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posted by martyb on Monday June 18 2018, @03:39PM   Printer-friendly
from the addiction-sucks dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday June 18 2018, @08:58PM (1 child)

    by NewNic (6420) on Monday June 18 2018, @08:58PM (#694708) Journal

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opioid_epidemic [wikipedia.org] claims 289 million prescriptions per year, so 6.2 B / 289 M = a completely reasonable 21 pills per prescription in the sort of united states.

    That depends on how often and how many times an individual receives a prescription for opiates. It would not be reasonable for almost every person in the USA to receive one prescription of opiates per year.

    --
    lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2  
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Monday June 18 2018, @09:39PM

    by VLM (445) on Monday June 18 2018, @09:39PM (#694718)

    Arithmetic being a revolutionary act, lets commit some treason...

    Lets say the average bastard lives 100 years to make the math easy, so thats 620 billion pills manufactured per lifetime. That seems a lot, but hold on... Google says the USA population in 2017 was 325.7M people no idea if that counts illegal invaders don't matter lets call it 333.333333 million to make the math easy and assume the population is constant at that number. That seems to be 1.8Kpills per lifetime which seems a lot. However, I took four pills per day for taking all my wisdom teeth out at once, and it hurt like hell just my bad luck, so I'd guess dying of cancer or having a broken back would take... I donno, ten pills per day. That's an average of half a year of pill use per lifetime? And I'm already three days into my lifetime allocation because of my wisdom teeth? I donno this doesn't sound very unreasonable at all. How many years can someone live with arthritis, like ... 99 years or so at a somewhat reduced dose? I mean not every gets it, and not everyone needs pills every day, but ... similar math argument is I'm allocated half a year of painkillers per lifetime at present rate of production/consumption... now what if I get painful terminal cancer that takes more than six months to croak, that would suck. My mother in law had her gallbladder out maybe a decade ago, she was in some pain for awhile before and after. Of her lifetime allocation of 6 months pain meds, she's only got like 5 1/2 months left, hope she doesn't get painful cancer or something.

    I'm just sayin, for innumerate people 6.2B is a meaningless number that sounds impressive, but when you do some treasonous math to hack the establishment message, all it really means is the average terminal cancer patient gets a couple months of pain pills. There really is NOT that much med use going on out there. Or rephrased, all the hell that's being raised due to pills is due to a really small amount of (mis) use.