re: Purdue pharma pays 270m settlement to Oklahoma for starting opioid crisis

How irresponsible do you have to be to die from opioids? I’ve mixed oxys and alcohol dozens of times and sure it’s fun but addictive?

How is that douchey?

ETA: Misread it due to your formatting and my ADHD. It’s pretty douchey

And for the record, I'm definitely not against opiates completely for pain management.

The hard stuff needs to only be used in severe circumstance however and have very tight controls on pill count per bottle, doctor oversight, etc.

And for any moderately low pain or less there should rarely be opiates prescribed outside of a single dose or two. One of the huge issues, which is getting way better with new med school grads, was the over prescribing opiates for things like minor bone bone fractures of hands/fingers and sprained ankles, etc. You might justify a couple lortabs, you don't need 30 pills with 2 refills.

The oversight on it just really needs to improve. shite, there was a tiny town in West Virginia that was filling more opiate prescriptions than there were residents in the city. It was an obvious mill and the government was clueless.

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I need it probably once every two years and it’s hard as hell to get the heavy stuff anymore. So apparently LA is doing something right.

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Its wayyyy better than it used to be.

We're seeing the effects of stiffer controls and regulation now with the huge heroin surge. People who can't get their pills are switching to the real stuff. A VAST majority of heroin users got hooked originally on opiate pharmaceuticals.

And the dealers are putting fentanyl in their doses to make it stronger.

Its fricked.

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The reason it was such a popular prescription was because doctors were led to believe it could treat pain without being addictive. They have blood on their hands.

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Presumably those doctors learned how pain receptors work in medical school. Not to excuse Purdue at all, but it's mind boggling that the drs didn't see through the sales pitch as total bullshite. What other quackery are they accepting from pharma reps at face value?

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Presumably those doctors learned how pain receptors work in medical school. Not to excuse Purdue at all, but it's mind boggling that the drs didn't see through the sales pitch as total bullshite. What other quackery are they accepting from pharma reps at face value?

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Totally agree.

But this was also back in the day when pharma would give kickbacks to docs for prescribing their meds. So they either fell for the pitch that less than 1% became addicted or they were taking kick backs. Both are inexcusable.

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I know some highly intelligent and successful people that have had serious issues with pain killers that started with a minor surgery, etc.

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They aren’t smart if they’re hooked on dope

Oklahoma is depressing as shite. Literally the second you cross the border you see Anti Opioid billboard and help 800 numbers

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1) Pain is there for a reason. It is a signal. Pain saves lives because it tells us something is going on in our body that needs to be addressed. Pain relievers completely muck up this process

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Know how I know you’ve never dealt with chronic pain? Most people are able to take pain meds and even abuse them slightly and be just fine. It’s not the doctors in West Virginia and Oklahoma that are out of control, it’s the patients whose lives are such that they fall into opioid addiction and death. People vastly underestimate the role that social, cultural, and environmental factors play in our everyday decision making. And yes this includes you.

Just look at the map. There is little to no correlation between areas where people are prescribed opioids and where people are dying from opioids.

There’s a reason people OD on opioids and it’s much bigger than the actual pill itself.

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It was an obvious mill and the government was clueless. 

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They weren't clueless, they looked the other way.

For a long time pharma distributors have had to report shipments and qty's into a DEA database. Any dumbfrick at the Dea, could have seen the millions of pills pouring into small towns like the West Virginia town you referenced.