PREVENTABLE TRAGEDIES

The horrific murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, by their son are made more tragic because they were preventable.

Nick Reiner, Rob’s son, began his downward spiral to murder at age 15.  His eighteen attempts at failed rehabilitation are typical of the 1.36 million patients going through Rehabilitation Programs to address their Substance Use Disorder (SUD).

Drug Rehabilitation is now a $35 billion global industry.  Americans spent $9.44 billion on patient rehabilitation treatments in 2024.  U.S. Rehab spending is expected to rise to $16.22 billion by 2033.  Another $1.5 billion is allocated in Federal grants for Opioid Response Programs.

Approximately 60 percent of those who complete rehab programs relapse into addiction. Only 43 percent of those who enter rehab programs complete their treatment.

These multiple levels of failure have only motivated government and private foundations to spend more money pursuing the same approaches.  How many more lives will be lost before there is meaningful change?

It does not have to be this way.

On November 4, 2022, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) issued their updated Opioid Prescription Guidelines.  Their goal was to limit the exposure to Opioids when health professionals manage pain.

They unanimously recommend the use of Red-Light treatments as the preferred nonopioid therapy for chronic pain.  They also declared that Red-Light therapies were as effective as opioids for common types of acute pain.

Red-Light, known in the scientific literature as Photobiomodulation (PBM), has treated over 100 million patients in clinical settings without any documented side effects.  

PBM Therapy’s efficacy is supported by 2,466 Randomized Clinical Trials (RCTs) and 11,178 research studies, many published in leading scientific journals, including the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) and the Lancet.  

There are 505 active PBM clinical trials registered with the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

PBM has been proven to improve the success rate of SUD rehabilitation. PBM eases the physical and psychological withdrawals from opioids and other drugs.  It dramatically reduces relapse.

Major studies have documented PBM’s role as an effective adjunct to traditional drug rehabilitation.

In 2020, Dr. Fredric Schiffer, Harvard Medical School, proved PBM reduced Opioid cravings by 51% versus 15.8% using traditional rehabilitation.

A Novel Treatment of Opioid Cravings With an Effect Size of .73 for Unilateral Transcranial Photobiomodulation Over Sham - PMC

In 2024, Dr. Jennifer Flora, Shepherd University, validated Schiffer’s findings.  She further documented a significant reduction in depression symptoms. Dr. Flora’s depression findings validated earlier studies conducted at Harvard Medical School by Dr. Michael Hamblin and Dr. Paolo Cassano.

Transcranial Photobiomodulation Therapy as an Intervention for Opioid Cravings and Depression: A Pilot Cohort Study - Jennifer Flora, Kelly Watson Huffer, 2024

What is Red-Light/Photobiomodulation?

Photobiomodulation (PBM) is a noninvasive, FDA cleared, medical technology that successfully manages pain and treats a variety of medical conditions.

The human body has 32 trillion cells.  Each cell has thousands of Mitochondria that process nutrients and light into the energy required to power the cell.  When we are injured, ill, or aging, this process breaks down, harming the cell and the body. Exposing all or part of the human body to intense Red and Near-Infrared light restores the Mitochondria’s ability to generate cellular energy.

PBM is a natural process aiding a natural process. 

Why is Red-Light/Photobiomodulation not generally available to those in need?

Bureaucratic inertia is preventing this proven treatment from being known and adopted:

-       The Centers of Disease Control (CDC) has never added its PBM therapy recommendations to their updated Opioid Guidelines media pages or educational material.

      CDC Clinical Practice Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Pain — United States, 2022 | MMWR

-        The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) has never added PBM treatments to its rehabilitation recommendations. 

-       The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has never published an updated and accurate description of PBM for expedited device clearance, even though the final rule process was completed in March 2023.

      Photobiomodulation (PBM) Devices - Premarket Notification [510(k)] Submissions | FDA

-       States dispersing Opioid Settlement money continue to purchase Naloxone EpiPens and fund failed rehab programs.

