
Court Filings Say Corporations Fed Opioid Epidemic - mlthoughts2018
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/health/opioids-trial-addiction-drugstores.html
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jijji
The article makes the assumption that the likes of Walmart, Walgreens and CVS
should be responsible for "monitoring" what doctors legitimate prescriptions
are being asked to fill, as if they were doing anything illegal by doing this.
If a licensed MD writes a prescription for a medication, their responsibility
begins and ends with fulfilling that legally authorized prescription. It is
bizarre to think that these companies should have some system in place to
refuse to fill these legally authorized prescriptions. If the DEA wants these
drugs off the street, they should work with congress to have these drugs added
to the Schedule I list. Speaking of the Schedule I list, which includes Heroin
(an opiod), I've never understood the rationale that could conclude that
Heroin (an opiod) would be listed as a Schedule I (no medical benefit), yet
all the other opiod analogs are not listed there as well. As a matter of fact,
there is an Analogs Act [0] that has been in place to specifically deal with
analogs of Schedule I substances. These drugs, like Oxycontin, Oxycodone,
Hydrocodone, other opiod analogs, you would think would fall under the Analogs
Act, but for some reason they were lobbied to not be part of that -- therefore
allowing a few large players to make billions of dollars a year because of it
and allow millions of people to overdose.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Analogue_Act)

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anigbrowl
I don't understand why you would post a comment that ignores so much
information in the article, starting with the very first paragraph. There are
in fact laws about reporting unusual volumes of drug sales and people employed
by drugstores specifically to perform that task.

It seems like you just wanted to express your opinion and did so by suggesting
that the article was somehow misleading or not grounded in reality.

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celticmusic
I think you're being unfair to the above poster.

They expressed both sides of the issue. That what they're doing isn't
technically illegal, and that they've obviously lobbied congress to keep
certain drugs available because they can legally fulfill them for massive
profits.

By no means did the above poster give these companies a pass, they just did it
in a way that's closer to reality and less histrionic.

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yomly
How curious, when companies look to optimize for profits, and when their
profits are pegged to consumption of pharmaceuticals, they look to get people
hooked on them so they can sell in quantity

I didn't see this coming at all

/s

Also notice the similarities with the food/big-sugar industry

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paulstovell
Having a legal requirement for companies to report “suspicious” orders seems
destined to fail. You receive an order for $XM in a product you sell. It looks
suspicious.

You can fulfil the order and make $XM, or you can report it and get...
nothing.

Now as the employee of course you want to do the right thing, so you run it up
the chain. And someone says to the board “we should invest millions in better
systems and people to detect suspicious orders, so that we can make less money
but do the right thing”. Any wonder this didn’t happen?

The blame here seems to be with the design of the regulation/oversight. Where
was the FDA/other agency reviewing a random sample of those orders and then
smashing the companies for missing the suspicious ones?

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seeker61
It appears from this comment that you have not read the article.

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stordoff
FWIW:

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read
> the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions
> that."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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mnm1
No one is going to go to jail. Nothing at these companies or others that will
take their place will change. None of this will help people who are addicted
especially since the only thing that can help them now is to not get cut off
from their supply and have access to treatment and opiates like methadone,
suboxin, or even good old heroin in pure form. Our governments are so fucking
incompetent in dealing with this crisis, even a multi-billion dollar
settlement won't do shit. I wonder if they even really care or is this just
another show they're putting on to pretend like they care when they don't? You
don't need storage space to store thousands of bottles of opiates because they
go very quickly. It's not a wonder, it's called tolerance. Even such basic
concepts are not understood by the idiots running these governments. Nothing
will change. People will continue to die. Because nothing mentioned here is an
actual solution. Probably because the problem isn't opiates. The problem is
people living shit lives in a shitty society. Poverty. Loneliness. Alienation.
Lack of support. Lack of culture. Lack of community. Anyone who thinks our
government is qualified or even cares about fixing these fundamental issues
with American society is delusional. At the very least we could legalize
drugs, stop the crime around them as they would be incredibly cheap, and stop
the overdosing from unknown combinations that often include fentanyl or
carfentanyl drugs that are tens to hundreds or thousands of times more potent
than morphine. But of course, the idiots in charge won't even do that, because
then how are you going to lock up all the black and brown people? What a
farce.

