This is a big ugly mess... but I think this lawsuit and this article may be a little.... slanted. "Go get the big evil drug companies! Forget the accountability of the people popping the pills for the wrong reasons." No doubt the drug companies have a part in this... but so do the insurance companies, the doctors, the government, and the people taking these pills. I have a prescription for an opioid. I take one about once per year when a migraine is really out of control and all of the other options haven't worked. I can thank this kind of lawsuit for making it more expensive this year. blergh... I know... it's a real problem... and shame on them for "engaging in a sustained marketing campaign to downplay the addiction risks of the prescription opioid drugs they sell and to exaggerate the benefits of their use for health problems such as chronic pain." but shame on the doctors for prescribing the drugs incorrectly. and some shame on the people taking them too much. and shame on me for being an asshole.Asked by NPR's Robert Siegel whether doctors had a role of their own in overprescribing potentially dangerous medication, DeWine says more fault rests with a culture created by these companies.
I dunno. We've known that for a long while now that a decent chunk of people are susceptible to very strong opioid addiction. Morphine addicts aren't new. Heroin addicts aren't new (in fact, I think heroin was originally created to help ween people off of morphine, but don't quote me on that). This really shouldn't strike us as new because it's not about ethnicity, culture, or economic status. Opioids are a type of drug that literally rewires your brain to get you hooked. The fact that the medical community, from doctors to pharmaceutical companies, have known about the danger for decades and somehow things still got out of control? Maybe it's not fair, but they seem to be a reasonable target for a lot of this blame. The layman though? How many people really expect them to know how dangerous this stuff is? Worse yet, it's been ingrained in American cultures to trust doctors. Your doctor knows better than you. His knowledge overrides your doubts and concerns. You don't know what you're doing in regards to your health, he does. Talk to your doctor. Trust your doctor. Listen to your doctor. Victim blaming is just as much a part of our culture. Someone becomes an addict though? It's not the doctor's fault. It's their fault. Vices are the symptoms of being spiritually flawed, weak willed, or some other fault in character value. But reality is much more nuanced and much more unfair than that. So yeah, maybe shame on everybody. But maybe less shame should go to the addicts and maybe the gatekeepers should get the lions share.
Ahhhh, but who profits? Insurance companies have to pay for the drugs (with premiums). Doctors are net zero - once you filter out the junkets and swag. The government? I think I linked this somewhere but suffice it to say, they get to deal with a public health crisis. The people taking these pills? Well, let's agree they're not coming out ahead. They sure as shit aren't popping up on Forbes worth $14 billion. And you have my sympathy and my admiration. My mother in law has two prescriptions for Oxy and she refused to fill either. But the compounding pharmacy next to where my kid gets her hair cut has a big sign that says "WE HAVE NO OXYCONTIN" and bars on the windows. And my wife's medical sample boxes were stolen three times by pillheads who think anything that says "medical" on it is worth the risk. And I can be mad at junkies for junking but dollars to donuts they likely wish they weren't stealing fuckin' urine samples either. There's a powerful profit motive behind the opioid crisis. Wars have been fought over profits. Meanwhile, the drawbacks are externalizing all over everyone else. No less than St. Milton Friedman made this argument: if the public interest wants any control over the externalities of trade, they need to litigate to limit that trade. If they don't litigate, they don't get to bitch.No doubt the drug companies have a part in this... but so do the insurance companies, the doctors, the government, and the people taking these pills.
I have a prescription for an opioid. I take one about once per year when a migraine is really out of control and all of the other options haven't worked.
Doctors really do a terrible job of driving home the risks of taking these medications when they prescribe them. Add in on top of that the fact that a lot of the time these things are being prescribed and explained at a time when the patient is already on painkillers due to a surgery or what have you and not likely to be at full mental function. They fail to explain that it is crucial to take the medication at the intervals prescribed and not let the levels in the patient's system get too low before the next dose as repeated cycles of that high are what causes the addiction. If the level is kept even the risk is minimized.
"persusasion schemes" aren't illegal, thankfully^. malicious intent is somewhat illegal, but of course their intent wasn't malice it was profit. this lawsuit will not stick, and that's not the point of it. the point is getting into npr, and scoring with the base. (and yeah, i'm sure they're utopianists who think that suing the big bad company will get people to stop taking opiates. dunno whether that's a positive trait or not, because it's pretty stupid. but it's well-meant.) anyway. america has a pain problem. i think lifestyles are a major cause, as well as the expectation that pain is abnormal. for most of human history, pain was normal. teeth, bones, stomach, etc. i think a) we have more sources of pain than we used to because no one gets any exercise and diets are shot to hell blah blah.... and b) it is finally possible to live a fair bit of your life without any pain at all. this is brand new. 70 years, max. however, unless you want to become addicted to opiates OR you want to live extremely healthily, there will come a point when you have to deal with pain. surprise, most people choose opiates over living healthily. are they to blame? yeah partially. but in their defense, i'm sure most of them were essentially informed that what they were taking was a miracle drug. as a population we are used to ignoring the side effects list on the bottle, but it's always there. the end. ^the same people who bitch constantly about police states want to make basically everything illegal. i'm certainly not the first person to mention that irony, but, you know, it's worth calling out periodically
I don't know the facts of the case, but I imagine that the main thrust of the lawsuit is that the side effects were either undersold or ignored altogether by the manufacturer. When Oxycontin was first introduced, the manufacturer went to great lengths to say in their marketing that "less than 1% of people who take pain medicine for pain become addicts." They repeated this line over and over, and they ignored all the contrary evidence. Malicious intent or fraud notwithstanding, I think it could be argued that many pain medicines are defective products, and have caused great injuries to many legal users of them. Although I'm sympathetic to the argument that people bear a lot of the responsibility for this problem themselves, for the above reasons, I wouldn't be surprised if lawsuits like these prove to be successful.
yeah. i will be monitoring this one with interest as it stumbles deeper into the abyss of the american judicial system. but judges are lately rather more afraid of the precedent they are setting for future cases than of the short-term repercussions of the decision at hand, which i think weighs in favor of pharma. i very much doubt they will be culpable, so far removed as they are from the physical insertion of the drug into the body. and oxy has helped plenty of people recover from injuries and surgeries. tough question.
You're comparing two completely different things. One is the actions of individuals whose actions are clearly breaking laws that are written in black and white. The other is actions of a collection of people, who might be acting unethically, but for all intents and purposes are following all the laws and regulations that apply to the businesses responsible for the manufacturing and distributing of legal substances. There is a real chance that no one involved in this whole ordeal was acting maliciously and that the mess we're in is just another result of failing system. You're upset. That's cool. This is something worth being upset about. That doesn't mean though that anyone actually did anything legally wrong, or else this would be a criminal trial, not a lawsuit.