@jimdavis_philly@angertab@CMerandi PROP are murderers. If some random Joe on the street did what they have done, murderer THOUSANDS of people, they'd be held accountable. So either send every last one of those murderers to jail for life or give them the death penalty.
@LisaJoh61770094@CMerandi I'm with you! They want us to be:
A) "bad guys" bc we can't get out of bed w/o the help of an opioid due to severe pain.
B) ER "drug seeker" The only seeking we are doing is for pain relief.
Seriously, if all we wanted was "get high" the streets are cheaper & quicker. 😡😭🤬
@CMerandi I've seen so many people who know NOTHING about 7oh say how bad it is. It's a million times safer then going to a random dudes house, buy a pill, take a quarter of said pill, & OD. All in an attempt to manage your pain bc your lifesaving opioids have been ripped away from you.
Get ready, Crisis on Infinite Earths: Absolute Edition is coming out next week.
DC has released this "first look" video for you to enjoy. Just look at how massive that book is in comparison with that person's hands.
https://t.co/yPKLEBfRNl
#CRPS I can report major progress with my own physical therapy but it's definitely not going to last with Stage 3 CRPS. Being denied doctors and medication by the State of PA the last 7 years has prevented me from recovering enough to remove my neuroma so no matter what I do or how much prednisone I take or doctors are willing to treat the pain of the tumor killing me, that neuroma being inoperable is the ticking timebomb in my chest.
I decided to have Claude, Chat GPT and Grok create a social media post about my discussion with them about putting the blame on people for the war the war on pain management @angertab@CMerandi and we included sources so none of this about PROP & the government is BS.
They admitted it kills people. Then they refused to count the dead.
For a decade, Americans were told prescription pain pills caused the opioid epidemic. It was never true, and the government's own data proves it. Prescribing peaked and began falling after 2012 — the CDC's own 2022 guideline says so. The wave of death that followed was driven by illicit fentanyl. In 2024, of roughly 80,000 overdose deaths, about 54,000 involved opioids and about 48,000 involved illicit fentanyl — not a chronic-pain patient's prescription. The prescription-opioid death rate stayed flat while the illicit street supply did the killing.
The press repeated the false story for a decade — and to this day, not one major outlet has run a correction walking it back. Its own watchdog, the Columbia Journalism Review, published two pieces documenting how the coverage was complicit: outlets built the "good person ruined by a prescription" storyline when most addiction never starts with a doctor's script at all. The lie was broadcast at full volume. The correction never came. That silence is not an accident — it's how a false story survives.
But the lie did its work. On the VA's own numbers, veterans prescribed opioids fell from 874,897 in 2012 to 288,820 in 2023 — 586,077 fewer, a 67% cut — while hundreds of thousands of civilian pain patients were force-tapered off medication they'd taken safely for years, or cut off entirely and abandoned by frightened doctors.
Denial of pain care is driving these suicides — and the government made sure you'd never be able to prove it. The VA's own 2025 report admits pain was the single most frequently identified risk factor among veterans who died by suicide from 2021 to 2023 — 52.3%. Not combat. Not PTSD. Pain — the one thing we've spent a decade making harder to treat.
And the evidence that cutting them off is what kills them is not fringe. A VA study of 1.39 million patients (BMJ, 2020) found that stopping opioids raised the risk of death by overdose or suicide up to nearly 7 times higher for long-term patients, and the risk climbed the longer someone had been stable before being cut off. A large non-VA study (JAMA Network Open) tied tapering to elevated overdose, withdrawal, and mental-health crisis for up to two years after the taper began. And a Medicaid study found that the faster the cutoff, the worse the outcome — patients were discontinued in a median of one day, nearly half ended up in the ER or hospital, and every additional week of slower tapering cut the odds of an opioid-related crisis by 7%. Speed kills. They have the data. They know exactly what cutting people off does.
So where's the count? There isn't one.
No federal agency — VA, CDC, HHS — publishes a single number for deaths caused by forced tapering or denial of pain care. Overdoses are tallied by which drug was found in the body, never by whether the dead person was a compliant patient taking a prescription exactly as directed, under a doctor's care, with no diversion. A treated patient's suicide and a street fentanyl death get folded into one number. The one statistic that would prove the scale of this — the compliant patient, cut off, dead by his own hand — is uncountable by design. And that design is a choice.
And they knew. HHS and the FDA warned in 2019 that abruptly stopping opioids causes withdrawal, worsened pain, severe psychological distress, and "thoughts of suicide." The CDC admitted in 2022 that its own 2016 guideline had been misapplied in ways that caused undertreated pain, withdrawal, overdose, and "suicidal ideation and behavior." Their words, not mine. They put the harm in writing — and then paired it with no count, no investigation, no accountability, no apology. Admission without action. Guidance without a body count.
The closest anyone in power came was a single letter. In 2022, Senators Bill Cassidy and Mazie Hirono asked the VA, in writing, whether the opioid crackdown was driving veterans to suicide — after rural veteran suicides rose about 75%. A bipartisan question, on the record, from two sitting senators. There is no public sign the VA ever answered it. Two people asked. Nobody followed. And that was the end of the caring.
Meanwhile the people who built this got paid. An activist group — Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing (PROP) — fed Congress and the CDC the claim that 1 in 4 patients become addicted. The real number is under 5%, and a California judge ruled the studies behind that claim inadequate to support it. Then follow the money. PROP founder Andrew Kolodny was paid $500,000 as an expert witness in a single opioid case, and later revised his medical-journal disclosures to admit conflicts he had not reported. Board member Anna Lembke was paid up to $800 an hour to testify — and titled her book "Drug Dealer, MD." Several PROP members helped shape the very CDC guideline that drove the multibillion-dollar litigation they were being paid by. Paid to build the theory, then paid again to prosecute it. That is the grift, in the open.
