US Opioid crisis

[gosub]

Now that Taylor Weyeneth is out of the way
Any chance of hurrying up with :S.778 - 115th Congress (2017-2018): Prescription Drug Monitoring Act of 2017

Because, yes it is as you said, Mr Trump, "a National Public Health Emergency". But a national budget of $57,000 and a threat of death penalty of dealers isn't going to cut it.

 

[spring-peeper]

Some how I would have put this in the "What stupid shit has Trump done today?" thread

 

[gosub]

Some how I would have put this in the "What stupid shit has Trump done today?" thread

This problem will take longer to deal with than Trump's Presidency.

 

[phillm]

If we must have the death penalty let's start with these...

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain

 

[stockwelljonny]

yes, really good article

 

[gosub]

If we must have the death penalty let's start with these...

The Family That Built an Empire of Pain

Article says the fella is dead anyway. Its not the way to go IMO anyway. If BIG PHARMA have to pay big bucks in fines over this already, why is there only $57,000 in the pot for dealing with the issue?

 

[not-bono-ever]

its sorta a copy of a copy but you get the gist- I am sure many urbs will not be unaware at the advertising of prescription meds on common or garden telly in the USA

 

[ice-is-forming]

 

[gosub]

Even if you hold branded Big Pharma's feet to the fire you have the generics and cheap Chinese et al knock offs you can order on line.

 

[8ball]

its sorta a copy of a copy but you get the gist- I am sure many urbs will not be unaware at the advertising of prescription meds on common or garden telly in the USA

"Ask your physician for...."

Yeah, proper sinister to a Brit.
Didn't really occur to me that they were actually flogging strong opiates this way, though. Probably because a lot of the celebrity deaths seem to have involved what we might call "under the table" prescribing.

 

[not-bono-ever]

Even if you hold branded Big Pharma's feet to the fire you have the generics and cheap Chinese et al knock offs you can order on line.

a friend had to order some diaz online for chronic shoulder issues and to be able relax on long haul flights . the vendor offered a bogoff freebie batchb from a list of other generics for being a first order. he declined this generous offer - and yes, amongst those meds were a category packed full of opioids. Its pretty shocking how easy it is to get them actually

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

"A Probably because a lot of the celebrity deaths seem to have involved what we might call "under the table" prescribing.

It's fentanyl that's wreaking havoc. Seems you injure yourself, doc prescribes some opiate pain relief, and again and again, then stops once you're hooked, so you look elsewhere (the net) and at some point fentanyl arrives instead of what you ordered and you die without ever knowing what it was that killed you. 100's of 1000's of people, Whacko, Prince and so on

 

[8ball]

It's fentanyl that's wreaking havoc. Seems you injure yourself, doc prescribes some opiate pain relief, and again and again, then stops once you're hooked, so you look elsewhere (the net) and at some point fentanyl arrives instead of what you ordered and you die without ever knowing what it was that killed you. 100's of 1000's of people, Whacko, Prince and so on

My limited experience of fentanyl is that it's bloody horrible. Made me depressed as fuck for 3 days following it. Maybe that helps people get hooked.

I thought it was propofol with Jackson. Which is a weird as fuck thing to be hooked on. Though weird as fuck to be taking it without airway support etc. in the first place.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

I thought it was propofol with Jackson.

He was on both AFAIR. Propofol doesn't provide pain relief, so the two can go together, if you're done with living...

 

[yield]

F.D.A. approves powerful new opioid despite warnings of likely abuse
02/11/18

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved a new form of an extremely potent opioid to manage acute pain in adults, weeks after the chairman of the advisory committee that reviewed it asked the agency to reject it on grounds that it would likely be abused.

The drug, Dsuvia, is a tablet form of sufentanil, a synthetic opioid that has been used intravenously and in epidurals since the 1980s. It is 10 times stronger than fentanyl, a parent drug that is often used in hospitals but is also produced illegally in forms that have caused tens of thousands of overdose deaths in recent years.

2017 was the worst year ever for drug overdose deaths in America
16/08/17

2016 was the worst year for drug overdose deaths in America — at least, until 2017 came along.

According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 72,000 people in the US are predicted to have died from drug overdoses in 2017 — nearly 200 a day. That’s up from 2016, which was already a record year in which roughly 64,000 people in the US died from overdoses. At least two-thirds of drug overdose deaths in 2016 and 2017 were linked to opioids.

If the estimate holds, it means drug overdoses in 2017 killed more people than guns, car crashes, or HIV/AIDS ever killed in a single year in the US. As with 2016, the 2017 death toll is higher than all US military casualties in the Vietnam and Iraq wars combined.

 

[NoXion]

Isn't fentanyl itself such a powerful opioid, that the tiniest dose can be lethal unless your body is already seriously used to banging down the heavy shit? Why on Earth would anyone need anything ten times more powerful than that?

 

[8ball]

Isn't fentanyl itself such a powerful opioid, that the tiniest dose can be lethal unless your body is already seriously used to banging down the heavy shit? Why on Earth would anyone need anything ten times more powerful than that?

People will take what they can get when hooked on it.

 

[NoXion]

People will take what they can get when hooked on it.

I meant more in terms of medical application. The article says it's for acute pain? Then why so strong? I thought medical practice was to start on the lighter stuff beforehand, only moving onto stronger stuff if the pain persists, i.e. it turns out to be chronic rather than acute.

But then again I know barely anything about pharmacology, so maybe there is some medical reasoning behind it.

 

[8ball]

I meant more in terms of medical application. The article says it's for acute pain? Then why so strong? I thought medical practice was to start on the lighter stuff beforehand, only moving onto stronger stuff if the pain persists, i.e. it turns out to be chronic rather than acute.

