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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

The Atlantic has an interesting article that claims the risk of addiction for ordinary folks isn’t that high.

What became the popular but essentially dubious interpretation of the trends was that the typical opioid victim was a patient who received Oxycontin, Percocet, or Vicodin from her doctor for a tooth extraction or sprained ankle and then stumbled into addiction.

In fact, only 22 to 35 percent of “misusers” of pain medication report receiving drugs from their doctor

[1]https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-ameri...

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22-35% is...actually quite high and pretty disturbing, given that these are coming from medical professionals who should know to avoid overprescription.

I'm not sure who this is at all relevant. Millions of people still died, and there's a very direct correlation between how much opioids were dumped in a state and the increase in death rates in that state. You can try to blur the lines by throwing statistics about addiction, but you can't deny the actual end results. It doesn't matter if you think it's addictive or not, millions of people died from opioid overdose, and communications show that the execs at these companies very explicitly pushed it heavily knowing full well the impact it had.

Of course it's relevant. The narrative is that companies like J&J promoted opioids which led to higher levels of addiction (and use of illegal opioids).

This data suggests that for the vast majority of patients, addiction was not an issue and the cause of the opioid epidemic was in fact people that used illegal opioids to begin with.

Doesn't matter if it was addiction of not, people still died of overdose, and there's a direct correlation between higher sales of opioids and deaths. They quite literally killed people for a higher profit.

Correlation doesn't equal causation or else you have to start charging Ben and Jerry for all of the murders and drownings and the whole justice system becomes the Red Queen's court.

Please stop parroting the myths created by the drug companies.

This is just parroting what the drug company reps say.

But not treating pain and also causing addiction in 30% of your patients isn't just "not very good", it's catastrophic.

> In fact, only 22 to 35 percent of “misusers” of pain medication report receiving drugs from their doctor

Because of the floods of prescription meds available many people get meds from their family and friends. The ultimate source was a doctor prescribing them, but the meds have been passed on.

Worth noting she works for a conservative think tank, so I am not sure I am going to take her at face value for defending pharmaceutical corporations...

Did you have a particular data point you’re trying to refute?

Or are you just trying to dismiss the entire article because of her political views?

The fact it tries to downplay that millions of people are dying, and continue to die, ignoring that there is direct correlation between number of pills dumped in a state and deaths.

Down playing it how? Can you quote the relevant text?

The author acknowledges it's a crisis, but simply asks questions about the true cause.

> The author acknowledges it's a crisis, but simply asks questions about the true cause.

I mean, that's been the conservative playbook for decades. Deny entirely first. Once it becomes undeniable, deny attribution. Once that becomes undeniable, claim nothing can be done anyways.

Climate change, air pollution, fossil fuels...

It is possible that some facts got distorted, but by looking at the big picture it does not look too good any way you look at it

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