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US needs to invest 'tens of billions or hundreds of billions' to fight opioid epidemic
The goal of an opioid is to reduce pain, but the addictive drugs are creating pain for millions of families suffering through the crisis. Deaths from opioid overdoses number at least 42,000 a year in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control.
"This is an epidemic that's been getting worse over 10 to 20 years," Caleb Alexander, co-director of Johns Hopkins Center for Drug Safety, told CNBC's "On The Money" in a recent interview. "I think it's important that we have realistic expectations about the amount of work that it will take and the amount of coordination to turn this steamship around," Alexander added.
[...] Alexander added: "The statistics are stunning. More than 2.1 million Americans have an opioid use disorder or opioid addiction" and he says the country needs to "invest tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars" to shore up the treatment system. He said patients should be able to access medications that "we know work to help reduce the cravings for further opioids."
Don't mention the Portugal model!
Meanwhile, the Massachusetts Attorney General is suing members of the family that runs Purdue Pharma:
Their family name graces some of the nation's most prestigious bastions of culture and learning — the Sackler Center for Arts Education at the Guggenheim Museum, the Sackler Lefcourt Center for Child Development in Manhattan and the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Columbia University, to name a few.
Now the Sackler name is front and center in a lawsuit accusing the family and the company they own and run, Purdue Pharma, of helping to fuel the deadly opioid crisis that has killed thousands of Americans. Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey took the unusual step of naming eight members of the Sackler family this week in an 80-page complaint that accused Purdue Pharma of spinning a "web of illegal deceit" to boost profits.
While prosecutors in more than a dozen other states hit hard by the opioid epidemic have sued Purdue Pharma, Healey is the first to name individual Sackler family members, along with eight company executives.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @04:12PM (12 children)
You can't help junkies. They aren't people anymore. Just let them go and hope that their miserable existence will serve as a warning to your children. I don't want any of my tax dollars helping addicts and junkies. Fuck them.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @04:20PM (5 children)
Why not free up more tax dollars by ending the war on (some) drugs? Iboga root, cannabis flower, and LSD-25 show promise in treatment for addiction. In fact, we can end the war on (some) drugs and make the addicts pay for it with sin taxes.
But that's not really what this is about, is it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @04:23PM (1 child)
Why not both?
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @04:38PM
Well, I realize that my proposal to allow the free market to provide substances with known anti-addictive qualities carries the risk of a critical mass of the working class unable to find work for a living wage (or at all) organizing and demanding the status quo change. It's probably best to keep the excess labor pool locked up in cages.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @04:28PM (2 children)
I don't care if you discover magic unicorn poop that helps junkies. It doesn't matter. They can help themselves if they want to but they don't want help. Fuck them.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Monday June 18 2018, @06:48PM (1 child)
Says someone that is probably an alcoholic.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 19 2018, @05:59AM
What evidence of this do you have?
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @07:06PM (4 children)
Now minimizing expenditure of tax dollars is a totally different topic than "providing help".
It might not help them in the sense of "help" but the cost to society of illegal pills in total including legal and criminality costs must be 100 times the tax dollars of just handing out as many pills as they ask for. They'll probably die quicker (well, maybe, maybe not...) but I know for sure they'll die cheaper with less tax dollars spent....
There is also the side issue of regardless of cost, the effect of quality of life on non-junkies. My wife and I had to deal with an aggressive pan handler, the same scruffy dude, four times, last Saturday in front of the hotel. Ironically a free dispensary would not only save money in the long run but would completely eliminate the negative effect on the people around the junkie, I'd be willing to drop more money to get rid of the panhandler, but it would actually be cheaper to hand out free pills than all the police expense...
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 18 2018, @07:21PM (3 children)
That's not even close to the biggest effect on quality-of-life for non-junkies: For instance, most relatives of junkies will be robbed, repeatedly, by the junkie in question. And of course they have to watch their son/daughter/former BFF/sibling deteriorate and often die. And if they die, everyone around them will be wondering if there's something they could have done to prevent it.
I'm guessing you've never had to witness this.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @08:29PM (1 child)
Theres really at least three options, medical supervision where people live normal lives plus some pills, free dispensary where they don't live as long or as well but its probably the cheapest, and what we have now where addiction requires dodgy products and a life of crime, which is incredibly expensive and costs a lot of human life.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday June 18 2018, @08:59PM
And of course attempts at rehab programs that try to break the addiction. Easier said than done, but it is an option and one I have no philosophical problem with funding so long as there's some effort to do some accreditation and certification of the various programs in question. I've seen it have some success in working, if the person in the program actually wants to get and stay clean.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 18 2018, @11:53PM
Close relation to someone with fetal alcoholism syndrome. It's incurable, costs millions of dollars a year (trillions if you look at it cumulatively) I know a family who bankrupted themselves over it, spent hundreds of thousands on the kid, the state has probably spent a million so far to the early thirties. I bet they could throw a hundred million more at it and the situation would not change. That's the problem with metal illness that is caused by brain irregularities; you can't rebuild missing structures with surgeries or drugs.
Most drug addicts and homeless suffer from some level of fetal alcohol syndrome.
https://www.fasworld.com/fasd-facts/ [fasworld.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 18 2018, @08:02PM
Here's the thing: you are already paying for these people. You're paying for the Drug Enforcement Agency, drug investigations, drug busts, prisoners, homeless shelters, Medicaid for addicts too messed up to work, emergency services like ambulances when one is injured, and crime like theft to fund their addiction. Plus, you have people fleeing Central American and South American hellholes into the US because being an illegal immigrant that 40% of the country wants to evict or execute here is a better life than being a citizen in some sections of Mexico, Honduras, and similar because of the corruption and drug gangs.
We learned all of the lessons we needed about heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines in Prohibition. Prohibition didn't work, it made all of the problems related to alcohol worse. This is no different. This deadly stuff needs to be legal, regulated, and taxed. It gets the gangs off the street, because you don't see Budweiser and Guinness salesman gunning each other down over sales. It even takes the gangs out of other countries, because Coors and Yuengling aren't manufactured and distributed by mass murdering gangs from outside the US borders. And you can use the tax revenue from selling this stuff to fund medical services and addiction services for the addicts - basically paying for their care with their own money.