What exactly is wrong with people making the most use of this drug as they see fit in their own lives? Is it wrong for people with chronic pain to take what they need? Why should doctors and others be able to prevent people from treating their pain?
"Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies."
20 years later, I think we know how it turned out. Something like 75% of opioid addicts start with pills.
Because they probably do.
Pain is a stimuli people will do a lot to avoid. But pain also exists for a reason. You generally can't trust people in pain to self medicate.
Evolution did not give humans the ability to feel pain just to fuck with them.
Pain prevents you from unnecessarily straining damaged body parts, keeping you from harming yourself further and making your condition worse.
On painkillers you might hurt yourself doing something as simple as walking up a set of stairs, just because you didn't notice you placed your foot badly.
My personal story is of a loved one needlessly suffering mind boggling amounts of pain for half a year because the DEA had so scared our doctors.
Luckily the surgery was a 100% success and she doesn't need to rely up on the steaming pile of crap that is the DEA's interference in the medical community.
This is also a real problem, but I think a strong argument can be made that the Sacklers fraud is responsible for it too. A lot of the fear and under-prescription that now happens is a direct result of a strong backlash that itself was in response to the opioid epidemic and the massive damage that resulted. If that had never happened, then rather then the pendulum swinging way too far towards opioids everywhere and then (as is so often the case) right back over the neutral to suspicious of any opioids allowed for anyone anywhere, it could have been more steady state. Doctors would have known how serious the drugs were and been careful with prescriptions all along. Those who really needed them would get them, those who didn't would be directed elsewhere. If it never became such a political cause with so much rightful public interest and anger, then none of would intrude on the medical process.
So really the Sacklers may well have screwed people over coming and going. People who would have been fine without were turned into addicts and had their lives ruined, and now people with horrendous chronic pain have to suffer with it and have their lives ruined.
>Purdue Pharma contended that OxyContin, because of its time-release formulation, posed a lower threat of abuse and addiction to patients than do traditional, shorter-acting painkillers like Percocet or Vicodin.
That claim became the linchpin of the most aggressive marketing campaign ever undertaken by a pharmaceutical company for a narcotic painkiller.
“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”"
Addiction is a physical and biological process as opposed to a willful individual choice and any company that produces drugs and studies their affects on the body should be at the forefront of understanding that. It appears that Sackler willfully chose to paint people addicted to his product in a negative light in pursuit of profits.
These are people that are prescribed this medication by their doctors whom they trust. These doctors in turn are pressured / bribed by the pharmaceutical companies to act as dispensaries for these pills to the detriment of the patients they are supposed to be protecting.
Opioids are not an effective treatment for most people with long term pain. They develop a tolerance for the opioids, and so they end up with an addiction, taking very large quantities of opioids, and still being in pain.
The pain system in your body gets used to the opioids faster than the breathing system. Over time, the difference between the amount of opioids you need to help the pain and the amount of opioids that make you stop breathing gets smaller and smaller. This has a very predictable bad end result.