Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

washingtonpost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

591–600 of 691 posts

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#591

Post by ab5tract »

beaeglebeachedd wrote: post #573
Retric wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doctors, did not .. The reason, the person who discovered it was a vet. You’re wildly incorrect, nobody involved was a vet. Barry Marshall shared that Nobel and is a Doctor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall Robin Warren received his M.B.B.S. an undergraduate degree focused on medical research. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Warren He worked at: “SA Pathology, (formerly the Institute of Medical and…

Chinese emporers were controlling opiates all the way back in the 1700s and the British were tied up in war for 20 years over the wreckage to the Chinese addicts. The doctors, all college educated, some of our most studied and intelligent citizens, they knew about the history of opiates and im not talking about the dare campaign. I knew before the epidemic even got into force when I tossed the opiates I was prescribe…

“Tied up in a war” is a funny way to say “aggressively breaking Chinese law in order to hook local populations, make tons of drug money, and collapse public order.”

The Opium Wars were a cynical prototype for the modern war on drugs, which was initiated with similar designs and outcomes.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#592

Post by brobdingnag_pp »

jhgvh wrote: post #590
sneak wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7x as many people in the US die from cigarettes every hour, day, week, month, and year as from all opioids combined. Cigarettes don’t even require a prescription. If there is an opioid crisis, there is a 7x larger tobacco crisis, too.

Tobacco companies have paid out countless nine figure sums, smoking in public has gone from universal to mostly illegal, cig taxes have skyrocketed, etc… Tobacco has been treated as a crisis, and I have no doubt that if cigarettes had been invented by one specific family, that family would be hated. Weird that you don’t know any of this.

What’s weird is that people still think tobacco smoking is about nicotine being addictive and dangerous, when it is literally everything else in the smoke that makes it extremely addictive and mortally dangerous.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#593

Post by adastra22 »

qarl wrote: post #521
adastra22 wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion. I think those owed restitution would feel differently about the primary purpose.

Yeah. I looked up the settlement - it amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per individual. I can see how that would be important to many people.

And to people whose lives were wrecked by addiction. Tens of thousands of dollars would be a welcome windfall to people on HN, but to these families it could even be life changing amounts of money. Sucks that their payout is now delayed indefinitely.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#594

Post by jhgvh »

brobdingnag_pp wrote: post #592
jhgvh wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tobacco companies have paid out countless nine figure sums, smoking in public has gone from universal to mostly illegal, cig taxes have skyrocketed, etc… Tobacco has been treated as a crisis, and I have no doubt that if cigarettes had been invented by one specific family, that family would be hated. Weird that you don’t know any of this.

What’s weird is that people still think tobacco smoking is about nicotine being addictive and dangerous, when it is literally everything else in the smoke that makes it extremely addictive and mortally dangerous.

Can you please tell me which of these mandatory warning messages you feel fails to convey that cigarette smoke, on the whole, is dangerous?

https://www.fda.gov/tobacco-products/labeling-and-warning-st...

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#595

Post by brobdingnag_pp »

com2kid wrote: post #455
beaeglebeachedd wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same shit practically all the way back to opium wars. Always the drug dealers fault. I blame the patient. We've known opiates were bad since at least the 1800s, and really longer than that. What the doc said was just what they needed to hear to lie to themselves, but this is taught in every highschool.

> I blame the patient. We've known opiates were bad since at least the 1800s, and really longer than that. As a reminder, Oxy was heavily marketed, (to doctors!) as a "not bad" opioid. As in, not as addictive, not as problematic, and something that can be prescribed more easily and with less worries. If a doctor comes up and tell you "don't worry about this one, it isn't addictive like the others", and you are in a t…

Heroin was introduced as a cure to morphine addiction.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#596

Post by checkyoursudo »

mktemp-d wrote: post #500
janice1999 wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're really underselling it if anything. Over a million Americans have died so far in the opioid epidemic. That more than any of their wars, including their civil war.