But then again I know barely anything about pharmacology, so maybe there is some medical reasoning behind it.

Sometimes it is used as an adjunct to general anaesthetics (it means you can use less propofol and get the patient up faster), but in that case it’s still unwarranted in terms of personal prescribing.

Maybe someone here knows more than me on this point.

 

[Supine]

I meant more in terms of medical application. The article says it's for acute pain? Then why so strong? I thought medical practice was to start on the lighter stuff beforehand, only moving onto stronger stuff if the pain persists, i.e. it turns out to be chronic rather than acute.

But then again I know barely anything about pharmacology, so maybe there is some medical reasoning behind it.

Acute in medical terms generally means short duration / recent so had nothing to do with level of pain. Drugs like Fentanyl are given where pain is extreme e.g. Fucking hurts. Normally is for short term use while the underlying cause is removed by other means.

 

[nogojones]

I meant more in terms of medical application. The article says it's for acute pain? Then why so strong? I thought medical practice was to start on the lighter stuff beforehand, only moving onto stronger stuff if the pain persists, i.e. it turns out to be chronic rather than acute.

But then again I know barely anything about pharmacology, so maybe there is some medical reasoning behind it.

Palliative care, when you've already worked your way up through the other available options?

And it's also about dose. OK it's 10 X stronger, you may find that they are giving doses 10 X smaller. I'm not sure about this particular med, but different opiates have different halflives in the body, so there may be a use for it because of this.

 

[yield]

The making of an opioid epidemic
08/11/18

When high doses of painkillers led to widespread addiction, it was called one of the biggest mistakes in modern medicine. But this was no accident.

Worth a read.

 

[equationgirl]

I meant more in terms of medical application. The article says it's for acute pain? Then why so strong? I thought medical practice was to start on the lighter stuff beforehand, only moving onto stronger stuff if the pain persists, i.e. it turns out to be chronic rather than acute.

But then again I know barely anything about pharmacology, so maybe there is some medical reasoning behind it.

Acute pain is the medical term for pain of any intensity that is not long term. Plus some types of pain are not responsive to other painkillers. Renal pain is hard to treat, for example, and has been likened in equivalence to the pain of child birth. Chronic pain is long term pain.

The term chronic is usually taken to mean 'bad' rather than 'long term'.

 

[yield]

Documents reveal new details about Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin
January 15, 2019

When Purdue Pharma started selling its prescription opioid painkiller OxyContin in 1996, Dr. Richard Sackler asked people gathered for the launch party to envision natural disasters like an earthquake, a hurricane, or a blizzard. The debut of OxyContin, said Sackler — a member of the family that started and controls the company and then a company executive — “will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”

Five years later, as questions were raised about the risk of addiction and overdoses that came with taking OxyContin and opioid medications, Sackler outlined a strategy that critics have long accused the company of unleashing: divert the blame onto others, particularly the people who became addicted to opioids themselves.

“We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in an email in February 2001. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

 

[yield]

Purdue Pharma and Sacklers Reach $270 Million Settlement in Opioid Lawsuit
March 26, 2019

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, and its owners, the Sackler family, agreed to pay $270 million to avoid going to a state court trial over the company’s role in the opioid addiction epidemic that has killed more than 200,000 Americans over the past two decades.

The payment, negotiated to settle a case brought by the state of Oklahoma, was far larger than two previous settlements Purdue Pharma had reached with other states. It could jolt other settlement talks with the company, including those in a consolidated collection of 1600 cases overseen by a federal judge in Cleveland.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

I wonder who this guy pissed off to actually get convicted:

The head of a leading drug manufacturer has been found guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe a dangerous painkiller to patients who did not need it, in the first criminal conviction of a pharma chief over the opioid epidemic.

A Boston jury also found John Kapoor, the 75-year-old billionaire founder of Insys Therapeutics, guilty of defrauding insurance companies in the push to sell Subsys, a spray made from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times stronger than morphine.

Subsys was approved for terminal cancer patients but the company targeted sales at a much bigger and more profitable market of people with non-life threatening chronic pain. Prosecutors said that fuelled the opioid epidemic and cost lives.

Four other Insys executives were also convicted on similar racketeering charges after the jury took two weeks to deliberate. They each face up to 20 years in prison.

Billionaire founder of opioid firm guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe drug

Somehow I doubt that he's going to get prison time. I hope I'm wrong. A billionare drug dealer who sells addictive shit, even though he knows its killing people, is going to be treated completely different than a street dealer. Still, there's 400,000 dead from this crisis. Its actually managed to lower life expectancy in the US by several months. And, he isn't the only one....

 

[Poi E]

Wonder if legalised weed would have pushed down the numbers seeking chronic pain relief.

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Wonder if legalised weed would have pushed down the numbers seeking chronic pain relief.

I wouldn't be surprised. I know a number of veterans with chronic pain that use it instead of their prescribed meds. They do this in spite of VA rules that drug test them to make sure they're taking their prescriptions. One guy I talked to described smoking weed when he knew he didn't have a VA appointment, and then taking the prescription enough to test positive when he has an appointment. Its perverse.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

I wonder who this guy pissed off to actually get convicted:



Billionaire founder of opioid firm guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe drug

Somehow I doubt that he's going to get prison time. I hope I'm wrong. A billionare drug dealer who sells addictive shit, even though he knows its killing people, is going to be treated completely different than a street dealer. Still, there's 400,000 dead from this crisis. Its actually managed to lower life expectancy in the US by several months. And, he isn't the only one....

I hope you're wrong about him/them not facing jail-time. In the UK they would get peerages, at least in your country, sometimes, the rich and powerful do get their desserts.

 

[Poi E]

At least the Tate and National Portrait Gallery have stopped taking donations from the disreputable Sackler family.