Controlled Substance Prescribing Patterns – Pennsylvania

Rates of psychostimulant (stimulant)-related overdose deaths in the United States have increased substantially since 2010; in 2022, 32% of all overdose deaths involved stimulants. Citation: Hayden S, Murzynski SM, Bolton A, Goetz CT. Controlled Substance Prescribing Patterns Among Fatal Overdose Decedents with an Opioid, Stimulant, or Both Contributing to Death — Pennsylvania, 2017–2022. MMWR Morb Mortal Wkly Rep 2025;74:205–209. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15585/mmwr.mm7412a2

Prescribed stimulants. Read more here – https://www.dea.gov/factsheets/stimulants

Happy Friday!

My Cryptocurrency Investment

My cryptocurrency investment was taking the time to learn and understand the bubble. Charles Mackay’s bestseller Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds discussed many historical bubbles and was published in 1841. The book sits on the shelf and remains a reminder not to get caught up and swept away by the madness of crowds. THERE ARE IDIOTS: Seven pillars of market bubbles is a good article and much more recent than 1841 https://www.acadian-asset.com/investment-insights/owenomics/there-are-idiots-seven-pillars-of-market-bubbles.

Greg Hunter’s https://usawatchdog.com/ is neither Democrat nor Republican, Liberal nor Conservative. Before creating and producing the site, Greg spent nearly 9 years as a network and investigative correspondent. He worked for ABC News and Good Morning America for nearly 6 years. Most recently, Greg worked for CNN for shows such as Paula Zahn Now, American Morning and various CNN business shows. The following is an edited excerpt from an interview with Catherine Austin Fitts.

Bailout of the Big Boys. Be careful out there. Don’t get screwed.

“This is literally a Bitcoin for land-grab swap. . . . So, they take our retirement savings, what’s left of it, and they take our taxes and use it to buy Bitcoin.  The Bitcoin billionaires sell their Bitcoin into that at the same time they are taking advantage of the monetization of all the land and minerals.  They sell their Bitcoin at the top, and what can they do?  They can buy the land. . . . They want out of digital assets, and they want real assets.  Right now, the whole race on the planet is to grab the real assets such as land, mineral resources, water resources, etcetera, etcetera. . . . The land ownership of the top 100 landowners of America doubled.  They are not buying Bitcoin.  They are buying land.  Bill Gates is buying farm land.  The Harvard Endowment is buying farm land.  What you are really seeing is a discussion to sell the unreal assets to the taxpayer and the real assets to private parties.  If this succeeds, it will be the biggest robbery and financial scam in the history of the country. .  . The smart money is trying to control the real assets.” Catherine Austin Fitts former Assistant Secretary of Housing (Bush 41 Administration) https://usawatchdog.com/smart-money-buying-up-real-assets-not-bitcoin-catherine-austin-fitts/

Catherine Austin Fitts is the founder of Solari, a private company. Link to her company website is https://home.solari.com/ where I found the absolute best summary of the history of Bitcoin and what Fitts calls the BITCOIN BAILOUT: Why a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve Is a Bailout of the Big Boys https://home.solari.com/bitcoin-bailout-why-a-bitcoin-strategic-reserve-is-a-bailout-of-the-big-boys/

Humans are Difficult

That day at the Costco checkout, I paid for my groceries at a human-powered cash register and received the tiny oxytocin boost that comes from a random interaction with strangers, the kind that Mehret Biruk is always raving about, those small insignificant moments of connection that add to the richness of life…

This interaction made me realize that much of what I explore in this newsletter is about embracing inefficiencies—making phone calls instead of texting, planning your route ahead of time instead of relying on a GPS, waiting to check your email from a desktop instead of on-the-go, letting people know that you can’t always be instantly available across various communication platforms.

We live in a world obsessed with optimization. An era of contactless everything. This holiday season, lean into the inefficiencies. Make eye contact with strangers. Take your AirPods out of your ears and make small talk with the cashier instead of scanning your own groceries. Chat with the kind humans handing out samples at Costco. Choose human connection, however uncomfortable that may be. You might be pleasantly surprised. Humans are difficulthttps://substack.com/@carmellaguiol

Choose human connection.

The Dark Side of TikTok – Beef Tallow For Skincare

In just three years, the share of U.S. adults who say they regularly get news from TikTok has more than quadrupled, from 3% in 2020 to 14% in 2023.

