tobala
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2006
- Messages
- 9,385
Well I'm glad you brought this up because:burn out said:...now i totally understand the concept of treating the symptoms being more profitable, but if the competition can offer something better, like a cure, then you're not going to make a profit only treating the symptoms when your competitors are offering up a cure.
i know more money goes toward researching treatments than cures because it's more profitable, but i don't go as far as to assert that it's impossible to make a profit with cures as illustrated by antibiotics.
1. It presents a good model for the ibogaine-methadone argument, and
2. I have a personal and spiritual connection to ibogaine, which I try not to let color my objectivity.
If we look at the methadone model, we are of course treating the symptoms only--that's why it's called methadone maintenance therapy (MMT). The addict returns every day or week to obtain a substitute for the drug (usually heroin or prescription opioids like oxy- or hydo-codone) that originally deregulated the agnostic receptors particular to that drug. This often goes on for years--decades even. MMT targets the symptoms only--no attempt is made to return the brain receptors to their pre-addiction states. Big Pharmacy is contracted to supply the maintenance material which is usually paid for with public funds.
I don't really know how much revenue MMT generates. I have a feeling that, with a larger baby-boomer population reaching middle-age already addicted to prescription opioids, MMT is becoming icing on the cake.
Now let's look at ibogaine therapy (IT). IT treats an addict's real issues: brain receptors. After an effective IT session, the deregulated receptors are returned to their pre-addiction states. The addict walks out of a facility returned to normal from a neurobiochemical perspective. He may need another session three or six or nine months down the road, but in essence, the real component of his addiction has been treated. No keeping him on dope forever, no putting him in NA meetings to tell him he's a helpless addict.
The addict is not helpless, and is back in control of his life. IT also works for stimulant addictions, for which no effective maintenance therapy has been found. It seems that all the effective stimulant maintenance therapies get the addict as high as coke or meth (as an aside, my wife got the surprise of her life when, based on my cocaine addiction, she dragged me into Family Court expecting to get sole legal custody of our son. I tested clean--because I am clean, and have been for going on 6 months).
So, if we look at IT as the competitor, given its effectiveness and potential, in a capitalist world it should be able to kick the shit out of MMT and other conventional therapies, right?
There's only one problemo, hombre. It's illegal.
The same economic model that allows market competition also allows lobbyism. The lobbyists for Big Pharmacy are very effective at taking Joe Politcian out for lunch and telling him that IT is DEADLY. That may be true, but what they don't tell Joe is that the death rate is about 11 out of 3,500 treatments conducted in the Western world.
The death rate is possibly higher in addicts on MMT, but that doesn't matter because by the time the lobbyists have bought Joe his third Martini, they have also told him that ibogaine causes HALLUCINATIONS. Now Joe is really scared, because Amerikans aren't supposed to have hallucinations--which might interfere with their ILLUSIONS of mom, baseball, and the notion that they are actually a free society.
So Joe goes back to Washingtoon and votes against any legislation that moves to deschedule ibogaine or allocates funds to research it. He also makes sure that Bob and Jim Politician know that if this ibogaine thing ever gets a foothold on Amerikan society, it will be the end of democracy in the "Free" World.
The DEA also does their Big Pharmacy brown-nosing by putting up disinformation on their website, as we have seen in a previous post. So when Mom and Dad Amerikan go to this site, they see this scary plant that grows in AFRIKA, and is used by descendants of PYGMIES with PAINTED FACES for their SCARY RITUALS. And subjecting their children--Bill and Susie Amerikan--to such a substance in order to get them off their Beverly Hills addictions is unthinkable.
So the capitalist model is more complex than a simple competitive market. There's a lot of bullshit to contend with as well. Ignorance, stupidity, and greed--things Amerika has a world market share of.

What, me worry? Not while I'm on MMT...
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