Arkansas has become the latest state to hold Big Pharma accountable for its role in the country’s ongoing opioid crisis, but unlike the other states that have filed lawsuits against major pharmaceutical companies, Arkansas is demanding compensation for solutions to end the epidemic.
The lawsuit, which named 52 opioid manufacturers and 13 distributors, physicians, pharmacists and retailers, argues that the pharmaceutical companies “falsely touted the benefits of long-term opioid use, including the supposed ability of opioids to improve function and quality of life,” despite research from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which stated that “there is ‘no good evidence’ supporting these claims.”
“Each Defendant spent, and some continue to spend, millions of dollars on promotional activities and materials that falsely deny or trivialize the risks of opioids while overstating the benefits of using them to treat chronic pain. As to the risks, Defendants falsely and misleadingly, and sometimes contrary to the language of their drugs’ labels: downplayed the serious risk of addiction; promoted the concept of “pseudo-addiction” and thus advocated that the signs of addiction should be treated with more opioids.”
The lawsuit highlighted the damage the opioid epidemic has caused in the state of Arkansas, noting that when individuals become addicted to opioids, the addiction affects every aspect of their lives and often results in “job loss, loss of custody of children, physical and mental health problems, homelessness, and incarceration.”
Big Pharma’s efforts to convince doctors to prescribe opioids like candy have worked extremely well. As the lawsuit stated, opioids are now the most prescribed class of drugs, generating $11 billion in revenue for drug companies in 2014 alone.
“As opioid prescribing has skyrocketed in Arkansas, so too have overdose deaths. Today, prescription opioids are the leading cause of drug-related death in Arkansas, and by a wide margin. Arkansas also has seen a dramatic surge in hospital and in-patient admissions linked to opioid abuse. Alarmingly, and in keeping with a pattern seen across the nation, many Arkansans addicted to prescription opioids are now turning to heroin because it supplies a similar high at a fraction of the street cost of prescription opioids.”
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The CIA heroin from the record poppy crops in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had eliminated their lucrative source of black budget funding before the US attack there in 2001, and the Mexican illicit fentanyl that the open Southern border allows to walk in every day would be difficult to stop and would reduce the CIA black budget, so the incorrect focus on pain treatment, based on socalled "voluntary" CDC guidelines that were developed by a committee without the input of pain management doctors or chronic pain patients. Pin patients that have been stable for years on modest opiod treatment are being cut off by their doctors afraid to buck the state legislatures and AGs trying to act as if they are "doing something"
ReplyDeleteSure, going after the low-hanging fruit, driving pain patients to street drugs or suicide , that will surely help the overdose statistics, which, by the way, the CDC just admitted that their ability to differentiate between illicit street fentanyl and prescribed fentanyl accounted for their inaccurately claiming twice as many victims from "prescribed opiods" than there were. The OD problem is street drugs, not pain patients. But cut off pain patients have no recourse but to treat their pain from the liquor store or from unpredictable "dope" they buy in the alley.
This is somehow an improvement?
Opiod prescriptions have fallen by 20% in the last two years but the OD toll continues to go up, because the border is wide open to cheap heroin and fentanyl.
https://www.painnewsnetwork.org/stories/2018/3/21/cdc-admits-rx-opioid-deaths-significantly-inflated
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-spoils-of-war-afghanistan-s-multibillion-dollar-heroin-trade/91
Big Pharma didn't put the needle in these druggies arms. Big Pharma didn't sell the Heroin to these druggies, a heroin dealer did.
ReplyDeleteJust like the dumb as Liberal government wanting to blame big pharma for killing heroin addicts. This is the same analogy used by liberal blaming guns for killing people.
We need to quit coddling the criminals and the crazies and go after the real culprits, the people shooting up... in both cases!!
Put Big Pharma out of business and and you thousands upon thousands of jobs and put people in welfare lines and homelessness.
Put gun manufacturers out of business and you lose thousands upon thousands of jobs and put people in welfare lines and homelessness.
Big Pharma gets penalized big time and the drug dealers get a free pass. Typical Democrat and RINO mentality!!
Great Idea...
ReplyDelete500,000 Americans die from obesity a year! 450,000 die from smoking!! 100,000 from drunk driving! However non are considered epidemic, big fat zero. 60,000 died from heroin and pain pill overdose but it's considered the biggest epidemic in current times and 60 BILLION DOLLARS was given by the government to fight it. Hmmmm, I'm thinking something isn't right ??
ReplyDelete4:14 you are awake. Its all a big scheme and they are laughing all the way to the bank.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete500,000 Americans die from obesity a year! 450,000 die from smoking!! 100,000 from drunk driving! However non are considered epidemic, big fat zero. 60,000 died from heroin and pain pill overdose but it's considered the biggest epidemic in current times and 60 BILLION DOLLARS was given by the government to fight it. Hmmmm, I'm thinking something isn't right ??
April 3, 2018 at 4:14 PM
Oh if you only knew, if you only knew!