Congress Is About To Pass A Bill That Shows D.C. At Its Worst — It May Also Turn Around The Opioid Crisis And Cure Cancer | The Huffington Post
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In 1996, Purdue Pharma introduced a new painkiller it said carried a low risk of abuse or addiction. It called the drug “OxyContin.”
In reality, of course, OxyContin was extremely addictive — and Purdue knew it. A decade later, three Purdue executives, and the company itself, pleaded guilty to criminal charges tied to OxyContin’s marketing and agreed to pay more than $600 million in fines.
But the executives dodged prison time, and the prosecution did little to slow the rise of opioid use. The pharmaceutical industry had spent the past 10 years and billions of dollars pushing the medical community to ramp up the use of OxyContin and other opioids. By 2013, the number of annual opioid prescriptions, including short term and multiple, had nearly tripled, topping 200 million — in a country of just over 300 million people.
Use of OxyContin and other opioids grew to crisis levels. As federal and state governments cracked down on doctors who dispensed pills and prescriptions indiscriminately, users turned to heroin instead: Four out of five new heroin users started out by abusing prescription painkillers. The results have devastated and overwhelmed first responders and an ill-equipped and ideologically hidebound treatment system. From 2010 to 2012, heroin overdose rates doubled in 28 states, according to a 2014 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report. In 2014, more than 28,000 Americans died of opioid overdoses, an all-time high, according to the agency. There’s no reason to think the death rate has slowed since then.
Congress is ready to act. On Wednesday, the House will consider the #21st_Century_Cures_Act, a bill that would commit billions of dollars to medical research while sending $1 billion to states to help combat heroin and painkiller addiction and recovery.
But there’s a complication: Instead of cracking down on the pharmaceutical companies that fueled the boom in opioid abuse, lawmakers are rewarding the industry. No health care-related bill of this size could move through Congress without the support of Big Pharma. The authors of the 21st Century Cures Act earned the industry’s support by including regulatory rollbacks that drugmakers have long sought and creating cheaper and quicker paths for drug approval by reducing safeguards. It’s as if the fire department had to pay off the arsonist to get permission to put out a fire.