A good book to read regarding this topic is "Death in Mud Lick" by Eric Eyre who was a reporter for a local newspaper in WV during the early discovery phase of the epidemic. The book details the methods used by the drug companies to pedal these drugs into small communities, the tragic victims, and lastly the refusal of drug suppliers to admit any wrong doing. There's also a slight dose (no pun intended) of WV AG's sh…

*peddle

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#597

Post by chii »

dylan604 wrote: post #273
rootusrootus wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering the patience the US has with getting justice against other individuals who have fled our jurisdiction, we could do the same here. We also have an enormous amount of influence in the financial sector in other western nations, so we could at least make their lives less lavish and comfortable. Throwing up our hands and declaring it an unsolvable issue just encourages others to misbehave and then escape the s…

If we can seize Russian oligarch's money, why could the US Gov't not seize assets of a US citizen even if living abroad?

Because US citizens have rights that are not granted to non-US citizens.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#598

Post by chii »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #520
thegrimmest wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Loaning money at 200% interest to vulnerable people is usury and should be illegal Stop with the patronizing. Any transaction between consenting parties (backed by bankruptcy protection) should be allowed. We're all grown ups, let people make their own decisions. Setting upper limits on interest rates simply makes it so that high-risk borrowers are unable to access credit. This harms those borrowers more than anyon…

> Stop with the patronizing. Any transaction between consenting parties (backed by bankruptcy protection) should be allowed. Any? Can I sell my kidney? You are arguing an extreme minority opinion, consumer protection laws exist because it is not possible for an average consumer to understand all safety implications of vehicle design, house construction or a medical procedure.

> it is not possible for an average consumer to understand all safety implications of vehicle design

and that is why there is and must be independent regulation. The consumer doesn't need to understand vehicle design, they just need to understand safety _ratings_ that must be assessed via third parties (typically, a gov't institution).

So why did the FDA fail to assess the drug properly?

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#599

Post by boxed »

brobdingnag_pp wrote: post #592
jhgvh wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tobacco companies have paid out countless nine figure sums, smoking in public has gone from universal to mostly illegal, cig taxes have skyrocketed, etc… Tobacco has been treated as a crisis, and I have no doubt that if cigarettes had been invented by one specific family, that family would be hated. Weird that you don’t know any of this.

What’s weird is that people still think tobacco smoking is about nicotine being addictive and dangerous, when it is literally everything else in the smoke that makes it extremely addictive and mortally dangerous.

The nicotine is what makes it addictive, but everything else makes it deadly.

This distinction is well known here in Sweden where we have snus, and also lower rates of lung cancer and cigarette use than the rest of Europe by a LOT.

Re: Supreme Court blocks controversial Purdue Pharma opioid settlement

#600

Post by dguest »

skellera wrote: post #499
addicted wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d argue it’s the opposite. Look at what’s happened since Oxycontin was heavily regulated. Opioid deaths in America have exploded by an order of magnitude. There’s a direct correlation between higher regulation of OxyContin and opioid deaths in the U.S. The Sacklers have done illegal stuff. Misrepresenting the addictiveness of their drugs (well, it was immoral and wrong…it’s not clear how illegal it was). But it’s q…

Are you one of the lawyers? None of that would’ve happened if they didn’t start the flood of opiates to begin with. It wasn’t a marginally increased issue, they flooded the market with it. People with minor pain were getting massive bottles of OxyContin and selling or using it. This led to pill mills and crooked doctors. You had normal people getting hooked on high dosages. These are not the people who were using opi…

A bartender mocked my brother for getting Aspirin for his broken arm.

"man you got nothin', you should get some oxy for that!"

I'd been living outside the US and this in my first few hours back on US soil. A few hours later my friend (working in criminal defense) explained how opiates accounted for roughly 1/3rd of his income (other sources: drunk driving and domestic abuse). They all followed the same trajectory: minor condition -> prescribed oxy -> illegally obtained oxy -> heroin when the money ran out.

This wasn't normal. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world at the time, or at least not where I was living.

Post reply on HN