Union.   

I can understand nobody wants to sound like some McCarthyite cretin sounding the alarm.  Still, the profound silence on the fact that all these alternate philosophies are mere derivations of Marxism seems striking.

For whatever reason, neither our MSM nor our establishment parties want to talk about a silent attack killing 100,000 Americans a year from fentanyl mixing; nor do they want to talk about the divisive, destructive, and polarizing movements with whom academia, corporations, non-profits, and government agencies are all flirting which are all off-shoots of Marxism and anathema to freedom, individualism, and human rights.

Very striking.