Today, as I type, my body is racked by a great deal of pain caused by the inflammation of connective tissue throughout my body - in my fingers, neck, shoulders, elbows, chest and hips. Unfortunately, the medicine I take is having little effect. Pain of this type is often accompanied by fever, chills and fatigue, and mental states such as depression.

However, pain is not merely a term we use for bodily pain, such as I am experiencing today. Pain also encompasses a number of conditions traditionally lumped together as emotional or psychological states: grief, sadness, despair, melancholy, anhedonia, anxiety, helplessness, fear and and suicidal ideation.

In the past, people who suffered extended periods of emotional pain were often labeled either as suffering from a a mental illness, or worse, their condition was seen as a sign of moral weakness. This explains the stigma that many still attach to emotional suffering, despite the knowledge from scientists that the brain itself is the source of of both physical and mental pain receptors.

Indeed, emotional pain can have far more long lasting effects, and is harder to treat than physical pain. This one reason drug companies have invested millions of dollars in drugs that mask emotional pain, such as sedatives, barbiturates, and serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, the first of which was Prozac. There is a lot of money to be made in providing symptomatic relief to people undergoing emotional "distress," and Big Pharma has made billions off of such drugs.

People without the wherewithal to afford prescription medications, many of which come with deleterious side effects, however, often turn to legal and illegal substances to address their suffering. Alcohol is the most common, but hardly the only "medicine" of choice.

Marijuana, which scientists are beginning to finally understand has many healing properties for both physical mental states of pain. Cocaine and its variants, such as crack. Uppers such as methamphetamines and MDMA (more commonly known as ecstasy or molly), and downers such as benzodiazepenes, hypnotics (think Quaalude), and the numerous opiates, including morphine, opium, heroin, and synthetic drugs such as Fentanyl, a drug originally designed to be used as anesthesia but which has now reached epidemic proportions in many communities.

Substance abuse is a major problem in America among all classes and all races from the poorest of the poor to the richest of the rich. Our Declaration of Independence famously declared that individuals are entitled to the "pursuit of happiness," but in our current society and culture, that relies on consumerism, materialism and the commodification of human beings it appears that few of us ever become actually reach a state of happiness.

Indeed, happiness is least likely to be found among poor and working class communities, where alcohol, tobacco and other drugs have long been used to numb people from feeling their suffering, and to escape the emotional poverty of their existence. Needless to say, beer and liquor companies have made fortunes off the misery of those two groups, selling cheap alcoholic beverages, and tobacco companies billions of cigarettes, that have led to the destruction of families and the early deaths of countless of millions of people.

But pain serves the powers that be in another way also. A demoralized populace, benumbed by alcohol and drugs is less likely to pay attention to how our political, economic and justice systems rely upon our emotional pain. many of us. lost in our own misery, are less likely to question the official narratives put out by our political leaders who ever more and more have become entangled in a despotic system in which they take legal bribes to do the will of an oligarchy composed of the wealthy, corporate interests and the professional elites that serve their interests.

Emotional pain has also been weaponized. From the criminalization of marijuana and other "illegal" substances, begun during the Nixon Presidency for political purposes (i.e., a way to go after antiwar protestors and African Americans), the "War on Drugs" has been exploited by our government to oppress the lower classes. A war that was ramped up to heights previously unknown by subsequent administrations from Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and even Obama. From all of them we've seen a reluctance to end this monstrous "drug war" because of the benefits it provides through mass incarceration.

Those benefits include profits for the private prison industrial complex, more and more law enforcement jobs with more and more military style weaponry, and the use of prisoners as slave labor, often by people whose only presence in prison is for offenses that before the drug war was conceived were consider minor misdemeanors, but are now classified as felonies carrying mandatory sentences in the federal system and in most states.

Pain, fear, anxiety - all have been exploited by demagogues in both parties to allow them to advance policies such as endless war, tax breaks for the upper classes, austerity, and the demonization of racial, ethnic, religious and other minority groups in order to distract most Americans from these truths. People who haven't the time or the energy to discover the get past the multitude of lies that have propped up the greatest transfer of wealth in our nation's history, People living in desperate straits because of their economic situation, but also a populace that has been subject to a disinformation campaign propagated through mass media, including news outlets that have all to often acted as propaganda organs for the two political parties and the corporations that stand behind them in the shadows, pulling the politicians' strings.

And what has been the end result of all this incessant manufacturing of anxiety, fear and distress by our governmental elites and popular culture? We now have Donald Trump as our duly elected President with a Congress controlled by the worst element of our duopoly, the Republican Party (though to be fair, no one knows how many people actually voted for Trump or Hillary Clinton, thanks to voter suppression and election fraud).

And that is how pain profits the powers that be, keeping many of us docile, numbed by substance abuse or our own suffering. Yes, we saw more people wake up after the illegal and blatant violations by the Democratic Party to rig the primaries against Sanders, and others who have awoken from their slumber when Trump actually won, the man that everyone believed even a disastrous and deeply unpopular candidate, Hillary Clinton could not lose to. But for every person who is awake to the corruption and political crisis this past election year exposed, there are millions who are still lost in their pain and suffering, and see in Trump a savior, the strong leader we need to "Make America great again," along with a nearly equal number of people who ares still falling for the lies of the Democratic elites and their addiction to neoliberal economic policies.

Fear is the mind killer, but pain and suffering are as well. We have a long way to go brother and sisters, and not much time in which to do it, if we are to avoid a collapse into an even worse authoritarian state than the one in which we now unhappily reside.