OxyContin goes global -- "We're only just getting started" (LA Times Investigation)

[highplainsdem]

Found via a tweet from NYT's Nick Corasaniti:

https://twitter.com/NYTnickc/status/810846872428564480

If you've lost a loved one or friend to overdose, the @latimes OxyContin investigation will make your blood boil

I agree. The LAT story:

http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-oxycontin-part3/

OxyContin is a dying business in America.

With the nation in the grip of an opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, the U.S. medical establishment is turning away from painkillers. Top health officials are discouraging primary care doctors from prescribing them for chronic pain, saying there is no proof they work long-term and substantial evidence they put patients at risk.

Prescriptions for OxyContin have fallen nearly 40% since 2010, meaning billions in lost revenue for its Connecticut manufacturer, Purdue Pharma.

So the company’s owners, the Sackler family, are pursuing a new strategy: Put the painkiller that set off the U.S. opioid crisis into medicine cabinets around the world.

A network of international companies owned by the family is moving rapidly into Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and other regions, and pushing for broad use of painkillers in places ill-prepared to deal with the ravages of opioid abuse and addiction.

In this global drive, the companies, known as Mundipharma, are using some of the same controversial marketing practices that made OxyContin a pharmaceutical blockbuster in the U.S.

In Brazil, China and elsewhere, the companies are running training seminars where doctors are urged to overcome “opiophobia” and prescribe painkillers. They are sponsoring public awareness campaigns that encourage people to seek medical treatment for chronic pain. They are even offering patient discounts to make prescription opioids more affordable.

-snip-

[CountAllVotes]

1. I took oxycontin for awhile

It did help a bit but for not long.

I was switched to something else that does work quite well and I need only ONE pill a day.

Not surprised really. Oxycontin sucked FOR ME, maybe not everyone else though.

[anneboleyn]

5. I am very curious (our relative has cancer) -- OxyContin is a twelve-hour medication. What

do you take that lasts for 24 hours? (You may not want to post this but our relative has two doses of this per day -- one each twelve hours). Nothing else has worked -- ESPECIALLY not the drugs like lyrica (which was developed for epilepsy but is now prescribed for pain relief by doctors terrified of prescribing opioids even though lyrica is also potentially addictive and can be abused and doesn't work at all for people like our relative).

[CountAllVotes]

8. link ...

http://www.rxlist.com/ms-contin-drug/indications-dosage.htm

[ghostsinthemachine]

2. Rush Limbaugh, the official spokesperson for Oxycontin

Nobody had ever take my meds away however. No keys, But I take morphine and Percocets for chronic Pain. Could not live without it.

[anneboleyn]

3. I am sorry but we have a relative who lives with cancer pain, and this endless sh!t about "evil"

painkillers means that she and other legitimate patients have to deal with unbelievable hurdles, every single month, to get medication that makes life endurable. Long-term, extended release painkillers like OxyContin have their place in chronic severe pain treatment. There have been great articles (by doctors who treat people with chronic pain) about this issue and how the persecution of doctors is destroying the lives of REAL PATIENTS.

The war on drugs has been a failure, and I have zero trust in law enforcement going after doctors and people with horrible diseases, as in patients that will (and do) commit suicide w/out pain relief (long term cancer pain doesn't get "fixed&quot . These patients are being punished. I can't even imagine the mindset of those who would rather see a cancer patient suffer and/or kill themselves as a result of this now endless demonization of opioids, doctors, and pain patients -- who are now ALL treated as addicts. It is a kind of evil that makes me wish they endured the pain and misery of these diseases -- about which they seem to have zero concern.

[Coventina]

4. Thank you. There's another thread floating around GD full of DUer's horror stories in this regard.

(Including mine).

This "reefer madness" mentality has to stop.

[anneboleyn]

6. Honestly, thank god/goddess for you and everyone else responding to this horrible war on real

pain sufferers and of course doctors. I never knew, I am ashamed to say, what a pain patient had to endure (every single month -- painkillers can't be given refills) just to make life endurable and how untreated pain or under-treated pain -- which is now an epidemic thanks to the persecution of doctors and patients -- literally takes years off a person's life. I hate to think that I was once a callous idiot, wth no real knowledge, who would proclaim that people with pain should just take some Advil. Now I know better, and it is such a horrible thing to witness.

[Coventina]

7. Thank you for the support. This is something all sane people have to come together for.

I firmly believe that a middle road between the abuses in WV and taking live-saving meds from people who need them can be found.

Right now it seems the government wants us all to destroy our liver and kidneys by taking mass doses of ibuprofen.

(2400 mg a day for me for my arthritis).