Drugs and Drug Rehabs: Co-conspirators in Hate, Death and Profit

by | Dec 20, 2025 | Money Over People

Image: Darwin Brandis, iStockphoto

Drugs and Drug Rehabs: Co-conspirators in Hate, Death and Profit

by | Dec 20, 2025 | Money Over People

Image: Darwin Brandis, iStockphoto

The world is in the grip a highly profitable addiction operation by both legal and illegal cartels. And when addicts reach bottom, they go do "rehab" which just continues the problem.

The terrible murders of Rob Reiner and his wife are just another chapter in the ongoing saga of drug addiction in our world today.

When one asks how any son could commit such an act against his own parents, the stark power that drug addiction holds over a person is only a part of the story. The grip of the drug addiction is only one of the danger points. Even more insidious is the hatred addicts have of others around them. This is not some imaginary thing.

I’ll give you an example. I had a circle of friends back in my high school days. Back then, the early 70s, the hallway drug dealers used to sell, among other things, “reds.” These were called downers or by their chemical name of barbiturates. They were called reds because of the red capsules they came in—and in Santa Monica in those days these “reds” had the logo of Eli Lily on them, and so were considered the “best.” How high school kids were getting their hands on large quantities of pharmaceutical barbiturates was a question that apparently was not being asked at the time. But I digress.

Some of my friends experimented with these. And one of the starkest things I noted was that one person I knew who was taking them changed radically. He shifted from being open and communicative to resentful, combative and dangerous—even to the point of physically attacking me on one occasion. It was a dramatic and scary shift.

My high school years were peppered with experimentation with drugs, but I never got into the addictive sort and later realized that I really didn’t like the persistent mental fog that continued even long after their use. It has been well over 50 years since those days and a lot of river volume has passed ‘neath the bridge so to speak.

We all know the stories of how the big, bad, evil drug cartels hook people and then drain them of money and their lives. But there are other industries, also drug related that are even more effective in this same vein.

The first is the psychiatric-chemical complex. “Mental health” practitioners hand out prescriptions for mind altering drugs with a frequency that would make your head spin. And make no mistake drugs like Prozac, Xanax and other “anti-depressants” are addictive, but in an even more dangerous way. When people come off of them they can be come violent and murderous. This is not a statement or allusion to the drug history specific to Nick Reiner, just a general statement.

People even on anti-depressants can, and have, become violent or suicidal. Again, just a general statement. There are some infamous cases that back up this statement. One is the mass-murdering postal worker in Oklahoma who killed 14 people before shooting himself. (This is where the term “going postal” came from.) Another is the Aurora, Colorado theater shooting in 2012 where the shooter was under the “care” of a psychiatrist and on psychiatric drugs. There are many, many more examples.

The other industries that generates massive profits from drug addiction are the drug rehab outfits and, ironically, drug companies again profiting from the sale of “addiction management” drugs.

Back in 2006, Mit Romney’s Bain Capital purchased CRC Health which owned about 90 inpatient, outpatient and opiate addiction treatment centers. They spent upwards of $720 million. This was just one example of the private equity world seeing the profit potential of drug treatment operations. Ten years later NPR reported that investor interest in drug rehab was spiking yet again.

So the deal is that not only is there big money in creating addiction, there is big money in treating it. As touched on earlier, this profit potential also applies to the drug companies themselves.

This brings me to one of leaders of one of the most infamous cartels in the opiate distribution world: Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family. Wait, you might say, aren’t these creeps bankrupt, destroyed and in prison? In a word, no. The Sacklers with miles deep pockets full of opiate blood money are still negotiating with expensive attorneys to hold on to their gelt. Purdue is still operating under judicial oversight. Meanwhile the Sackler family still hold billions and profit from their patents.

One of the most egregious patents in the Sackler portfolio is for a drug called Buprenorphine. This is an opiate formulated to keep a person from having withdrawal symptoms from drugs like OxyContin, but without providing the “high” attendant with their use. This is how companies like Purdue are plugged into the drug rehab network. Like Methadone, Buprenorphine, also known as Sublocade, is used in addiction “treatment” giving the addict a substitute addiction.

What is not generally known about Buprenorphine is that it is 10 times as difficult to withdraw from as is heroine and has a long list of harrowing side effects. It takes expensive medical intervention to get people off of these drugs. If this sounds insane to you, go to the head of the class.

In a nutshell, we have a highly profitable addiction operation by both legal and illegal cartels. And when addicts reach what they think is the bottom, they go do rehab and thus continue shoving money at those same cartels. But the profit rivers must not be dammed—or damned, as the case may be.

In the meantime, death and destruction from this insanity is visited upon those who have loved ones in the addiction pipeline. Hopefully this will shed some light on why it is so hard to combat this scourge.

Addiction is a horror show in every possible way. But it can me overcome. There does exist one drug rehabilitation organization that is effective and has a very high success rate: Narconon. People go through a completely different regimen and do not come out the other side addicted to a different drug. If you Google Narconon you’re going to find a lot of nasty stories mainly planted by drug-substitution rehabs or those owned by CRC or other private equity groups profiteering on addiction. They hate Narconon because it works. One of these private equity groups tried to buy Narconon some years back, were laughed out of the building and went into attack mode. To their chagrin, Narconon has since vastly expanded internationally.

So, something can be done. Starting with prevention is the smartest way to go. But tread with care when proceeding if that didn’t work. Mainstream addiction “treatment” is a dense minefield rigged only to generate profits. The deaths be damned.

Marty Kassowitz

Marty Kassowitz

Marty Kassowitz is co-founder of Factkeepers. As founder of Interest Factory and View360, he brings more than 30 years experience in effective online communications, social media management, and platform development to the site. He is a writer, designer, editor and long time observer of the ill-logic demonstrated by too many members of the species known as Mankind. After a long history of somewhat private commentary on a subject he totally hates: politics, Marty was encouraged to build this site and put up his own analyses as well as curate relevant content from other sources.

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