Opinion | These Newborn Babies Cry for Drugs, Not Milk - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/07/opinion/sunday/babies-opioid-addiction-west-virginia.html
Un éditorial plein de fougue et de colère, très bien écrit et qui pose les véritables questions de la rapacité, des entreprises et de la défaillance du système pour réguler celles-ci.
His body dependent on opioids, he writhes, trembles and cries. He is exhausted but cannot sleep. He vomits, barely eats and has lost weight.
He is also a baby. Just 1 month old, he wails in the nursery of the CAMC Women and Children’s Hospital here. A volunteer “cuddler” holds him while walking around, murmuring sweetly, hour after hour, but he is inconsolable. What his body craves is heroin.
Every 15 minutes in America, a child is born after a prenatal exposure to opioids. Here in West Virginia, 14 percent of babies are born exposed to drugs, and perhaps 5 percent more to alcohol, totaling nearly one out of five newborns. Some get by without symptoms, but for many, their very first experience after birth is the torment of withdrawal.
Pharmaceutical executives are battling lawsuits by blaming drug users. I wish those executives had to cuddle these infants who, partly because of their reckless greed, suffer so much.
Executives in three-piece suits were drug lords as guilty as any from Medellín. The Washington Post reported that pharma companies shipped 76 billion opioid pain pills from 2006 through 2012. A single pharmacy in Kermit, W.V., sold more than 13 million over those seven years — and Kermit has a population of just over 400 people.
So today, hospitals in West Virginia and across America struggle to calm babies who sometimes begin to go through withdrawal as soon as the umbilical cord is cut.
There’s plenty of blame to go around, encompassing opioid-abusing moms and opioid-prescribing doctors. But it’s appropriate to feel special loathing for executives at pharma companies whose corporate strategy was to profit by getting people hooked. Some of the companies funded a movement claiming that pain was the “fifth vital sign” and urged doctors to prescribe more painkillers, and then paid them kickbacks to do so.
Almost 80 percent of heroin users began with prescription pain pills, though not necessarily prescribed to them.
Newborn babies struggling through withdrawal are only one dimension of America’s opioid crisis. Every seven minutes another American dies of an overdose; 2.1 million children live with a parent with a drug dependency.
McKinsey and Company, the global consulting company, issued a sober report last fall warning that “the opioid crisis will worsen over the next three to five years.” What McKinsey didn’t say was that it had previously advised Johnson & Johnson to be more aggressive in peddling opioids for back pain and to encourage doctors to prescribe stronger, more addictive pills.
These drug-addicted newborns are suffering partly because of Johnson & Johnson, McKinsey, Purdue Pharma, McKesson and many other companies; these babies are a reminder of why corporate regulation is essential.