7 ms·

Court Filings Say Corporations Fed Opioid Epidemic

143 points by mlthoughts2018 7y ago

blodovnik 7y ago
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.
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  inevitable in a plutocracy
- ska 7y ago
  Almost like the “war on drugs” doesn’t have much to do with drugs ...
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    “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 7y ago
      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.
NetOpWibby 7y ago
Hey, just like the government and the crack epidemic!
- kaycebasques 7y ago
  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.
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    It is largely conspiracy theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...
    - povertyworld 7y ago
      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.
      - fabianhjr 7y ago
        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
        povertyworld 7y ago
        Operation Sea-Spray by the US Navy was a good one too. Hopefully for the sake of our fellow commenters the US government won't test bioweapons on San Francisco again.
        7y ago
11thEarlOfMar 7y ago
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-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 https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  I think the other side of the horror is reflected in the employment to population statistics. Look past the statistics and you see millions of hopeless and despondent people. Obama and Trump don't care that these people have reliable employment and enough resources to get though the day without fear. Given that why would we assume they care about people OD'd on opiates?
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  It's much easier to blame all the USA's ills on Mexico and the lack of a wall along the southern border, notwithstanding the volume of drugs that come in by ships and other vectors. However, the administration has taken action against some of these pharmaceutical industry suppliers. One firm was fined $20 million (payable over 5 years) in return for a deferred prosecution agreement. The President hasn't made much of this in his political speeches, no doubt because of his innate modesty. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/04/23/rochester-drug-cooperative-20-million-opioid-distribution-drug-enforcement-administration/791689002/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/04/23/r...
- slavik81 7y ago
  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.
jijji 7y ago
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
- anigbrowl 7y ago
  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.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    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.
tathougies 7y ago
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
yomly 7y ago
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
mnm1 7y ago
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.
- dhdidhdu 7y ago
  “No one is going to go to jail. ” Normally I’d agree w/ you, but the folk in WV are super pissed
paulstovell 7y ago
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?
- seeker61 7y ago
  It appears from this comment that you have not read the article.
  - stordoff 7y ago
    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
- jmull 7y ago
  > ...and then smashing the companies for missing the suspicious ones? These legal efforts are the smashing you are calling for. This is what makes the decision to fulfill a suspicious order rather than report it a potentially costly one.

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.

hyperpallium 7y ago
inevitable in a plutocracy
ska 7y ago
Almost like the “war on drugs” doesn’t have much to do with drugs ...
- inflatableDodo 7y ago
  “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 7y ago
    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.

NetOpWibby 7y ago

Hey, just like the government and the crack epidemic!

kaycebasques 7y ago
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.
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  It is largely conspiracy theory. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_co...
  - povertyworld 7y ago
    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.
    - fabianhjr 7y ago
      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
      - povertyworld 7y ago
        Operation Sea-Spray by the US Navy was a good one too. Hopefully for the sake of our fellow commenters the US government won't test bioweapons on San Francisco again.
      - 7y ago

11thEarlOfMar 7y ago

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-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 https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/opioid-overdose-de...

Gibbon1 7y ago
I think the other side of the horror is reflected in the employment to population statistics. Look past the statistics and you see millions of hopeless and despondent people. Obama and Trump don't care that these people have reliable employment and enough resources to get though the day without fear. Given that why would we assume they care about people OD'd on opiates?
anigbrowl 7y ago
It's much easier to blame all the USA's ills on Mexico and the lack of a wall along the southern border, notwithstanding the volume of drugs that come in by ships and other vectors. However, the administration has taken action against some of these pharmaceutical industry suppliers. One firm was fined $20 million (payable over 5 years) in return for a deferred prosecution agreement. The President hasn't made much of this in his political speeches, no doubt because of his innate modesty. https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/04/23/rochester-drug-cooperative-20-million-opioid-distribution-drug-enforcement-administration/791689002/ https://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/news/2019/04/23/r...
slavik81 7y ago
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.

jijji 7y ago

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

anigbrowl 7y ago
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.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  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.

tathougies 7y ago

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

yomly 7y ago

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

mnm1 7y ago

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.

dhdidhdu 7y ago
“No one is going to go to jail. ” Normally I’d agree w/ you, but the folk in WV are super pissed

paulstovell 7y ago

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?

seeker61 7y ago
It appears from this comment that you have not read the article.
- stordoff 7y ago
  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
jmull 7y ago
> ...and then smashing the companies for missing the suspicious ones? These legal efforts are the smashing you are calling for. This is what makes the decision to fulfill a suspicious order rather than report it a potentially costly one.