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Purdue’s promotional strategies included falsely claiming to well-meaning doctors that scientific studies showed the risk of patient addiction from OxyContin wa
by refurb 3y ago
Purdue’s promotional strategies included falsely claiming to well-meaning doctors that scientific studies showed the risk of patient addiction from OxyContin was “less than one percent.”
These are "pill mills" - doctors who are willing to hand out hundreds of tablets to whoever walked in their door for a large cash payment. We're talking about doctors who saw hundreds of patients per day, didn't actually examine them and then wrote prescriptions. Offices that had people lined up outside.
To call those doctors "well meaning" is laughable. They were entirely complicit in handing out powerful opioids for cash.
Why do these doctors get a pass? They're the ones that are supposed to be the gatekeepers for prescription opioids.
- ericjmorey 3y agoBased on numbers alone, it's obvious they weren't even seeing patients at all and selling directly to drug gangs. Selling more pills than would be lethal to the entire population of the county they were being sold in is simply being a wholesale distributor.
- refurb 3y agoExactly. Punish Perdue for lying about their product, that’s fine. But Oxycotin was always a schedule 2 drug - the most restrictive category for prescription drugs. Schedule 2 includes things like morphine, cocaine, barbiturates. Highly addictive medicines. Perdue could lie all they want, but without doctors basically selling scripts of the stuff people wouldn’t have access to it. I’m kind of surprised the DEA took that long to get on top of it. The data should have been clearly apparent like a year into the problem.