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The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

esquire.com

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Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#141

Post by alkonaut »

mgkimsal wrote: post #56
joemag wrote: post #27

Aren’t the doctors to blame for this as well? It always surprised me how quickly and easily they prescribe serious painkillers. A few years ago I had a tooth pulled, and the doctor gave me prescription painkiller. In the end, I ended up using regular ibuprofen, and that was more than enough. I wonder how much of this comes pharmaceutical sales reps pressuring the doctors to use their medicine. That whole system seems…

about 5-6 years ago, my wife had a small eye problem and we went to a local urgent care clinic. resolved the problem, but it was still inflamed and had some discomfort. the physician offered to write a prescription for either oxy or hydrocodone. (I can't remember which). "No, I'll be OK" my wife said. "Well, here, take this anyway", and she gave us a prescription for... 7 days of the stuff (IIRC). 2 years ago, both u…

So basically a doctor prescribed a hugely addictive opioid for something described as "discomfort". That shouldn't just mean you lose your license it should mean you go to jail.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#142

Post by WalterBright »

cwyers wrote: post #24

I'm reminded of that line from Chinatown. "Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Is there really no point of diminishing returns, where you can tell yourself you've made enough money?

> made enough money

My fantasy about money is not about better cars or nicer houses. I'd like to do what Elon Musk is doing - try to advance human civilization through projects like space exploration. I'd be launching space telescopes, more probes to outer planets, etc.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#143

Post by iaw »

appleflaxen wrote: post #46
iaw wrote: post #12

Very good write-up from Esquire, I'm thoroughly impressed with the article. That said, my visceral emotional response is strongly negative especially when reading the following paragraph: >In May, a dozen lawmakers in Congress, inspired by the L.A. Times investigation, sent a bipartisan letter to the World Health Organization warning that Sackler-owned companies were preparing to flood foreign countries with legal na…

which part bothers you?

There's a hypocrisy intrinsic in claiming that OxyContin is too dangerously addictive to go generic but still pushing it in under-saturated markets. It's the disregard of human life/experience innate in this line of behavior.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#144

Post by andreasgonewild »

alkonaut wrote: post #137
andreasgonewild wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From my perspective, OxyContin is obviously designed to be as addictive as possible; and they have been lying all along. These people are not fully functioning humans, they will do whatever it takes to generate more profits. I promised myself to never touch their artificial crap again; if it doesn't grow on the ground, I'm not interested.

Medication is thruroughly tested and there are plenty of good painkillers that aren't as addictive. Many are synthetic of course, and still have known side effects. The evil here isn't that the drug is addictive but that doctors and pharmaceutical companies prescribe it despite the known side effects. It's almost unheard of outside the US.

They're tested by the same psychos that created the drugs and their bought fan club, otherwise things like Oxy would never have made it to market. It's worth repeating, big pharma is all about creating return customers; nothing that comes out of that mess is ever going to solve problems.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#145

Post by cwyers »

WalterBright wrote: post #142
cwyers wrote: post #24

I'm reminded of that line from Chinatown. "Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What can you buy that you can't already afford?" Is there really no point of diminishing returns, where you can tell yourself you've made enough money?

> made enough money My fantasy about money is not about better cars or nicer houses. I'd like to do what Elon Musk is doing - try to advance human civilization through projects like space exploration. I'd be launching space telescopes, more probes to outer planets, etc.

As I have stated before, I feel like if you have a pro-social mission to further human civilization the first step is "don't enmiserate large numbers of humans by getting them addicted to opioids." Maybe that's just me, though.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#146

Post by alkonaut »

andreasgonewild wrote: post #144
alkonaut wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medication is thruroughly tested and there are plenty of good painkillers that aren't as addictive. Many are synthetic of course, and still have known side effects. The evil here isn't that the drug is addictive but that doctors and pharmaceutical companies prescribe it despite the known side effects. It's almost unheard of outside the US.

They're tested by the same psychos that created the drugs and their bought fan club, otherwise things like Oxy would never have made it to market. It's worth repeating, big pharma is all about creating return customers; nothing that comes out of that mess is ever going to solve problems.

