4 ms·

People figured out pretty quickly that if you crush the pills, you absorb the oxycodone quickly. It was the coating that delayed absorption.

FDSGSG 7y ago
Are there any slow release drugs that you can't do this with? Shouldn't this be obvious to the doctors?
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  As a general rule Doctors trust the documentation given to them by the pharmaceutical companies, which in turn is approved after several rounds with the FDA, so one would think that the documentation would be pretty reliable. The source of the issue really is just how hard Purdue was fudging their data. And I mean, you can say that a drug company shouldn't be the sole tester of it's own drugs and I'd agree with you, but good luck getting average people to want to pay for it by funding the FDA.
  - FDSGSG 7y ago
    I wonder if it is normal for slow release drugs to come with warnings telling you that you can crush them up and abuse them?
refurb 7y ago
This is true, so users were pretty quickly able to get around it. Although manufacturers have created a tamper proof version, but that just led users to move to heroin.
- FussyZeus 7y ago
  Yes and no. The first fault is that even the studies done by Purdue prior to release did not indicate anything close to the 1% addiction rate they advertised, it was more like 8-12%. The second, most Oxycontin users who aren't well off eventually move to heroin, because the effects are very similar, and the street price for Oxycontin is much higher. Ironically, where Marijuana was demonized for a nonexistent gateway property in the original war on drugs, Oxycontin was actually demonstrably a gateway drug for heroin. There's a very well researched episode of the podcast "Behind the Bastards" hosted by Robert Evans that drills down exactly into all of Purdue's dirty little secrets surrounding Oxycontin. Once you realized just how many numbers were fudged, how many studies fiddled with, it becomes clear just how much had to be made to go wrong in order for this epidemic to really kick off. It's quite damning.

FDSGSG 7y ago

Are there any slow release drugs that you can't do this with? Shouldn't this be obvious to the doctors?

FussyZeus 7y ago
As a general rule Doctors trust the documentation given to them by the pharmaceutical companies, which in turn is approved after several rounds with the FDA, so one would think that the documentation would be pretty reliable. The source of the issue really is just how hard Purdue was fudging their data. And I mean, you can say that a drug company shouldn't be the sole tester of it's own drugs and I'd agree with you, but good luck getting average people to want to pay for it by funding the FDA.
- FDSGSG 7y ago
  I wonder if it is normal for slow release drugs to come with warnings telling you that you can crush them up and abuse them?

refurb 7y ago

This is true, so users were pretty quickly able to get around it. Although manufacturers have created a tamper proof version, but that just led users to move to heroin.

FussyZeus 7y ago
Yes and no. The first fault is that even the studies done by Purdue prior to release did not indicate anything close to the 1% addiction rate they advertised, it was more like 8-12%. The second, most Oxycontin users who aren't well off eventually move to heroin, because the effects are very similar, and the street price for Oxycontin is much higher. Ironically, where Marijuana was demonized for a nonexistent gateway property in the original war on drugs, Oxycontin was actually demonstrably a gateway drug for heroin. There's a very well researched episode of the podcast "Behind the Bastards" hosted by Robert Evans that drills down exactly into all of Purdue's dirty little secrets surrounding Oxycontin. Once you realized just how many numbers were fudged, how many studies fiddled with, it becomes clear just how much had to be made to go wrong in order for this epidemic to really kick off. It's quite damning.