Five years later: Recalling my own reporting on the triumphantly dishonest pharmaceutical industry (intermission)
I should have known what I was inviting by turning my attention to Vivitrol
I have a difficult time describing some of the drinking-related episodes that spanned about half of my life. This isn’t because I’m too ashamed of specific things I did under the influence to revisit them; many of these are endlessly regrettable and in some cases beyond, but in the nearly six years I’ve stayed off the sauce, I’ve been able to repair some of the damage I caused. I can also understand for the most part why I made even the reckless decisions I did, even if this doesn’t excuse them. The life of a determined binge-drinker unmoored from considerations of the future is selfish in the extreme and grotesque to behold, but it evinces an undeniable and simple, if pitiful, internal operational logic: If I have alcohol, I need a place to drink it so I can pass out; if I don’t, I need some and the “where” will work itself out.
More fundamentally troubling than these recollections of the less edifying aspects of my past, be these sudden or deliberately summoned for purposes of literary reflection, is appreciating how many institutions—both literal and semi-abstract—I drank my way into that are staffed by people who have no clue about the neurophysiology of addiction and are not equipped to describe the mechanism of action of any medications specifically concocted for substance abusers. (That many staffers of these places are thieves, occasionally intoxicated on the job, and burned out within weeks or months of entering the field are different problems with the substance-abuse industry.)
This ignorance of granular or even surface-level science wouldn’t be a major problem if these people—not expected to be M.D.- or Ph.D.-level experts given their usual pay and required qualifications—didn’t push the very medications they’re clueless about as the (usually) clueless people who darken the doors of detox units (”drunk tanks”), treatment centers, and courtrooms—the latter a setting where non-medical professionals in robes are now basically in the business of prescribing Vivitrol by judicial force.
When I made my first post in what I expected would be a two-part miniseries, I already knew sales of the monumentally expensive drug Vivitrol in 2017—the year I wrote the piece—were $269.3 million. I did not yet know that this figure had risen 28 percent to $343.9 million four years later, in 2021. Now that I have context, I’m almost too pissed off to continue, even though I fully expected to see Vivitrol’s profits continuing to soar despite the “medication” being an exorbitantly pricey dud.
This is a drug that does little for opioid addicts and nothing at all for alcohol abusers. I’ll delve into this more next time, but should be obvious that naltrexone—which, depending on the dose, partly or completely blocks opioid drugs as well as internally produced endorphins from attaching to the cell receptors that unlock their effects—doesn’t diminish cravings for opioids or alcohol. Naltrexone has been in use for decades, and if it could produce something as seminal in psychiatry as reducing the desire to use a potentially dangerous but alluring mood-altering chemical, someone would have noticed this long ago.
It’s also worth noting that there is nothing about naltrexone, or any known chemical, that would produce this specific effect in the human brain. There is no direct path from “eliminates or reduces a drug’s effects” to “reduces the desire to use the drug.” Even a deterrent like disulfiram (Antabuse), which leads to unpleasant sickness in people who drunk alcohol while on proper doses of the drug, doesn’t eliminate cravings per se; it merely introduces the certainty that drinking will lead to physical misery, something established alcohol abusers—who often think in terms of the next thirty to sixty seconds and nothing else—are not especially afraid of. Of the people I know who have taken Antabuse, more than not have drank on the stuff. All have regretted it, including those who report having embarked on this acetaldehyde-rich hepatic adventure more than once.
Time diminishes the craving for substances of habitual abuse. Other therapeutic things can help accelerate and solidify this, but Vivitrol is not one of them. Not in the realm of alcohol anyway.
Vivitrol also doesn’t stop you from experiencing drunkenness, especially in people who drink solely to get hammered—in other words, nearly 100 percent of drinkers to whom Vivitrol is prescribed. I know this because I got drunk sometime in 2015 after two or three injections, and the same thing happened as usual: I wound up passing out in my clothes, having forgotten most of what had happened the night before, and thinking on blearily awakening of getting more alcohol, not of having strayed.
