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Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

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Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#51

Post by Clubber »

misja111 wrote: post #42
Clubber wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell it was a tabloid style article by the headline: "Drug firms poured..." >Which is about 72 per year, per person. That doesn't sound unreasonable. I would guess the average prescription is 2-4 a day per person per year.

> That doesn't sound unreasonable. According to the article, the 780 million pills were hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. Those are highly powerful and addictive opioids. 72 of those per inhabitant of WV per year seems insane to me.

Look at it this way, 15% of the US population smokes. Let's say they smoke a pack a day, 20 cigarettes. If I presented that data to the population as a whole as this journalist is doing, it would be "The US population smokes up to 3 cigarettes per person per day," which is technically true based on the math applied, but grossly misleading.

15*20/100 = 3.

They are applying a number of a subset of the population to the entire population. It's very misleading.

Edit: This journalist is also citing per year statistics, so take my math and multiply by 365, so that would be, "the US population smokes up to 1,095 cigarettes per person per year." The larger number implies that it is much worse. To add a little spice, I could say, "The US population smokes 1,095 cigarettes per year for every man, woman and child," which is exactly the same data set, but it's now implying that children are 1/3 of the people who smoke. Also most people don't envision a 17 year old as a child, so it further implies that young children (say 5-12) smoke.

The saddest part of this whole story is that this is what we can expect from serious journalism in this day and age. Gotta have their clicks!

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#52

Post by maxerickson »

snrplfth wrote: post #47
maxerickson wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice the War on Drugs has involved arresting and imprisoning a lot of people and the militarization of police. How many people are in prison for violating FDA rulings? I'm sure there are a few, but policing egregious behavior is probably a step that a reasonable society takes out onto that slippery slope of having rules about a thing.

Let me try to clarify: if you have rules prohibiting the creation and sale of substances solely for personal consumption by competent, consenting adults, then you have the primary tool needed to conduct a War on Drugs. I think that it is a mistaken notion to imagine creating this power, and saying "don't worry, we'll only ban dangerous things, and not harmless things, because we'll know better." I think that is defin…

I recognized that you think it's a slippery slope, I'm not sure what you think I'm not getting.

I do believe that you can tell store fronts not to market literal gasoline as a restorative tonic without automatically escalating to violent raids. As far as I can tell, a rule against marketing gasoline as a restorative falls afoul of the standard you declare in your first sentence. People aren't very comfortable shrugging and not doing anything about perceived problems (illicit distribution of the restorative gasoline), but we'd be better off if we did that more often.

(I do understand that the example is ridiculous because there is no demand for a restorative gasoline tonic amongst competent adults, it's just that there is ample evidence that people want some assurances about safety. A less ridiculous example would be requiring people buying cocaine to go through some sort of educational material that made the risk of forming a habit clear, and regulating the manufacture of the cocaine that is eventually sold so that it is not adulterated)

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#53

Post by snrplfth »

vkou wrote: post #50
snrplfth wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that, yes. But what I am saying is that, even with a "safety" criterion, the War on Drugs is completely prosecutable. Heck, alcohol is dangerous as hell, as evidenced by the number of deaths it precipitates. There is nearly always a safety criterion that can be thought up for "products for personal consumption" (as opposed to, say, environmental pollutants) You can have prohibition of "unsafe substances"…

If personal possession and consumption stopped being a crime, that would effectively end the War on Drugs overnight. That kind of drug policy would make the current state of affairs unrecognizable. (Yes, I am well aware of how in the current legal framework, anyone can be accused of being a dealer.) The FDA approach to regulation goes after dealers and manufacturers - not their customers. So yes, we absolutely can en…

> If personal possession and consumption stopped being a crime, that would effectively end the War on Drugs overnight.

Well, sure, the current way it's being done. But you'd still have cartel warfare for selling territory, adulterated goods, and to effectively shut down distributors, you'd have to define smaller and smaller amounts of substance as qualifying for "dealing", as dealers learned what they could and couldn't get away with. Perhaps I should not have used the capital-letter "War on Drugs" to refer to this. But you would still have much of what you have now.

Now, would it be net improvement if enforcement of drug laws moved towards a dealers-and-manufacturers model? Sure, I think so. But my point is that there would still be no principle in place preventing that model from expanding again into a broader prohibition, involving new substances, posessions, uses, or what have you. It would be like saying "we'll have free speech, except if it's bad, or we don't like the person saying it, or some other reason that we might think up later." There's no sufficiently strong principle preventing prohibitions from continually increasing.

> I honestly have a lot more sympathy for an addict, or a bystander, whose life was destroyed by the state, then I do for his heroin dealer. I think most people opposing the War on Drugs on grounds other then ideological anarcho-capitalism share this assessment.

That's probably true. However, I don't think sympathy is an effective basis for judging whether things should be legal. And if observing that a government with an expansive power to ban things will probably use and aggrandize that power makes me an anarcho-capitalist (rather than, say, just a boring classical liberal) then so be it.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#54

Post by chillwaves »

dmclain wrote: post #40
chillwaves wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think every person, every man woman and child, has a legitimate need for 2-4 pills of narcotics each day? Am I misunderstanding the figure? Instead of 2-4 a day per person, maybe you should calculate how many it is per person with a legitimate need for the drug.

