This Couple Died by Suicide After the DEA Shut Down Their Pain Doctor

[Hortensis]

30. Tragic! It's no coincidence that a mean era elected mean people,

and that giving national and state power to mean, backwards people in 2016 worsened an already terrible pain problem. And there you and your friends are, living the realities.

From what I've read, those elections tragically interrupted a long-delayed professional attention to pain that had finally developed and turned to government for crucial legislative assistance, as well as funding.

If the election of Democrats hadn't been derailed in 2016, they would have been working with problem solvers who believe government exists to serve the people. Instead, our governments were controlled by troglodytes who thought cutting off supplies, actual punishment as policy, and telling sufferers to "tough it out" (!!!) were .

We've all been living the consequences of that election, which are still playing out and threatening to swamp us, but some have had it a lot worse than others for sure. I'm so sorry. And this subject scares me. We're old now and it may be us before long. My husband's recently been diagnosed with cancer.

I can't get the article this quote below is from in the New Statesman to open; that the author was a first-person observer to his father's suffering would explain the emotion load (reminds me of Olbermann's anguish over his father's entrapment in a world of pain), and this thread made me want to read it:

America and the politics of pain

“The American politics of pain has three levels: the sadistic, the sadomasochistic and the sadopopulist,” writes Timothy Snyder. Gravely ill in hospital with sepsis, Snyder had a revelation on how Donald Trump transformed the US’s inequalities into a suicidal tribalism.

Have a nice evening.