Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

> I got a vasectomy recently and was told to expect a day or two of pain

I didn't get anything after mine. I nearly fainted outside the clinic waiting to be picked up when the feelings all suddenly caught up with me.

Not only that, some of the problem with addiction were directly caused by the dosage guidelines for oxycontin. They really wanted it to be a 12h drug, but it really isn't and it wears off after about 8 hours. Rather than admitting this and giving a smaller dosage more frequently they doubled down by using a larger dose and trying to keep with the 12h schedule.

This combination or larger dose followed by mild withdrawal then results in a higher likelihood to become addicted to opioids. So not only they marketed it heavily and got more people on opioids than necessary, they did it in a way that maximizes the likelihood of addiction.

https://www.latimes.com/projects/oxycontin-part1/

> I don't understand people who think the Sacklers are villains who destroyed lives, but Purdue should continue operating more-or-less as-is

I’ve got a friend that’s the same in Afghanistan - he thinks it was right to go in, and it was right to abandon it - which to me sounds like moral myopia. Surely it was either wrong to begin with, or you have to stick around.

>both edits are not in our comment chain

The first edit I mentioned is in this comment chain and the second one was in response to my post in a different chain.

>Nobody forced anyone to get vaccinated

Really? This is trivially false. For example vaccination was extensively mandated in several countries by law, for example some provinces in China.[0] In the US certain states require proof of vaccination for certain activities. For example in New York vaccination is required to go to school.[1] Perhaps you meant "not all people were forced to get vaccinated?" That is not being debated here. In any case I never even made an argument about this point until now. And in any case I don't feel too strongly about whether "force" is the right word to describe vaccine mandates. My only points were that if your boss tells you you'll lose your job if you don't have sex with him he has forced you to quit (assuming you cannot get him fired, for example if you have no proof he said that and will continue harassing you) and secondly that "forced to trust" is not complete nonsense.

>You seem to have another agenda here

You're the one that tried to say that a boss extorting sex isn't considered forcing you to quit your job in order to maintain your position. My point was actually fairly clear and not even about vaccination.

>One is rather clear and the other one is nitpicking to get an agenda across.

I would agree except you're not even nitpicking you're just claiming that whatever you decide "force" means is the one that OP must hold by as opposed to "throwing dictionaries" at the problem.

[0] https://doi.org/10.2147/RMHP.S336434

[1] https://www.health.ny.gov/prevention/immunization/schools/sc...

I mostly agree!

I'll quibble on two points. "used as a wedge issue by foreigners", while perhaps true in some moral sense, it does not really make much sense, on closer scrutiny. To reduce things down to being some foreign imposition is to suggest that it could have been any product. But it couldn't - only opium has the special properties necessary to become this kind of product. Nobody fought a war over tobacco, or even cocaine.

It is also true that Arabia, and even the ancient Greeks ('land of the lotus eaters') were aware of and could obtain Opium. However, I'd inquire as to how it is that the primary opium growing regions of Arabia are doing lately, or say, ever.

It is true that Opium has been available to varying degrees, at various times, in various places without a total social breakdown. However, widespread, sustained, cheap availability of pure Opium without total social breakdown is, as far as I know, unheard of. The over the counter stuff in Europe and the early US were mixed with other things, as in Laudanum. Almost all of high society at the time was addicted anyway, and this was the mild form.

The Chinese discovered that they could smoke it, and changing ROA from oral to smoking is a radical step change in addictiveness. I'm not entirely sure why this didn't catch on elsewhere at the time, but the fact of the matter is it didn't, and the difference between these things is a difference in kind, not degree.

> It is not a choice between continued sadism or free reign herion and cocaine dealing

I hope you're right! But I don't observe anything in the world that would support it, unfortunately. I quit because I was arrested, for instance. I want to be careful about causal meaning here, I didn't stay off because I was arrested, but it was the excipient that proximately caused and also facilitated it. It was a structural break that allowed other things to change around it.

That's not to say that the judicial system is a good way to deal with things - it's not. But the credible threat of the judicial system cannot really be done away with here without courting disaster. When dealing with highly physically addictive substances, shaping short term behavior by force is often a necessary ingredient in having any hope of shaping medium or long term behavior via therapy, life circumstance changes, or anything else.