One Single, Concrete and Specific Suggestion to Address the Opioid Crisis. Louis Shalako.

Louis Shalako

So, are you having an opioid crisis?

Well, you’re never going to solve it going on the way you are. That’s because you’re a bunch of dipsticks and you don’t have any fucking ideas.

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Don’t worry, I’m not here to have a candlelight vigil on the riverbank, in the rather vain hopes of affecting the outcome, (in some miracle from heaven, apparently), not to mention signalling our bourgeois virtue, and values, and, not incidentally, getting ourselves on the front page of our local media outlet like so many other God-damned ineffectual do-gooders.

I have one single, concrete and specific suggestion. (You’ll notice they never have anything. Not one fucking thing, ladies and gentlemen.) Bear in mind, this is just one of many tools, many of which will have to be used in order to actually do anything to combat the opioid crisis. 

It’s very simple. 

Re-list chiropractic care under OHIP and the Ontario Disability Support Program. A few years ago, chiropractic care was in fact partially covered under this universal, provincial, health care program, certainly as it pertained to clients of ODSP. Then, the (Liberal) government of the time, in what was obviously a cost-cutting measure, prodded on in no small part by the lobbying efforts of the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, de-listed it. So, I went from paying twelve or fifteen dollars for a chiropractic treatment, to paying full price. These days it’s $70.00 for an initial visit, and $40.00 for each treatment after that.

And of course, when you’re on welfare, or ODSP, (the Ontario Disability Support Program), that’s just what you can’t do. Oh, maybe the middle class, working class people with good pay-cheques can do it. It’s a sacrifice, down at the lower end of the income scale, but they can at least do it. But we could no longer do it.

Of course, we’re still in a shit-load of pain, right? It’s not like the fucking assholes didn’t already know that, because they did.

And of course we’re going to continue to seek out some kind of pain relief, wherever we can find it…

Bear in mind, chiropractic care is fundamentally opposed to pain treatment based on heavy drugs. It is in fact completely drug-free treatment, and in my personal experience, it can sometimes be the only thing that works. The experience speaks for itself: one minute you’re popping pain pills, and can barely get out of bed, on and off the toilet, or up and down out of your car seat. Pulling on a pair of pants is sheer agony, and as a male, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the thought of wearing a skirt.

Anyhow.

The doc snaps your back, and the difference is amazing. You walk out of there a new man, or woman, or person, or whatever.

And it didn’t take any pain pills at all. One must wonder, if this wasn’t the basic problem the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons might have had with it—they’re getting all those kickbacks from Big Pharma, and the chiropractors were taking too many of their patients. 

And here’s the thing. Anything that can treat your pain, and maybe you don’t need to get that prescription for narcotic pain pills in the first fucking place, well. Maybe that would be a good thing. There’s nothing there to abuse, there’s nothing there to get addicted to.

There’s nothing there to sell, and this is a population that has been chronically and systematically starved of money, going back for many decades. You would almost think that somebody somewhere somehow benefits from all that petty crime in the community.

But that, I suppose, is just being paranoid—

Ha.

Ha-ha.

Over the course of time, this sort of action—a real, live, actual action—will have some discernable and measurable effect on the opioid crisis. It would take time of course, (because I know you’re going to want to study it for five years first, just like the housing crisis in this here town), and (of course) with everyone looking for the magic bullet that will instantly solve the problem forever and for good, ah, well. They may be a little disappointed, not getting those instantaneous, miraculous results after all, but then they’re the ones wasting their time, and their candles, down on the riverbank.

They’re wasting all of our time too.

Yet the truth is, there are a few tools in the chest that we might try.  

When the ineffectual do-gooders get involved, there’s really nothing to try, is there…??? 

That’s because they don’t have any fucking ideas except thoughts and prayers. 

 

Which are cheap enough, in the end.

END

Thank you for reading.

Louis has all kinds of books and stories on Amazon.