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Purdue and other big Oxy peddlers now face trial in federal court

theamericanconservative.com

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Re: Purdue and other big Oxy peddlers now face trial in federal court

#21
post #4
post #2

As with any phenomenon, I don't buy a single-cause explanation. It's way too pat. What about substitutes? Has anyone tried to demonstrate that OxyContin addiction, for example, might not have been heroin addiction if OxyContin wasn't available? Would people in chronic pain not pursue illegal solutions if legal ones weren't available to them?

There's a control group in the form of Europe where overdoses are an order of magnitude lower and have remained relatively stable over the last 10 years at least.

Europe generally has decent mental and physical health treatments as well as decent social security nets which results in less people having to self medicate with legal or illegal drugs.

Re: Purdue and other big Oxy peddlers now face trial in federal court

#22
post #2

As with any phenomenon, I don't buy a single-cause explanation. It's way too pat. What about substitutes? Has anyone tried to demonstrate that OxyContin addiction, for example, might not have been heroin addiction if OxyContin wasn't available? Would people in chronic pain not pursue illegal solutions if legal ones weren't available to them?

Heroin hasn't been marketed as "virtually non-addicting" or actually non-addicting for quite some time, although that's pretty much the exact tagline it had when it first came out. It doesn't take a genius to see that marketing something so incredibly addictive as OxyContin as non-addictive will lead people to take it and get addicted unnecessarily, regardless of any other circumstances. It's simply impossible that this was a mistake. I can buy it may have been a mistake in the late 1800's when heroin first came to market, but in modern times, this was a calculated effort to make money off of people's misery and deaths. "People will die and their lives will be ruined, but we'll make a ton of money off them, so fuck them," is likely what was said before going ahead with this plan.

This was pushed by doctors at the behest of the companies, doctors who the patients trusted had their best intentions in mind. The drug companies knew from history that the US government would not do anything to stop them, but instead would help to promote their drugs over the illicit substances sold on the street that had the exact same effect. To claim that all the advertising, pushing, and money spent on promoting OxyContin had no effect on anyone and that people would have taken heroin regardless without being pushed by the drug companies' machine into first taking something they claimed was benign is fucking absurd and flies in the face of both logic and current research in psychology, advertising, and marketing.

Re: Purdue and other big Oxy peddlers now face trial in federal court

#23
post #2

As with any phenomenon, I don't buy a single-cause explanation. It's way too pat. What about substitutes? Has anyone tried to demonstrate that OxyContin addiction, for example, might not have been heroin addiction if OxyContin wasn't available? Would people in chronic pain not pursue illegal solutions if legal ones weren't available to them?

Purdue encourages GPs to overprescribe Oxycontin, including for period pain and headaches. 13% of those patients who took Oxycontin for headaches became addicted.

Re: Purdue and other big Oxy peddlers now face trial in federal court

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes a lot of sense and definitely applies to more than just OxyContin. I am currently experiencing this with Vyvanse. Luckily, it's way easier to reverse compared to opioids, but still pretty damn hard.

Vyvanse is a prodrug, which means that dosage largely controls duration of effect rather than intensity. I suspect you eat a high protein breakfast or otherwise have a physiology that turns the prodrug into dextroamphetamine more quickly than expected. If Vyvanse doesn't last as long as the manufacturer assumes and comes on more intensely than you need, it's likely a good idea to switch over to dextroamphetamine with…

No way to PM you, but I just want to say thank you for your reply :)
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