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dhdidhdu
“No one is going to go to jail. ”

Normally I’d agree w/ you, but the folk in WV are super pissed

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tathougies
Court filings are just statements made by random people. The simple act of a
court filing saying something neither proves nor disproves the argument being
made

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11thEarlOfMar
This chart shows that the acceleration of deaths from the synthetics starting
in 2014. By 2015 it was unmistakable: After being more or less stable over the
prior decade, overdoses of Fentanyl, Tramadol, etc. _tripled over 2 years_ and
then _tripled again_. [1]

This is 2019, 4 years later, and only now are we seeing the results of action.
How does this horror persist, growing so fast, killing so many and the US
government under both Obama and Trump not declare war on the drug _companies_?

[1] [https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-
de...](https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-deaths-by-
type-of-
opioid/?activeTab=graph&currentTimeframe=0&startTimeframe=18&selectedDistributions=synthetic-
opioids-other-than-methadone-eg-fentanyl-
tramadol&selectedRows=%7B%22wrapups%22:%7B%22united-
states%22:%7B%7D%7D%7D&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D)

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slavik81
The war on drugs has been an utter failure. Nothing about a war addresses the
underlying human problems. The worst aspect of it all is that every failure
becomes evidence that we're not fighting hard enough. That if we just fight
harder, we'll win the war.

Ostensibly, point of the war on drugs is to help the addicts. Yet in most
contexts, they get treated with disdain. We provide very little direct help.
There's basically nothing to help respectable people, so respectable people
don't get help. Instead, they hide their problem until it grows too large to
be contained.

It sometimes feels like compassion for drug addicts starts and ends with
punishing drug dealers. Maybe it's just easier that way. I think we as a
society need to take a hard look in the mirror and ask ourselves if we really
did all that we could do to save those lives.

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blodovnik
It's incredibly weird that there's a war on drugs at exactly the same times as
the corporations legally feed and profit from an opioid drug epidemic.

Only in America could such a contradiction be possible.

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ska
Almost like the “war on drugs” doesn’t have much to do with drugs ...

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inflatableDodo
_“We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black,
but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks
with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those
communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their
meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know
we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.”_

\- President Nixon’s domestic policy chief, John Ehrlichman, in a 1994
interview with Harpers magazine.

~~~
Gibbon1
More dark stuff. In the 1950's through the early 1970's drug companies were
heavily in the business of pushing amphetamines on the public. Enormous
amounts were prescribed. And abuse was rampant.

Ever notice how anti-drug propaganda describes the effects of 'marijuana
dependency'? Yeah it's describing the effects of amphetamine dependency. I'm
convinced attempting to shift the blame from legal amphetamines to street
drugs was the other part of the drug war.

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NetOpWibby
Hey, just like the government and the crack epidemic!

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kaycebasques
What’s the story behind this idea? I’ve never looked into it so I don’t know
if it’s a conspiracy theory or a well-documented event that is not common
knowledge.

Edit: I also didn’t read the opioid article because I got paywall’d.

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WillPostForFood
It is largely conspiracy theory.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking)

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povertyworld
Nice link. Browsing the related articles is interesting. I wasn't aware that
the CIA was alleged to have trafficked opium during their secret and illegal
war in Laos. Good to know.

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fabianhjr
Well, the CIA also conducted illegal human trials of LSD and a mixture of IV
Barbiturate + Amphetamine on its own citizens, then tried coverup everything
by attempting to destroy all their own records.

[https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_MKUltra](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Project_MKUltra)

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manjana
Just a fun little fact: The Unabomber was a victim of Project MkUltra.

