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Comment by appendix-rock | Hacker News Reader

I’ve got the beginning of a movie staring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt that you might be interested in.

You mean the Ford Pinto case that was actually real, and lead to 27 deaths?

https://medium.com/@GallowayJefcoat/tyler-durden-was-right-a...

Purdue is responsible for somewhere between a quarter million and half a million excess deaths due to opiates. It's a shocking number. The Pinto scandal is rightfully notorious, but this is a different order of magnitude.

Only if you believe people aren't responsible for their own actions. Pintos would explode when you're rear-ended due to fuel tank defects. Opioids won't kill you if you take them as your doctor prescribes. Cars in general are a dangerous thing though. Even when they're built to generally accepted standards, they kill about as many people per year as opioids. Just like there's people who abuse drugs, there's drivers who drive recklessly. However, unlike abusing opioids, driving recklessly will kill others.

> Opioids won't kill you if you take them as your doctor prescribes.

The whole point is that Purdue recklessly lied about the effectiveness of Oxycontin and the duration of action, leading people to seek out street drugs when they had breakthrough pain, and doubled down by saying "just prescribe more oxy" when it became obvious that it only lasted 8 hours, not 12, because all of their profits were based on a 12 hour extended duration of effect. Even if taken as prescribed, they were basically selling a recipe for a heroin OD. They're responsible for a lot more than 27 deaths.

“ Opioids won't kill you if you take them as your doctor prescribes”

They will give you an addiction if used as prescribed. Purdue knew that their 12 hour interval doesn’t work but they still sold it as such.

they will give some percentage of people an addiction, sure, but it isn't 100%.

Now imagine a version where the steering cuts out every hour in every Pinto and they still don't recall.

That sounds like present day active safety systems on some cars.

I counted one erroneous steering override every 20 miles on mine until I disabled the feature deep in the car settings menu. (Turning off lane keeping wasn’t enough - the car still overrides steering in “emergencies” by default. It still seems to override sometimes, but it hasn’t done anything dangerous recently).

I talked to people with vehicles that have similar capabilities, all under five years old.

Other than the rivian and tesla owners, every person I talked to experienced similar problems.

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