Hiding In Plain Sight

Why do many people fail to see crimes happening right before their eyes?

This morning’s edition of the New York Times features a cover story under the headline Giant Companies Took Secret Payments to Allow Free Flow of Opioids about a gross and obvious element of corruption that amplified America’s opioid crisis. To quote the piece:

For years, [pharmacy] benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments.

The OxyContin story is a shocking example of how the representation of a phenomenon—in this case a dangerously addictive substance—can be manipulated on a massive scale. For years, U.S. institutions, agencies, and the mainstream media somehow failed to notice what OxyContin was doing to American society.

In 2017, the New Yorker published a report on the OxyContin scandal by Patrick Radden Keefe. In that same year, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services declared the Opioid Epidemic a public health emergency and estimated that 70,000 Americans would die of opioid overdose in that year alone. According to the CDC, between 1999 to 2019, nearly 841,000 people died from a drug overdose. More than 70% of overdose deaths were caused by an opioid prescription, heroin or fentanyl. During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, that number rose to 100,306.207 Most of the victims were younger than 55-years-old.

On April 17, 2021, Patrick Radden Keefe's comprehensive book on the story, Empire of Pain, was published to great critical acclaim and popularity. Major newspapers and television pundits gave the book a glowing review, but none remarked that the corruption it revealed within the US Bio- Pharmaceutical Complex was relevant to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Three weeks after Empire of Pain was published, Dr. Peter McCullough was interviewed on Tucker Carlson Today. During his interview, Dr. McCullough repeatedly expressed concern that U.S. federal health agencies, pharmaceutical companies, and medical societies were deliberately suppressing early treatment of COVID-19 in order to promote their hastily developed vaccine solution as the only solution to the pandemic.

When I watched this Tucker Carlson interview, I knew that Dr. McCullough was telling the truth and that he would eventually be vindicated. It was only a matter of how long it would take for people to wake up and recognize it.

Why do many people fail to see what is happening right in front of them? Whenever I ponder this strange phenomenon, I am reminded of Max Frisch’s famous 1953 play, Biedermann and the Arsonists, in which a couple of itinerant arsonists hide in plain sight. As one of them remarks: “The best disguise, even better than humor and sentimentality, is the truth, because no one believes it.”

In my most recent book, The Meaning of Malice, I investigated a true crime story that has haunted my community in Dallas for the last forty years. The heart of the story is the gunshot death of a prominent local doctor’s wife in 1982. The Dallas County medical examiner ruled her death a suicide, but everyone in my community suspected—and some people knew—that he’d gotten it wrong. In fact, the doctor’s wife had been murdered. The truth was always there, waiting to be told, but for reasons that I present in my book, no one—neither in law enforcement nor in the media—had ever been willing to tell it.

I am occasionally asked by readers why I, who cut my investigative teeth as a true crime author, write a Substack with Dr. Peter McCullough. It seems to me the answer is obvious. In recent years, the U.S. Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex has become a glorified racket that commits all manner of fraud and graft. It’s spectacular crimes, such as deliberately creating SARS-CoV-2 and then committing massive constructive fraud to conceal it—are now hiding in plain sight.

For the next five days, the e-book edition of The Meaning of Malice is available for free on Amazon. Even if you do not enjoy the true crime genre, please consider forwarding the link to this post to your friends who may indeed enjoy reading books in this genre.

For a limited time, FREE E-Book edition on Amazon.