At the time, I was attending a “Vivitrol group” at the local detox, and the turnover thanks to relapses and presumed relapses was as high as in any group of newly sober or not-quite-sober addicts. Most of those who showed up showed up mainly or exclusively for the pizza paid for by Alkermes Pharmaceuticals.
It was very easy to recognize this as a scam that the company knew it could perpetrate with relative ease, because the people running these companies understand everything I just listed about the recovery “environment”: Most of the ground-level workers are utterly ignorant and incurious when it comes to pharmacology, and most of the people with medical licenses associated with these places, along with the social sewer provided by the criminal justice system, are usually ignorant of biochemistry as well but more importantly are powerless. They have to eat whatever shit they’re given when locked up or dragged in front of a judge for another open-container or “camping” violation and follow the guidance given or be ejected from whatever remains of a clinically meaningful help stream.
Normally, when I read one of my own years-old articles, the main sources of any dissatisfaction I feel—assuming I haven’t provided bum or incomplete information—lie in regrettable phrasings or having presented the information in a less-than-perfectly-strategic order. When I reread my Vivitrol piece, I become infuriated at what Alkermes was already getting away with, how this has only gotten worse in the past five years, and how this has been accompanied by a systematic, freewheeling dissolution of truth and ethical standards overall.
On Friday, Alicia Monson became the second-fastest American women over 3,000 meters outdoors (all-time list) with an 8:26.81, breaking the meeting record at the Lausanne Diamond League Meet and crossing the finish line ahead of every other woman in the race. (Three of the four post-World Championships meets on the 2022 Diamond League schedule have been held, with the final one scheduled for September 7 and 8 in Zurich. Once that meet is complete, I’ll write something here about all four.) But the win went not to Monson but to Burundi’s Francine Niyonsaba in what would have been a thrilling finish had the presentation not been such a farce. Monson, in trying to keep pace with the druggies in Portland, may be as dirty as the day is long, but she’s clearly female. (Well, technically I’m guessing.)
World Athletics President Sebastian Coe recently said that he believes that the inclusion of DSD and other non-female athletes in women’s track and field events is a sham concocted by “second-rate sociologists,” and that he has a responsibility to “protect the integrity of women’s sport” because “if you don’t have a gender separation, no woman would ever win another sporting event.” Well, maybe he should contact someone in a position to fix the rules. What exactly is he waiting for? Is this former Olympic champion actually a closet misogynist? It’s hard to imagine why the president of an organization would identify what he believes is a fundamental problem with that organization and then just grouse about it as if his influence is no greater than Homer Simpson’s.
It will be “interesting,” to use one of Alison Wade’s favorite words, to see how Wade reports on the race in her Fast Women newsletter tomorrow. She will somehow find a way to pretend that the order of finish somehow represents a victory for women around the globe. People like Wade and her followership of anti-success harridans— folx fundamentally motivated to comment on running so they can vandalize it in accordance with their way-outside-sporting-lines social agendas—are only going to look like dumber and dumber “feminists” as greater society’s understanding of what a mess “pro trans” policies in sports have created slowly catches up to that of the few industry insiders—both current and excommunicated—willing to describe this situation on real rather than fantastical terms.
At the same time, nonstop whiner, cheater, liar, and intentionally self-humiliating slug Latoya Snell has wormed her way into another ambassadorship as she prepares to drop out of the New York City Marathon in November. The fact that Snell is a categorically destructive presence in every imaginable way and a long-established liar hasn’t stopped some of running’s bigger names from cheering her on—women who expect their own claims of being harassed and mistreated to be taken seriously when they proudly offer public support to someone who has done nothing but talk shit and overfeed herself on purpose so she can blame this on external factors, gaslight the world, hide from her critics, and enjoy the ride provided by the sad reality of the average human being’s lack of conscience and cognitive candlepower.
One of those vocal supporters is inviting you to pre-order her book. Why would anyone read a biography unspooled by someone this unreliable except to laugh at it? And the subtitle is “My life running in a man’s world.” Does Lauren Fleshman think she’s Roberta Gibb?
