How Purdue Pharma Hooked America on a Deadly Drug
Interesting article about the company that developed OxyContin.
Some parts of the article:
"...Purdue executives told sales staff at a launch meeting that OxyContin “was non-habit forming,” according to the undated investigator’s notes. Gergely (sales manager) said Purdue gave its sales force material — some of which was not approved by the FDA — for “education,” the notes show."
"One California doctor who was sentenced to 25 years in prison for overprescribing OxyContin is also suing Purdue. Masoud Bamdad alleges that the company’s representatives made sales calls and gave him “deceitful, misleading and over-hyped information,” which he relied on to prescribe the drug, in some cases with deadly consequences for his patients, according to the suit, which is pending."
"Since 1999, at least 200,000 people have died in the U.S. from these overdoses (opioid), according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. More than 52,000 of those died in 2015 alone..."
As Carla in the comments section of the article pointed out, "Capitalistic medicine is SO Fucked".
Yeah there is a prescription medication problem in America. Its hard to pin in down on one party. It looks like this company did use aggressive marketing, but that is common among pharmaceutical companies. They have invested a lot in the drug and its failures, so from a business standpoint, they need to sell product.
They are definitely at fault if during clinical trials, there were reports of addictive behavior and they misstated these findings on paper. A lot of pharmaceutical companies market directly to the consumer as well, so it is the MD's responsibility to know risks and characteristics of a drug before prescribing it. Typically, a good MD would catch addictive qualities in the clinical trials if he has done his proper research. But, there is a difference between knowing about addictive qualities and being shady about that as a doctor to keep patients (I think Florida doctors were notorious for this on Oxycontin. People would drive hundreds of miles to go to Florida doctors).
I don't have much sympathy for doctors who blame the pharmaceutical company. This sounds like a cop out of someone who was doing wrong the whole time and knew it. If the doctor wasn't knowingly breaking the law or the Hippocratic oath, he/she was reckless in not reading the proper literature before prescribing the drug.
We have a lot of things to conquer in this country when it comes to keeping these dangerous prescription medicines under control, even though they are legal and have to be prescribed by a doctor.
I’m sure true opioid crisis has nothing to do with the economy being hollowed out, break down of family, social bonds, etc.
People have been addicted to pain killers for a long time. Shits blowing up now for more than just doctors with loose script pads.
And isn’t it funny how the government bans drugs and then blesses their synthetic relatives that end up causing just as much damage.
Blaming Purdue for the opioid crisis is like blaming McDonald's for heart disease. It's shallow, overly simplistic, dishonest and uninteresting. It's a good one-liner for politicians looking to demagogue complex issues for political gains. That's about it.
Officiis aut dolorum maxime non corrupti. Similique vero illo qui suscipit cupiditate et velit.
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