We subjects don't decide our laws and regulations. [0] Instead, those are written by lawyers and lobbyists in the employ of reptiles like the Sacklers. They make the rules by which they play, so when we're told to "hate the game, not the players", well, they get that hate too.
[0] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
Purdue Pharma knew about “significant” abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drug’s introduction in 1996 and concealed that information. - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxy...
It seems like both the FDA and Purdue thought / hoped it would be less addictive, but this was not to be the case. And after it became clear from real-world data that this was not true, the FDA still didn't do anything about it?
> a Canadian physician, Dr. Brian Goldman, wrote that the findings turned thinking about the supposed safety of long-acting opioids like OxyContin on its head by showing that drug abusers “coveted” such drugs. “This should ring alarm bells,” Dr. Goldman, who was then a paid speaker for Purdue Pharma, wrote in the editorial.
Why wouldn't the FDA act on this alarm? Why would we rely on a pharmaceutical company to police its own drug when there is a clearly a massive conflict of interest? Isn't this what the FDA is for?
From that article, albeit citing the prosecutor's case, "... internal Purdue communications are cited by the attorney general of Massachusetts in a new court filing against the company, released on Tuesday. They represent the first evidence that appears to tie the Sacklers to specific decisions made by the company about the marketing of OxyContin. The aggressive promotion of the drug helped ignite the opioid epidemic.
The filing contends that Mr. Sackler, a son of a Purdue Pharma founder, urged that sales representatives advise doctors to prescribe the highest dosage of the powerful opioid painkiller because it was the most profitable."
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/15/health/sacklers-purdue-ox...
Edit to add: Actually, there's a pretty good (and seemingly neutral) history of the Massachusetts case on Wikipedia, with background info and related cases:
They knew the addictive nature of Oxycontin and that tolerance builds up fast, yet they still told sales reps to pressure doctors to always prescribe subsequent amounts be taken at 12 hours intervals (and not at 8 hour intervals to account for the tolerance buildup). That's fucking egregious. The entire family deserves to be put up against the wall.
There's also the factor of systemic issues that drove doctors to overprescribe: Pain Management Questionnaires[1]:
> ...pain management is the only clinical measurement among eight components of Hospital Value-Based Purchasing, and many physicians see their patient satisfaction scores in patient surveys drop as a result of changes in their prescribing practices. These scores affect compensation and promotion.
It wasn't the Congress pushing banks to get homes to everyone. (requiring things like a job disproportionately impacts my district!) Nevermind the tremendous number of ways Congress could have intervened.
It wasn't the fault of the borrowers. No, they are all noble people just struggling to get by on pennies. They weren't buying houses on credit and paying by flipping them on the run-up. Deep down, a lot of people knew they couldn't afford the house, but chose to do it anyway.
We saw this play out with cigarettes. The execs get dragged before congress and their performance was certainly ludicrous, but somehow the blame is entirely on them. The result is cigarettes are taxed more. They kill, but are taxed more. So the outrage was used to assign blame so the states could pull in more money.
Same thing here as far as I can see. Everyone has enjoyed their cut of the pharma pie, and when blame goes out the state which has been regulating this entire market heavily from top to bottom is blaming someone else and then absolving liability in exchange for money.
We really need to stop looking for single points of blame for these things. If it's at the point where we say, "look at the last 20 years how obviously reckless this behavior was" it's well beyond the fault of the person exhibiting that behavior.
I think everyone who wants a good background on this issue should read this:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2622774/
Purdue misrepresented many facts in their aggressive marketing.
Most people who take opiods do not get addicted.
And most people who are addicted did not start with a legitimate prescription--they started using it as an illicit drug.
Perhaps you could like, read before you post incorrect statements, or so that your attempts at trolling won't be so easily shot down.
1. The narrative is that some poor guy took pain meds for a legitimate reason then ended up addicted. While this does occur, it's actually not very common.
> Among people who are prescribed opioids, addiction is relatively uncommon. The percentage of patients who become addicted after taking opioids for chronic pain is measured in the single digits; studies show an incidence from less than 1 percent to 8 percent. Most of the estimates are skewed toward the low end of this range, when those at risk (due to a history of substance abuse or, to a lesser but meaningful extent, a concurrent mental illness) are removed from the sample.
2. Most addicts had a history of drug abuse.
> People who abuse pills are rarely new to drugs. The federal government’s 2014 National Survey on Drug Use and Health, for example, revealed that more than three-fourths of misusers had used non-prescribed benzodiazepines, such as Valium or Xanax, or inhalants. A study of Oxycontin users in treatment found that they “were not naive individuals with accidental addictions who were introduced to painkillers by their physicians as reported by the media … [Instead they had] extensive drug use histories.”
It's hard to bring this up without straying into classism or victim blaming. The reality is that most people without comorbidities and abuse history are quite safe, and these are drugs we need.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/what-ameri... [2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMra1507771
My claims are actually backed by published research (cited within the Atlantic article if you want to check)... Maybe you could like read before you get shot down.
> Although published estimates of iatrogenic addiction vary substantially from less than 1% to more than 26% of cases, part of this variability is due to confusion in definition. Rates of carefully diagnosed addiction have averaged less than 8% in published studies, whereas rates of misuse, abuse, and addiction-related aberrant behaviors have ranged from 15 to 26%. A small (estimated at 4%) but growing percentage of persons who are addicted to prescription opioids transition to heroin
In short, people who have no history of addiction (and to a lesser extent comorbid mental illness) are unlikely to become addicted, but of course even a small chance is still worth considering.
The media isn't lying about the individual cases they mention. Yes, there are thousands of people like your friend. But I also think they built a narrative about these drugs being extremely addictive when the truth is much more subtle.