Sackler and PurduePharma profited from “suffering and death,” NYC AG Letitia James says. NEP’s Bill Black discusses the case on The Real News Network. You can view with a transcript here.
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The idea that the companies who make and sell these drugs (opioids) would also profit from treating addictions caused by them is just awful and should be criminal if true.
But I hope that the New York Attorney General and Bill Black also realize that they are not in any position to judge the level of pain that other people might be experiencing. Severe ongoing pain is extremely debilitating and awful to suffer and drugs like oxycodone and hydromorphone and even the synthetic Fentanyl do reduce that suffering and a LOT more so than drugs like aspirin or ibuprofen or tylenol.
Now that statement is from personal experience and I realize drugs do not affect all people in the same way. What relieved my suffering without resulting in addiction or overdose (or even any euphoria I could detect) might not apply for everyone. But for the eight weeks I needed them, and used them as prescribed, those drugs probably kept me sane. And they were not very easy for me to get- even with a prescription. Perhaps it was easier in the past or in a different region of the country- I don’t know. What I do know is that the pharmacies around here are not eager to hand these things out and my doctors were not at all happy to prescribe them as of one year ago. And that my health insurance refused to cover them. And I know that because of a combination of those factors I suffered from many hours of really, really bad pain that could have been avoided. Which I consider to be a problem.