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posted by takyon on Sunday September 20 2015, @01:40AM   Printer-friendly
from the little-call-flood-for-big-pharma dept.

Addiction to heroin and other opiates is a growing problem in the USA, as Presidential hopefuls have learned from Q&A sessions with voters on the campaign trail (previous SN story here).

Tired of encountering dead bodies, the police department of Gloucester, MA (an old city with a large commercial fishing industry) decided to appeal for the public's help in a rather interesting way, via a department Facebook post:

Gotta go make some calls.....

Top 5 Pharmaceutical CEO Salaries:

5. Eli Lilly - John Lechleiter $14.48 million
jlechleiter@lilly.com 317-276-2000

4. Abbott Labs - Miles D. White $17.7 million
miles.d.white@abbott.com 847-937-6100

3. Merck - Kenneth C. Frazier
$25 million + cool private jet.
ken.frazier@merck.com 908-423-1000

2. Johnson & Johnson - Alex Gorsky $20.38 million
ceo@jnj.com 732-524-0400

1. Pfizer - Ian Read $23.3 million
ian.read@pfizer.com 212-573-2323

They're all on Forbes Top 100 CEO salaries as well.

In 2013 The Huffington Post reported that the 11 largest pharmaceutical companies made $711 BILLION in profits in the last decade while their CEO's made a combined $1.57 BILLION in the same period.

Now...don't get mad. Just politely ask them what they are doing to address the opioid epidemic in the United States and if they realize that the latest data shows almost 80% of addicted persons start with a legally prescribed drug that they make. They can definitely be part of the solution here and I believe they will be....might need a little push.

takyon: A newer Facebook post says that Pfizer is in contact with the Gloucester Police Department.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:26PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:26PM (#238904) Journal

    I doubt legalization would ever work as a continuing solution, either for an individual addict or society as a whole. Probably there would be fewer overdose deaths, but a lot more people would get drawn into it.

    Portugal says you are wholly and totally wrong.

    The resulting effect: a drastic reduction in addicts, with Portuguese officials and reports highlighting that this number, at 100,000 before the new policy was enacted, has been halved in the following 10 years. Portugal's drug usage rates are now among the lowest of EU member states, according to the same report.

    One more outcome: a lot less sick people. Drug related diseases including STDs and overdoses have been reduced even more than usage rates, which experts believe is the result of the government offering treatment with no threat of legal ramifications to addicts.

    http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/europe/120718/drug-decriminalization-portugal-addicts [globalpost.com]

    If you have the time, this debate between Glen Greenwald and GWB's drug czar is amazingly good: https://vimeo.com/32110912 [vimeo.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:27PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday September 20 2015, @05:27PM (#238905) Journal

    I should have mentioned in my post that Portugal decriminalized ALL drugs 2001.

    • (Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday September 20 2015, @06:35PM

      by Francis (5544) on Sunday September 20 2015, @06:35PM (#238958)

      It's also dishonest of you to suggest that the same results would occur elsewhere just merely by decriminalizing the drugs. It's not a matter of criminalization that leads to all the misery, criminalization only causes some of the misery. Assuming that a different culture's solution would work without having to examine our own culture is naive at best and dangerous at worse.

      I'm open to the idea of legalization, but the arguments being used are junk. I'm not aware of any countries with similar cultural institutions to the US decriminalizing all drugs.

      • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Sunday September 20 2015, @09:14PM

        by hemocyanin (186) on Sunday September 20 2015, @09:14PM (#239046) Journal

        Oh get real. Portugal isn't a suburb of Timbuktu -- it's a former colonial power, constitutional republic, there's separation of church and state, and it's a modernized EU member nation. Your arguments just echo the fear-mongering of prohibitionists, but prohibitionists, whether motivated by money or moralism, are just wrong according to the evidence. Sure, you can trot out a parade of horrors, but just alcohol prohibition in the US, the cure was way worse than the problem.

        And that bit about Portugal being so different -- damn, I suppose if you were shown evidence that shooting German in the head was fatal, you'd have to test it out on Swedes, because you know, different culture.

      • (Score: 3, Informative) by tathra on Monday September 21 2015, @05:20AM

        by tathra (3367) on Monday September 21 2015, @05:20AM (#239219)

        It's not a matter of criminalization that leads to all the misery, criminalization only causes some of the misery.

        wrong. even cops agree [www.leap.cc] that criminalization causes the most misery surrounding drugs by a long shot.