And notice what PROP aimed at. They built an entire movement around prescriptions written by doctors — while illicit fentanyl, the thing actually killing tens of thousands, was never their fight. They pointed the country at the wrong target and kept it there for a decade.
Then look who the law came for. The DEA prosecuted private pain physicians by the hundreds — some with sentences of decades — for the act of prescribing. Not one VA prescriber has been criminally prosecuted for denying pain care, or for a patient's death that followed being cut off. One law for the doctor who treats. None for the system that abandons.
Now Kolodny is back. His 2026 re-entry is a campaign against kratom — one of the few things abandoned pain patients turned to after he helped strip away their medication. Even his critics caught the irony: the man whose crackdown drove people to kratom now crusading against kratom. And watch where that road leads. For years he testified that buprenorphine — Suboxone — was the "responsible" answer to opioid dependence, while he ran addiction-treatment operations. Cut off the pain patients, then steer them to the replacement he has long promoted. It's the same playbook, aimed at a new target.
And where did the settlement billions go? Drug companies paid roughly $50 billion — some after courts found they hadn't caused the crisis at all. Almost none of it reached the pain patients destroyed by the policy. It was funneled into street-drug and addiction programs, while the people abandoned by the guideline — the veterans, the disabled, the dying — got nothing. The money extracted in their name is paying for everything except them.
By my own count of VA and CDC data, the toll is near 100,000 dead — a number the government refuses to make official. We know they are dying. We know why. And still nothing changes. The statistics don't move. The policy doesn't move. The dying doesn't stop.
So here's the challenge. If prescription pain medication truly caused this epidemic, the evidence exists somewhere in these agencies. Let's make them produce it — or admit under federal law that it was never there.
These belong in FOIA requests to the VA, CDC, FDA, DEA, and HHS:
The data behind the number. Every study, dataset, and internal analysis the CDC relied on to support the "1 in 4 become addicted" claim and the 90 MME threshold in the 2016 guideline — and the identities of the outside advisors who supplied them.
The count they never published. Any VA, CDC, or HHS record that tracks, estimates, or even attempts to count suicides or overdose deaths following forced tapering or opioid discontinuation. If it doesn't exist, that non-existence is the answer.
The VA's reply. Any response, memo, or analysis the VA generated in reaction to the 2022 Cassidy–Hirono letter and the finding that the Opioid Safety Initiative was associated with rising veteran suicides.
The disaggregated deaths. Any CDC/NCHS record separating overdose deaths of compliant, physician-supervised pain patients from deaths involving illicit fentanyl, heroin, diverted pills, or polysubstance use.
The conflicts. All communications between PROP members and the CDC, FDA, and HHS during the drafting of the 2016 guideline, and any disclosures of the litigation payments those same members were receiving.
The enforcement gap.
DEA records of physicians criminally investigated or prosecuted for opioid prescribing from 2007 to 2024 — alongside any record of a single VA prescriber investigated for denying pain care.
If these come back empty, that emptiness is the whole case: they blamed doctors and patients, destroyed a field of medicine, extracted billions in its name, and never had the data to justify any of it.
The truth is documented, sourced, and sitting in the government's own reports. So ask the only question left: why doesn't anyone care?
—
SOURCES
HHS 2019 Guide on Dosage Reduction or Discontinuation of Long-Term Opioid Analgesics:
https://t.co/1dS3ATfpKF
CDC 2022 Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids:
https://t.co/tZ1NbpRecN
VA 2025 National Veteran Suicide Prevention Annual Report, Part 2 (pain = 52.3%):
https://t.co/YPUdQwiT9i
Oliva et al., BMJ 2020 — risk after stopping opioids, 1.39M VA patients:
https://t.co/GyS3C1bCJH
Fenton et al., JAMA Network Open — tapering, overdose, and mental-health crisis:
https://t.co/5FK3g8H7qb
Cassidy–Hirono letter to the VA, April 2022 (rural veteran suicides up ~75%):
https://t.co/CRpHvuDmpv
VA prescribing 2012→2023 (874,897 to 288,820; 586,077 fewer, 67%):
https://t.co/DgCjDuQCfC
2024 overdose totals (~80,000 total; ~54,000 opioid-involved; ~48,000 fentanyl) — CDC via Reuters:
https://t.co/SyMF8tvbMC
Columbia Journalism Review — media complicity in the opioid narrative:
https://t.co/EJdTx2w5XN
PROP conflicts / expert-witness payments — Pain News Network:
https://t.co/azGLANlZtp
California ruling on the "1 in 4" claim — The Doctor Patient Forum summary:
https://t.co/z7rJUx9UxU
Kolodny 2026 kratom re-entry — The Conversation:
https://t.co/wmUy8NluGR
Dying RN is my cyberstalker.
Deborah Toucheshawks aka Debra Feldman Stein.
She’s an addict posing as a patient
She’s a disgusting beast who belongs locked up like an animal
(Pic taken in court)
Comic-Con is saddened by the loss of John Davis, who co-founded Capital City Distribution in 1980 and was a leader in comics' direct market and a fixture at Comic-Con for several decades. John was a recipient of Comic-Co's Inkpot Award and served as an Eisner Awards judge in 2008. Our condolences to his family and colleagues.
My longtime friend and inker @jonathanglapion, despite my intervention, cannot get paid for work rendered months ago from one of the “Big Two”. Hint: it ain’t DC! Just outrageous. Shameful. Totally unacceptable
BREAKING: In a stunning admission, Mike Johnson just told reporters that he has plan to cut Medicare and Medicaid after the midterms. We can stop this by making Hakeem Jeffries the next Speaker of the House.