A federal bankruptcy court judge on Friday said he would approve OxyContin-maker Purdue Pharma’s latest deal to settle thousands of lawsuits over the toll of opioids that includes some money for thousands of victims of the epidemic.
The deal overseen by US bankruptcy judge Sean Lane would require some of the multibillionaire members of the semi-reclusive Sackler family who own the company to contribute up to $7bn and give up ownership of the Connecticut-based firm.
The new agreement replaces one the US supreme court rejected last year, finding it would have improperly protected members of the family against future lawsuits. The judge said he would explain his decision in a hearing on Tuesday.
First, did anybody notice that the hundreds of thousands of deaths attributed to the opioid epidemic included heroin? Seems like shitty reporting to me.
There’s two sides of this. What Purdue did is truly awful and they deserve to be punished.
The other half of it, is that oxycontin works. I know somebody who has chronic pain due to a car accident, they have tons of metal in their body and the surgery never healed quite right. The result is they are never, ever, pain-free. On a good day they are at 3/10, bad day 8/10 on the 0 to 10 pain scale.
Oxycontin was one of the few drugs that brought them anywhere close to being pain-free. On oxycontin their pain was actually managed to the point that it didn’t impact their everyday life. For my friend, oxycontin was truly a wonderful life restoring drug.
In fighting the opioid epidemic, my friend was a bystander casualty. In the fight to stop opioid abuse, prescribing oxycontin even for people who genuinely benefit from it became a regulatory and insurance minefield. It’s like in the effort to stop abuse, the entire world forgot that some people actually need the stuff. Prescribing it became a problem for my friends pain doctor, as the amount of pushback from government and insurance for every prescription became totally untenable.
My friend now takes multiple short acting pain pills a day, and gets significantly less relief and lower quality of life despite being on a very similar daily morphine equivalent dosage.
So for whoever reads this, please don’t forget that while there are awful people at drug companies and insurance companies and the like, and pushing prescriptions of unneeded addictive medications should result in a lot of jail time, there are patients involved in this fight. Patients who can benefit from this drug, and whose needs are being totally forgotten.
This is because of two main things, AFAIK.
The number of heroin and other opiate addicts that got that way because of prescription opioids. This is a period of time where a significant majority of opiate/opioid addicts started on legally prescribed pills, were kept on them too long and weren’t properly tapered off. Many then sought street versions of the drugs to avoid withdrawals and fell further into addiction.
Adulteration of other drugs. It has long been common to adulterate drugs by adding cheaper but stronger drugs and filler to the mix so that most users know something is happening but remain unaware they paid more for a mix of dubious efficacy. Incomplete mixing, higher tolerance to the advertised drug than the additive one, or are in some way compounding in the mixed drugs cause many more overdose deaths than those of known and consistent effects.
And when both aspects combine, it can prove to be a particularly deadly combo.
Okay so you’re really telling me that the inner city addict who steals his brother’s watch and pawns it for drug money, back in 1992, that was all because he used to be functioning member of society but then got a prescription? Come on man. Heroin has been around a lot longer than any sort of Perdue malfeasance, as have the criminals supplying it to junkies.
I will perhaps give you that it’s possible a large number of new heroin users started with prescription pills, for some period during the height of the crisis. But it is beyond ridiculous to ascribe every opioid death to Purdue.
And as for combining drugs, yes that is the risk you take when you buy illicit substances off the street. That is a thing that has been going on long before Purdue, continues today, and will continue into the future even after they rebrand or reorganize or whatever they call it. None of that has anything to do with Purdue.
My point is, the US of course has a drug problem and lots of people die from it. But if you are going to talk about the harm a company creates, you should focus on the deaths actually related to that harm, not out of a broad general category.
For example, if you say ‘People need to slow down in work zones! 500 highway workers died on the job last year!’ But if the reality is only 100 of those died from being hit by vehicles, the other 400 died from equipment malfunction, chemical exposure, and bad workplace safety practices, your statistic is irrelevant and disingenuous, just like this article.
And how do you propose the people crunching the numbers separate these cases? Most addicts will lie about how they became addicted, choosing whatever story they feel paints them in a positive light. Most families of deceased addicts will stick to the same story, either because they believe it or because they too want to paint their dearly departed as a victim rather than irresponsible. Practically speaking, there is no way to get an accurate split between who was addicted to prescription drugs first and who wasn’t.
If you don’t have good statistics, then you don’t include them right next to talking about the prescription drug epidemic sending the impression (If not precisely stating) that your number is directly caused by prescription drugs.
Journalistic integrity is important.
I agree, but exactly zero large media organizations agree as well. Journalistic integrity is bad for business. That said, when a huge corporation is profiting by turning people into addicts and killing them, I have no sympathy. Let the FDA and DEA worry about which opioid deaths are whose fault while the courts lay each and every one at Purdue’s feet. The odds that they deserve it due to some other as-yet undiscovered shenanigans that they’re likely to get away with are as close to 100% as makes no difference.