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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: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 18 2018, @07:45PM (1 child)
Yep, narcotics don't really treat the problem. They treat one of the symptoms: pain.
In my case I get lots of other drugs for the underlying problem, which, of course, helps with the pain. To a large degree. But it varies. And there are sometimes really bad days.
My opioids are not 100% covered, but darn near. They are dirt cheap. More than any other med I've ever had. Last summer (June, 2017) I was in Colorado at a family reunion. Hey, let's try some cannabis! Ironically: it's way way more expensive, and doesn't help anywhere near as much as opioids do. So much for all natural.
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @09:14PM
Reading between the lines, where there is no data being reported about post-legalization crime rates that doesn't come from someone with an axe to grind, the opposition seems content with "its really bad, trust me, but there's no numbers to prove it" and the supporters seem content with "crime dropped 15%" type stuff, so it seems highly likely the net effect is generally a significant but not huge drop in crime rate due to weed legalization.
Of course people who really like weed are orders of magnitude less dangerous to the community and themselves than a pill addict going thru withdrawal willing to do anything for the next pill. That would seem to imply pill legalization would likely result in a ... obvious and large-ish ... decline in crime rates.