If it was the case that these people somehow rigged the testing to make it seem less harmful (which isn't that far fetched), then that would be the scandal. But it isn't. This is known, even in the US.

This thing is known to be this addictive. That's basically only prescribed in exceptional cases elsewhere in the world. Basically it's not prescribed to otherwise healthy people who only suffer from pain (back pains, surgery pains etc). It's only prescribed to terminally ill people. Because it's better to use a slightly less potent painkiller and be in slightly more pain, than to be addicted to an opioid.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#147

Post by throwaway0255 »

It should simply be illegal to advertise prescription medications.

"Ask your doctor about Klonopin today"

"Ask your doctor about coronary artery bypass grafting today"

One of these sounds completely ridiculous, and the other sounds commonplace. They should both sound ridiculous, because they're both equally completely ridiculous.

The idea that the patient should be influencing the treatment decisions of medical professionals based on things they saw on television is just absurd. It should be illegal. Doctors are all complicit in it, that should be considered medical malpractice, but doctors are put in an impossible position on this stuff and I understand why they do it.

Healthcare in general is just such a goddamn mess. There are so many completely obvious ways to improve it, but it's impossible to implement any of them, and in the meantime people just keep losing their loved ones early to all the inefficiencies and waste and stupidity.

And all the politicians just want to get their stamp on it to show their constituency how caring and benevolent they are, but they're politicians so all they're actually capable of doing is fucking everything up. So they all just keep grandstanding and fucking everything up and it just gets worse and worse every year.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#148

Post by semperdark »

hawkice wrote: post #76
EvanAnderson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ick! This reinforces my belief that direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs should be illegal.

I'm more concerned people dragoon their doctors based on some half-incoherent Super Bowl ad. They can't possibly be convinced that's ideal for their health in most cases, but I think health insurance hides the costs of wasting your doctor's time. (Which is to say, I wouldn't be concerned about making it illegal if it stopped being so effective.)

In my experience a lot of doctors are just happy when patients take real interest in their own health, even if that particular drug isn't the best choice. Jaded by too many noncompliant patients.

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#149

Post by tryingagainbro »

hawkice wrote: post #76
EvanAnderson wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ick! This reinforces my belief that direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs should be illegal.

I'm more concerned people dragoon their doctors based on some half-incoherent Super Bowl ad. They can't possibly be convinced that's ideal for their health in most cases, but I think health insurance hides the costs of wasting your doctor's time. (Which is to say, I wouldn't be concerned about making it illegal if it stopped being so effective.)

That's why they advertise on Superbowl, TV shows and everywhere else. To make people think they have something and their pill can make it go away. Doctor Johnson doesn't prescribe it, another one will.

Otherwise they'd only target doctors, in their offices, trade mags and all. http://www.businessinsider.com/infographic-america-is-over-m...

Re: The Family Making Billions from the Opioid Crisis

#150

Post by nate_meurer »

joering2 wrote: post #117
nsedlet wrote: post #18

The Sacklers have ingratiated themselves at the highest levels of society using a fortune that's at best built on a product of dubious value, and at worst obtained at the cost of the lives of tens of thousands of people. I think this piece points to a big problem: we worship money and those that accumulate it, and often ignore the question of how much societal value was created in exchange for it. The least we can co…

I definitely don't wanna play devils advocate for these scumbags, but can't you apply your logic to basically any product? I mean, Coca-Cola. Its at best product of dubious value, and at worst produced for the need for sugar by tens of thousands of people.

Not sure how deliberate your example was, but you can't hardly beat Coca Cola as a damaging influence on society. Coca Cola spends millions on propaganda disguised as research, designed to convince people that their product is not a health hazard. They're no better than the big tobacco companies.

And let's not forget that the sugar industry as a whole has done this on a vast scale over decades, bribing scientists and funding shoddy research in order to encourage abusive consumption of the substances they promote [2].

I don't think it's at all controversial to state that the sugar industry has cost millions of Americans their health or their lives.

1 - https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/12/the-food-industry-is...

2 - https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/09/sugar-industry-bough...

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