Greed to Do Good, is the untold story of Centre for Disease Control and Prevention’s disastrous war on opioids, as CDC announced that overdose deaths had quadrupled in ten years, hitting a record high of 90, 000 in 2020, but overdose deaths rocketed to 100,000 in 2021 and 110, 000 in 2022. 

Between 2006-2012, Purdue Pharma, which promoted OxyContin along with other Big Pharma companies, sold 76 billion opioid doses. Overdoses shot up almost in parallel manner. In 2022, the death toll from overdoses exceeded auto and firearms deaths combined. To stem the tide, the CDC decided to focus on a single issue and set guidelines for acute pain opioid prescription. However, the CDC’s intervention had another deleterious effect as it turbo-charged an epidemic of dangerous Fentanyl use as an opioid substitution.

In the past two decades, over a million Americans have died of overdoses.

Charles LeBaron, MD, a CDC Physician gives a vivid, unique first-person perspective on the human consequences. His 28-years of traveling the world as a medical epidemiologist for CDC and his experiences as a physician prescribing opioids in Appalachia and treating gang members in prison attacks, as well as his own near-death ordeal as a patient receiving high-dose opioids for severe pain. LeBaron writes: “ We look like we belong in H&R Block, (sic) all we lack are green shades and pocket-protectors and well-sharpened #2 pencils…”, as when the author chases pathogens in an underdeveloped country while avoiding possible kidnapping and assassination.

He concludes we have to be cruel against the lethal paradoxes of this self-inflicted opioid war- which is really a war upon ourselves.

Greed to Do Good: The Untold Story of CDC’s Disastrous War on Opioids: A CDC Physician’s Personal Account ( Kindle Edition, Amplify Publishing, 184 pages.