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Comment by tantalor | Hacker News Reader

Is it a bit of a stretch to hold Amazon responsible when counterfeit medicines, made with Amazon-sold equipment, harm people? The sole purpose of this equipment is to deceive.

As for woman in the picture up top, I think she has a reason to complain:

She woke up in a hospital bed herself. She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.

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To be fair, Percocet isn't exactly "safe" and it's never prescribed to "help people relax". Overdoses on non-counterfeit prescription opioids happen all the time -- Often in this exact scenario, where a (presumably) opioid-naive person takes a "normal dose" of an opioid-tolerant person like a hospice patient or an addict.

Also, taking the drugs left by someone who died of an of an overdose is best done with extreme caution, or not at all.

In assigning blame, it's also worth remembering that tablet presses are also used for compounding legal vitamins, making packaging cleaners and reagents ("dissolve one tablet of cleaner in a liter of water") and so forth.

How did the counterfeit medicines get to the people who took them? These are prescription drugs; even if someone made counterfeits of them, how are they going to get the counterfeits into the prescription drug supply chain? It's not like you can get prescription drugs on Amazon.

I don't see anything about this anywhere in the article.

Yes, I think it's still a stretch. Something along the lines of the guns don't kill people, people kill people argument.

I'm not saying that Amazon wasn't at fault here, but if you just read the headline and looked at the picture you might think Amazon was the one selling the counterfeit pills.

Is Percocet a safe medication designed to help people relax?

Certainly not. Of course, people who abuse drugs don't deserve to die, but there is some risk you have to assume.

The people actually manufacturing the fake drugs have a lot more liability than the sale of pill presses, which have legitimate uses.

> She didn’t realize her father had slipped the counterfeit pills into his prescription bottle of Percocet at home and, distraught with grief, she had taken what she thought was a safe medication to help her relax.

This whole family shares each others pills?! W-T-F!

I can see some blame for the counterfeit dies for the press, but the pill press itself is a legitimate tool.

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