JustSayNoToPurdue's
DrugsVille
From the Associated Press:
Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty Tuesday (Nov 24th) to three criminal charges, formally admitting its role in an opioid epidemic that has contributed to hundreds of thousands of deaths over the past two decades.
In a virtual hearing with a federal judge in Newark, N.J., the OxyContin maker admitted impeding the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's efforts to combat the addiction crisis.
Purdue also acknowledged that it had not maintained an effective program to prevent prescription drugs from being diverted to the black market, even though it had told the DEA it did have such a program, and that it provided misleading information to the agency as a way to boost company manufacturing quotas.
It also admitted paying doctors through a speakers program to induce them to write more prescriptions for its painkillers...
Gosh.
What would Nancy Reagan have said?
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Refresh my memory of Nancy Regan.
ReplyDeleteSteve--
ReplyDelete'Just say NO to drugs.'
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too bad they didn't charge the executives of Perdue with murder or at least manslaughter. fines are just the price of doing business. jail sentences might have put a different spin on things for corporations.
ReplyDeleteAfter all we have been through with these drugs, it will happen again, because fines are just the price of doing business.
ReplyDelete"It also admitted paying doctors through a speakers program to induce them to write more prescriptions for its painkillers..."
The first principal of the medical profession.. " Do no harm"
so what happens to the doctors.? If anything
Nothing is going to happen to the doctors. If they were fined, they'd file bankruptch, change their names, more to another state and start over again. With all the COVID in the U.S.A. they need all the medical staff they can get, even if they're just drug dealers.
ReplyDeletethe others who are complicit in all of this are the pharmacies and their staff. I recall one of the American news shows doing a piece on a small town which had a huge opiod problem and the pharmacies dispensed enough drugs in one small town to provide drugs to most of the state. Like how stupid or crooked did you have to be to ignore that?
there isn't much over sight in these states either of doctors or pharmacists. Not like in B.C. Its meant to make money and that is about all. "do no harm", right to the wallet of doctors and the medical industry.
“Nothing is going to happen to doctors.”
ReplyDeleteApparently the BC College of Physicians and probably most colleges across Canada really did feel like something was going to happen to them: in the final analysis, it was the only cogent rationale for the College’s 2016 ‘crackdown’ on opioid prescription. Nope, not the diversion of prescriptions (over 85% of look-alike opioid pharmaceuticals seized by police in Vancouver are counterfeit and laced with illegally-made fentanyl), neither the wholesale migration of the opioid prescription-addicted to the illicit street-opioid market (no data was ever presented to support this claim, only anecdotes from cherry-picked testators highly motivated to excuse their use of street opioids), not even the alleged dishonest, drug-seeking nature of patients in general (95% of patients prescribed opioids benefit safely without becoming addicts, diverting meds, or resorting to street drugs). These crackdown premises were suspect from day-one and the College was forced to rescind by 2018 because the unwarranted reaction to the street overdose epidemic was harming legitimate patients who were refused pain treatment, shorted, or cut off completely. And it did absolutely fuck all about the overdose epidemic (then styled a “crisis”) among users of street opioids laced with illegally-made fentanyl—because that wasn’t the crackdown’s real intent: it was, rather, to insulate doctors against malpractice.
Perdue should pay for what it’s guilty of, but US lawsuits cannot very well transfer as precedent to Canada: the US maker of OxyContin falsely claimed it was non-addictive in order to get it licensed and to market where it was heavily advertised and promoted with ‘inducements’ to prescribing doctors. It is the main defendant in State class-action suits for knowingly shipping OxyContin far in excess of expected, legitimate demand to retail pharmacies fronting for organized crime, corroborated by regular police seizures of pharmaceutical OxyContin on the streets in many US regions. Such is not the case here: we have universal public healthcare, one-fifth the jurisdictions, one-tenth the population; the US has tens of millions of private health insurance plans with thousands of private underwriters, almost all the Pharma manufacturing capacity and, generally, way more ways to corrupt pharmaceutical distribution.
BC doctors might not be affected by Big Pharma suits, but we have to wonder if the palpable ‘culpa frigidus’ discourages doctors from cooperating with or contributing to novel remedies to the street-overdose epidemic—like prescribing clinical opioids to treat users of deadly street opioids. Weighing against that, what chance of success does the BC government have in its own lawsuit against Big Pharma? The OxyContin fraud was exposed 20 years ago; the overdose epidemic is supplied almost entirely by organized crime’s illegally-made fentanyl. What, exactly, is the government’s case against Big Pharma? Weak is what it is.