I think you are misunderstanding the figure, it is 72 pill/year/person, so if an average person with a prescription is taking 2-4 (let's just use 3) they will need 365*3 = 1095 pills/year. That rate of consumption implies that 72/1095 = 6.5% of the total population is on a never ending prescription for opiates. As a percentage of the population, that still seems really high, but WV is taking 0.2 pills/person/day not…

Thank you, I did not have time to check my work.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#55

Post by snrplfth »

maxerickson wrote: post #52
snrplfth wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me try to clarify: if you have rules prohibiting the creation and sale of substances solely for personal consumption by competent, consenting adults, then you have the primary tool needed to conduct a War on Drugs. I think that it is a mistaken notion to imagine creating this power, and saying "don't worry, we'll only ban dangerous things, and not harmless things, because we'll know better." I think that is defin…

I recognized that you think it's a slippery slope, I'm not sure what you think I'm not getting. I do believe that you can tell store fronts not to market literal gasoline as a restorative tonic without automatically escalating to violent raids. As far as I can tell, a rule against marketing gasoline as a restorative falls afoul of the standard you declare in your first sentence. People aren't very comfortable shruggi…

Yes, of course, rules against incorrectly marked or marketed or adulterated products are different from the war on drugs. What I'm saying is that drug-war-type activities are based on rules prohibiting the sale of particular goods even with zero promises as to their safety or efficacy. (And the FDA does enforce a number of such rules, though certainly not that many compared to other bodies.)

If someone was convinced that gasoline would cure their hair loss, they couldn't get it through a pharmacy, but they could still get it from someone making no such promises. If someone was convinced that cocaine would cure their hair loss, they can't get it any way, any how - even just as something labelled "dangerous goods, do not consume". That's the prohibitive authority that leads to raids and cartel warfare. And that's the power that many people still support the FDA/DEA/government having, and which I am pointing out is the root of the problems with the drug war.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#56

Post by misja111 »

Clubber wrote: post #51
misja111 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That doesn't sound unreasonable. According to the article, the 780 million pills were hydrocodone and oxycodone pills. Those are highly powerful and addictive opioids. 72 of those per inhabitant of WV per year seems insane to me.

Look at it this way, 15% of the US population smokes. Let's say they smoke a pack a day, 20 cigarettes. If I presented that data to the population as a whole as this journalist is doing, it would be "The US population smokes up to 3 cigarettes per person per day," which is technically true based on the math applied, but grossly misleading. 15*20/100 = 3. They are applying a number of a subset of the population to the…

You're right, that makes sense. So the situation is probably that most of the people take nothing and 5% or so takes 6 a day and lives in a permanent state of sedation.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#57

Post by Clubber »

misja111 wrote: post #56
Clubber wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at it this way, 15% of the US population smokes. Let's say they smoke a pack a day, 20 cigarettes. If I presented that data to the population as a whole as this journalist is doing, it would be "The US population smokes up to 3 cigarettes per person per day," which is technically true based on the math applied, but grossly misleading. 15*20/100 = 3. They are applying a number of a subset of the population to the…

You're right, that makes sense. So the situation is probably that most of the people take nothing and 5% or so takes 6 a day and lives in a permanent state of sedation.

Sedatives are different. Also people who are on painkillers lose the "high" after a while, so for the most part, they are normal functioning people, which is the idea.

Also, as an aside, take into account that there are 5+ million car accidents a year. I would guess that is or at least is one of the leading causes of chronic pain in the US.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#58

Post by Avshalom »

snrplfth wrote: post #26
maxerickson wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are a large number of people that simply want a different mix of prohibition and enforcement than we have today. It doesn't take a whole lot of doublethink to want laws around marijuana relaxed while at the same time preferring to keep the FDA.

Okay, but what I'm saying is that once the tools are in place to ban various substances for personal consumption, and make those bans stick through enforcement, then that's all the tools you need for a War on Drugs. I mean, at that point, it's just "ban this thing, and not that thing, because it's what I want." What takes doublethink is imagining that, once these powers are in place, they won't be used against one's…

racism and guns are the tools you need for the War on Drugs, laws prohibiting some drugs are just there to make it easier to claim a veneer of legitimacy.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#59

Post by snrplfth »

chillwaves wrote: post #12
snrplfth wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never been quite able to grasp the logic of those people who think that, while the War on Drugs is a bad idea, the FDA being able to ban whatever drugs it likes is a good idea. Either the government should have the power to ban drugs or it shouldn't, but too many people seem to want it both ways: prohibition without enforcement.

> Either the government should have the power to ban drugs or it shouldn't Surely there is middle ground. A drug can be regulated but not banned. The way a drug is prescribed could be regulated. This needs to happen with opiates. That doesn't mean they should be banned but the addiction potential is very serious for these drugs (and vastly underestimated when they first entered the market).

"Regulated but not banned" is not a middle ground between "banned or not". It is "not banned". I am not saying that you can't have regulations on a drug, I am saying that if you make a drug entirely illegal, and it is in sufficiently high demand, then you will have drug-war-type effects.

Re: Drug firms poured 780M painkillers into WV amid rise of overdoses

#60

Post by nradov »

chillwaves wrote: post #10
imglorp wrote: post #5

Not that pharma is angelic here, but don't the doctors have the largest measure of blame for writing unnecessary scripts, failing to monitor for abuse, and failing to encourage alternate options? I'm in favor of maximum MD power. I think they should be allowed to prescribe everything from cocaine to bleach, or any other chemical compound, as suits the patient care, if they know what they're doing. But they should als…

A more helpful line of inquiry to me is the culture of Rx usage. As a society, our patients expect drugs when they go to a doctor and a doctor's average time per patient is around 10-15 minutes. Does not seem like enough time to understand the patient's needs and create an individualized solution. Further, RX medicine is highly profitable and encouraged from the pharma. In this case it looks like they are incentives…

Patients tend to give doctors higher customer satisfaction scores when the doctor writes a prescription, regardless of whether the patient really needs it. Patients like to feel that the doctor is taking their problems seriously and doing something. This is one of the negative aspects of moving to a more consumer-driven healthcare model. Providers try to optimize their customer satisfaction scores to bring in more business, and large provider organizations sometimes use those scores as one factor in paying doctors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3581314/

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