This was the result of me recently challenging Snell on her running history just as she dared people to do. She lied, called me named and blocked my account, while one of her Twitter pals expressed sadness that I wasn’t aborted in the womb and other (a white middle-aged woman, or maybe a bot) assured me that black-on-white racism doesn’t exist. That Snell fled the discussion feeling or pretending to feel like a winner despite these two lovelies being the only people among her 5,000+ followers to offer “support” is a given, as is the fact that anyone can see that she and the companies that support her are promulgating a shitshow of disruptive lies.
Ideally, the 2022 New York City Marathon will be disrupted by a massive Black Lives Matter protest or a touch bubonic plague in the municipal water supply. The leadership of the New York Road Runners deserves to suffer, and the shithole city it serves along with it. (I know there are people reading this who plan to run this marathon for whatever sickly reason. Just realize that if the event does in fact became plagued by awesome forms of nonviolent mayhem, I didn’t cause it, I just rooted for it with every charred ember of my throbbing heart.)
Meanwhile. Paul Pelosi, the shitbag husband of shitbag U.S. House of Representative Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, was just fined less than $5,000 and ordered to spend what looks like three whole days in jail for wrecking his Porsche while drunk on May 28, when he tried to weasel his way out of trouble on the spot. Both Pelosis should spend the rest of their lives in an especially unforgiving forced-sodomy facility until they perish of unnatural causes, which, given their combined 165+ years, would actually result in a needlessly lenient penalty.
But that’s beside the point. What isn’t is that most remaining Democrats deeply think Pelosi, who is not only personally repugnant but is a grifter of extraordinarily long standing, is doing a great job and can’t wait to vote for Democratic candidates in the November elections. (This is not news to regulars, but I’m a nonvoter until a party comes along that is held by the electorate to minimal performance standards, and that wouldn’t happen within my lifetime even if I had plans to extend it to its natural limit.)
The world runs on lies and horseshit, far more than ever before because the media is leading rather than resisting the charge. Most people are cheering on their preferred brand of bullshit while proudly declaring themselves to be discerning and intelligent and their enemies misled by white supremacists and other anti-progressive rascals.
This is why I am relieved to have almost no stake in it. I’ve known the same thing you have since you were about eight: Life isn’t fair. (If you’re Wokish, you’re busy blaming all of your misery on someone else.) But recent years have underscored the real ugliness of this, which is that ordinary citizens unknowingly rally by the millions for things that ultimately damage them, or benefit the wealthy at the expense of others. People on what passes for the left just believe or pretend to believe anything as long as the claim is yoked to “Trump sucks” or “Hey, did you know black people matter as much as others? I heard the news in 2020 too! Get the word out!”
I almost admire the idiots who either lack the ability to process these realities or ignore them in favor of pretending they don’t exist until their effects become personal. I don’t blame them. But like most terminally fed-up people, I have almost come to see my own irreversible disillusionment as a life hack, because it’s not like anyone needs brains, money, or a permit to bid the whole decaying circus a permanent sayonara. If people really want this kind of a society, they can have it.
I plan to focus my running-related energies this fall on running, coaching, and writing more about collegiate cross-country and less about professional track or road running. This image summarizes why I have little love left for the latter:
Everyone who “liked” Houlihan’s dribbling was raising their hand and proudly announcing being an unethical piece of shit. Together, the women in the center are a bunch of chittering little elves who, despite a combined mass of maybe 300 kg, are helping to hold aloft several metric tons of horseshit in a sport that doesn’t matter to anyone with taste anyway.
May these cretins and the many pro-runner males, wannabes, and Bowerman Track Club crotch-lappers and ass-fisters mimicking their stance become permanently injured apace, and Hayward Field collapse in the middle of the night for want of a single unplaced joist. Piss on the whole diseased carnival of doped-up dingbats and the lying gluttons they support. A lot of people who can’t admit it feel the same way, even if they’re not out on the “wait for the first subzero day, take a handful of barbiturates, wash it down with vodka and find a spot in the woods to freeze” branch with me.