Why Should Taxpayers Pay for the Opioid Crisis When Pharma Caused It? | Alternet
▻https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/why-should-taxpayers-pay-opioid-crisis-when-pharma-caused-it
As everyone today knows, opioid narcotics like fentanyl, hydrocodone, hydromorphone, morphine and oxycodone have created a toxic epidemic in the United States with at least 100 daily overdose deaths. This happened because Pharma paid off doctors, medical associations and federal lawmakers to loosen opioid regulations.
There was a reason narcotics were traditionally limited to severe pain cases, not “everyday” pain—they are addicting and can kill, as we are now seeing. But Pharma—especially the Sackler family’s Purdue which makes OxyContin—banked on the fact that younger doctors and patients did not remember why narcotics were so heavily restricted. They were right.
As new Pharma-driven prescribing guidelines were drafted and the industry-appeasing FDA waved new pills and patches through despite daily deaths, brazen “pill mills” and “Oxy docs” popped up, as did legions of addicts. Soon “opioid addiction” treatment clinics popped up to play the other side of the street—the addictions caused by the pill mills—further enriching Pharma.
Not only can narcotics like the popular OxyContin, Vicodin, Percocet and the fentanyl patch lead to coma, respiratory depression, shock, pulmonary edema and death, but studies suggest they can increase a body’s sensitivity to pain and make pain worse—a phenomenon called opioid-induced hyperalgesia. The drugs also cause constipation, hormonal derangement and negative mental changes.