More Americans are getting news on TikTok, bucking the trend seen on most other social media sites — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/11/15/more-americans-are-getting-news-on-tiktok-bucking-the-trend-seen-on-most-other-social-media-sites/

Beef tallow (if smeared on your face) may be be comedogenic according to Dr. Lee – The Beef Tallow TikTok Skincare Trend: Here Are The Concernshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/brucelee/2024/12/08/the-beef-tallow-tiktok-skincare-trend-here-are-the-concerns/

This too shall not end well.

The Dark Side of TikTok – Financial Advice?

The Dark Side of Tik Tok – Updated

The Dark Side of Tik Tok – Soak Your Eyeballs in Castor Oil

What’s Your America? (there are 10 Americas) – Updated with Scary Charts 02.01.25

Asians and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islanders definitively outlive other Americans. Is there anything we can learn from them? A confluence of factors may be at play. They tend to have relatively higher socioeconomic status, lower rates of obesity, and the lowest smoking rates of any racial group in the U.S. Healthier traditional cooking may also contribute to their longevity. When it comes to life expectancy, there are 10 Americashttps://bigthink.com/health/ten-americas-for-life-expectancy/

Attention Mortality Risk Experts

Sharpen your pencils and don’t ask me what a pencil is.

Updated 02.01.25 with Scary Charts

Nonrandom Thoughts on Retirement – Nov. 2024 (scary chart too)

Americans are split over the state of the American dreamhttps://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/02/americans-are-split-over-the-state-of-the-american-dream/

Are you familiar with the self-fulfilling prophecy in psychology/sociology? Simply stated a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when what you believe about your future causes it to happen. When you believe something will become true, you’ll act to make it a reality. Look at the chart above. Looks like around 50% of the survey respondents under the age of 50 will never achieve their American Dream.

They will make choices and act in ways to ensure they will never achieve the American Dream.

GLP-1 – Compounded or Brand-Name?

Caroline Apovian, MD, co-director of the Center for Weight Management and Wellness at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, Boston.

“Doctors who are obesity medicine specialists like myself in academic centers do not prescribe compounded semaglutide or tirzepatide,” she said.

Many of the compounded prescriptions, she said, come from telehealth virtual–only companies interested in profits.

GLP-1 Prescribing Decisions: Compounded or Brand-Name? – Medscape – November 14, 2024https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/glp-1-prescribing-decisions-compounded-or-brand-name-2024a1000krd?

To be clear, all of my GLP-1 posts are not anti-pharma. If you can afford these medications and they work for you on your weight loss journey that’s great. Just be aware of the possible side effects and the fact these medications are for life. You will regain all that you’ve lost if you stop taking the drug.

Here’s the link to Complications? What Complications? (just another GLP-1 receptor agonist post)

Scary Charts 09.23.24 (another generational gap)


54 percent of Gen Z participants polled for Statista’s Consumer Insights survey in the U.S. between July 2023 and June 2024 claim that owning a car is important to them, compared to 69 percent of baby boomers. This suggests that the perceived necessity of car ownership is not only influenced by the availability and quality of public transit but also by generation. Owning a Car Is Less Important To Younger Generations https://www.statista.com/chart/33097/importance-of-owning-a-car-for-us-residents-by-generation/

Let me think about this. Digital from birth, Covid-19 pandemic global shutdown, social media, shared ride businesses, grocery shopping done and delivered, prepared meal delivery, inflation, cost of cars both new and used, shit jobs that don’t pay much, cost of car insurance and maintenance, cost of gasoline, going Green, fear of accidents, fear of violence, self-fulfilling prophecy, coddled since birth, never learned to drive, never wanted to drive…

Did I miss anything?

Cannabis Use and Psychosis Risk (Aussie Version)

Professor Emmerson says Queensland’s Metro North Health — Australia’s largest public health service, based in north Brisbane and the surrounding region — is seeing increased presentations of psychosis due to medicinal cannabis.”The Metro North early psychosis service reports 10 per cent of their new presentations — so these are kids aged 16 to 21 — are people who’ve ended up on medicinal cannabis and are becoming psychotic,” the Brisbane-based psychiatrist says.

Doctors warn of significant increase in people hospitalized with psychosis after being prescribed medicinal cannabishttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-21/medicinal-cannabis-psychosis-harm-risk-prescription-marijuana/104116952