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Comment by andreasgonewild | Hacker News Reader

I was on Oxy for about a month after smashing one of my vertibraes into pieces in a climbing accident, I was prescribed more than three times as much. I walked through hell to get out of that crap; nothing else I've encountered even comes close, including heroine and cocaine. There are several natural, less addictive and less harmful methods for treating chronic pain; cannabis, mushrooms and meditation among others. Pharma is all about creating return customers; profits, at any cost; the people involved in creating this mess have some serious karma to deal with in the near future.

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Perdue Pharma, the producer of Oxy, is basically making half of its customers into drug addicts by lying about "12-hours" of "effective" pain relief.

The LA Times ran an investigation into Perdue Pharma's claim[1] and the article is incredibly disturbing. This is the killer quote:

> "More than half of long-term OxyContin users are on doses that public health officials consider dangerously high, according to an analysis of nationwide prescription data conducted for The Times."

Perdue Pharma has been lying about the 12-hour pain relief effect for decades. They wanted to dominate the 12-hour pain relief market. Whenever a doctor prescribed for a smaller interval of time, Perdue screamed bloody murder and sought to "refocus" doctors at all cost on the "12-hour rule" to ensure the drug stays in the 12-hour market share. To "refocus" doctors, Perdue Pharma tells doctors to prescribe stronger doses, rather than more frequent ones, and this leads to serious problems with reliance.

[1]: http://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

From my perspective, OxyContin is obviously designed to be as addictive as possible; and they have been lying all along. These people are not fully functioning humans, they will do whatever it takes to generate more profits. I promised myself to never touch their artificial crap again; if it doesn't grow on the ground, I'm not interested.

Medication is thruroughly tested and there are plenty of good painkillers that aren't as addictive. Many are synthetic of course, and still have known side effects.

The evil here isn't that the drug is addictive but that doctors and pharmaceutical companies prescribe it despite the known side effects. It's almost unheard of outside the US.

They're tested by the same psychos that created the drugs and their bought fan club, otherwise things like Oxy would never have made it to market. It's worth repeating, big pharma is all about creating return customers; nothing that comes out of that mess is ever going to solve problems.

If it was the case that these people somehow rigged the testing to make it seem less harmful (which isn't that far fetched), then that would be the scandal. But it isn't. This is known, even in the US.

This thing is known to be this addictive. That's basically only prescribed in exceptional cases elsewhere in the world. Basically it's not prescribed to otherwise healthy people who only suffer from pain (back pains, surgery pains etc). It's only prescribed to terminally ill people. Because it's better to use a slightly less potent painkiller and be in slightly more pain, than to be addicted to an opioid.

So what does that say about the medical practitioners on the front lines prescribing this shit at these insane levels? Hippocratic oath means nothing? Kickbacks from the pharma companies too sweet to ignore?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15522455

Relevant excerpts from the linked article:

> when it doesn’t last, patients can experience excruciating symptoms of withdrawal, including an intense craving for the drug.

> Even before OxyContin went on the market, clinical trials showed many patients weren’t getting 12 hours of relief.

> OxyContin’s market dominance and its high price — up to hundreds of dollars per bottle — hinge on its 12-hour duration. Without that, it offers little advantage over less expensive painkillers.

> Purdue tells doctors to prescribe stronger doses, not more frequent ones, when patients complain that OxyContin doesn’t last 12 hours.

> Research shows that the more potent the dose of an opioid such as OxyContin, the greater the possibility of overdose and death.

You do realize that if Purdue talked about any other dosing regimen other than 12 hours that would be illegal off-label promotion right?

In Arizona big pharma was the biggest contributor to the campaign to defeat marijuana legalization.

Links, sources, please.

One example.

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/sheila-polk-anti-prop-20...

$500k is a huge amount in Arizona politics.

Still amazed that US doctors prescribe oxycontin to patients that aren't suffering from late stage cancer pain and other conditions where addiction isn't really an issue.

I think the benefits of oxycontin for acute pain are highly contentious.

For advanced cancer pain, oxycontin is effective and the rates of addiction are very low. Patients can't wait to get off it usually if the pain improves. There are likely to be many physiological and psychological factors explaining these differences.

I'd really like to see some citations for your statement that patients with advanced cancer pain "can't wait to get off" of their opiods "if the pain improves."

"Advanced cancer pain" and "pain improves" [to a level where withdrawal seems like a good idea] seem like things that rarely go together. I could see people getting off of oxycontin to go onto stronger painkillers in hospice, but that feels like a very different thing to me.

Advanced cancer is treatable of course! The median survival for some types of advanced breast cancer is 7 years from diagnosis. Those patients may present with pain, start treatment, and get better. Happens all the time.

As for a citation, well nobody has done a study on that specific point, I'm talking from my experience of 500 or so patients.

Also kratom

Why not just go back to prescribing cocaine instead of Oxy?

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