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, President Trump, and HHS Secretary Kennedy, should take immediate action to implement these life-saving approaches that have already gone through extensive scientific and regulatory vetting.

No one suffering from Substance Use Disorder should ever have to go through Nick Reiner’s ordeal.  No family member should be murdered because the rehab system refuses to pursue successful treatment options.

 

THE THIN BLUE LINE

 

[Also published on Newsmax]

“Mine has a gun!”

“Mine does too!”

My wife, Vicki, and I were spread-eagled against the sides of our car.  An older white man was holding his Glock on her, a younger Black man was holding his Glock on me.

Moments earlier, I was looking at the posted menu outside a restaurant we visited years before.  Vicki had dropped me at their front door while she drove to the parking area behind the restaurant.  Then things began to happen.

Vicki roared out of the alley, slammed on the breaks, and screamed, “get in!”

I jumped in and we quickly drove off.

“Something bad is happening back there”, gasped Vicki, “guys were on the ground.  Others had guns.”

Two blocks later, an unmarked police car was speeding up from behind us with lights flashing.  We saw a strip mall on our right and pulled in.

The two men jumped out of their car and, with guns drawn, stood on each side of our car and shouted for us to get out, turn around, and put our hands on the roof.

We complied.

After checking our IDs they holstered their weapons and apologized. 

The older man was FBI, and the younger a policeman.  They explained they were part of a drug taskforce that was arresting people from inside the restaurant, which they claimed was a drug trafficking hub.  Our car matched the description of one of the drug dealer vehicles.

They apologized again and wished us a pleasant evening. We cautiously continued home, waiting for our adrenaline levels to return to normal.

We had become a statistic – “an unjust police stop”.

Police interactions have become the lightning rod for the Left’s assault on law & order. It is now commonplace for the media, activists, and politicians to showcase incidents of police shootings. Breaking news occurs when victims are unarmed criminals, or the rare instances of unarmed non-criminals, being killed, wounded, or just “harassed”.

Even though the number of police shootings are down, and police being shot are up, interactions that end badly are being promoted as evidence of America being a fundamentally racist unjust society.

Problematic Police interactions are positioned to justify teaching Critical Race Theory, 1619, White Privilege, Systematic Racism, Institutional Racism, Conscious Inclusion, and Unconscious Bias in classrooms and work settings.  It has ushered in changing terms from “Equality” to “Equity”.  It is the driving force behind “defunding the police” and “reimagining law enforcement”.

Police pull over about 20 million drivers across the United States each year, according to Stanford University.  Various studies try to prove racial bias, and profiling, lead to “unjust police stops” and escalation to violence against “people of color”.

Newsweek recently reported there is “significant data showing” that the U.S. is plagued by “systemic racism.” Their evidence is the “NAACP found that from 2017 to 2020, Black men were five times more likely than white people to be stopped by law enforcement without a valid reason.”

However, the Left’s facts, do not match the real facts.

A 2016 study in the Journal of Social Issues shows:

• “Latina/os comprised 42.2% of the sample and 41.9% of Latina/os reported being stopped.”
• “Black or African Americans comprised 24.7% of the sample [and] 25.8% reported being stopped.”
• “Whites comprised 20.2% of the sample and 22.6% were stopped.” 

The Manhattan Institute recently reported:

“In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.”

Justice Quarterly reported on a New Jersey study finding that while black drivers were more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, “police stop rates matched very closely the rates at which drivers” of different races “exceeded the speed limit by 15 mph.”

Dueling studies and statistics miss the real factor. 

The major factor in preventing “unjust police stops” from escalating is what Vicki and I did during ours – we complied.

Imagine if we had sped up instead of pulling over.  Imagine if we had refused to get out of our car.  Imagine if we had assaulted the plain clothes officers.  We would have become a very different statistic, no matter our race or gender.

There is a legitimate role for law enforcement in any society.  It is a risky, thankless, and stressful task. 

We should honor those who wake-up every day to assure our peace and security.