Solving the "opioid crisis"

[BvBPL]

I'm not misunderstanding anything. Tim's stated emphasis on making punishment of drug companies an antecedent to the availability of rescue medication is wrongheaded. You don't wait to save peoples' lives until after you punish others. You save people's lives NOW, and that might mean other concerns need to wait. If the wrong people end up profiting from SAVING PEOPLES' LIVES then so be it. That's acceptable.

Tim is generally given to hyperbole, so I'd be willing to imagine he doesn't actually want to keep lifesaving medicine on hold until a retributive process can be established. But that's not how he's presented it thus far.

 

[Berzerker]

Trump's donors make Fentanyl and the cure when users OD

 

[Synobun]

Tim recognizes that only increasing naloxone accessibility will do nothing for the problem and will be used by the suppliers as propaganda to downplay the effects of addiction. You can spin statistics, and saying that mortality rates have dropped significantly will make people believe things are going well.

 

[Lexicus]

I'm not misunderstanding anything.

Yes you are.

Tim's stated emphasis on making punishment of drug companies an antecedent to the availability of rescue medication is wrongheaded.

This summary of what Tim said is simply not accurate. You can go read his post again if you care to. His post simply does not say "we have to punish the drug companies first before we can distribute rescue medication." In fact, he suggests forcing the drug companies to turn over the rescue medication for free, as punishment.

You ought to bear in mind that literally giving every person in the US a dose of naloxone isn't going to significantly cut opioid overdose deaths, because most overdoses simply don't occur in places where random members of the public might just happen to stumble on the victims in time. That just ain't how that works.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Hmm...wasn't there something about the death penalty for drug dealers ?
Just put some CEOs of drug companies that produce stuff to get you addicted on the chair.
If that doesn't help, start frying lobbyists, sales reps and shareholders.

 

[BvBPL]

The rescue medications don’t cure the problem. They don’t turn addicts clean. They don’t make the people who profited from the sale of addictive opioids pay for their unethical practices. They don’t fix the ills of the criminal justice system. They don’t integrate addicts back into society. They don’t put communities, families, or lives back together. They are not by any means a panacea to the crisis. They should not be presented as a cure to the national problem. People who think that the public availability of rescue medications, alone, can cure this problem are not providing a particularly robust argument.

The rescue medicines do one thing: they save people’s lives.

That alone is enough to endorse their widespread availability.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The rescue medications don’t cure the problem. They don’t turn addicts clean. They don’t make the people who profited from the sale of addictive opioids pay for their unethical practices. They don’t fix the ills of the criminal justice system. They don’t integrate addicts back into society. They don’t put communities, families, or lives back together. They are not by any means a panacea to the crisis. They should not be presented as a cure to the national problem. People who think that the public availability of rescue medications, alone, can cure this problem are not providing a particularly robust argument.

The rescue medicines do one thing: they save people’s lives.

That alone is enough to endorse their widespread availability.

For the record, I stated no opposition to this widespread availability. I oppose the fact that creating this widespread availability by the usual method produces more profits for the same people who profited from creating the problem in the first place. It's in the same vein as tolerating arsonist contractors bidding to rebuild houses they burn down.

Also for the record, I am irritated by the people who are flipping out over "the opioid crisis" as if the consequences of addiction are somehow brand new just because they've come to the white bread suburbs.

 

[BvBPL]

The wide-spread support of a massive number of people is sometimes required to cause the sort of change that’s necessary to address public health crises. There were Johnny-Come-Latelys for the AIDS crisis and the MADD/SADD days, and they were welcomed. While we might wish people had come around more quickly then they had, rejecting the support of people because they came around a bit late doesn’t advance the goal. People should have been attentive to the drug crisis years ago. It is a shame they were not, but the greater shame would be in abandoning the goal of solving the crisis in favor of looking down our noses at peeps late to the party.

That’s one way to look at it.

The other way is to swear up and down until you are red in the face about people who didn’t get how big a deal this was years ago. That’s a totally understandable response too. People should be shamed for not getting how bad this is.

I just hope that afterward you’ve sworn your face off that you’re back to advocating for change and not discouraged by the tardiness of others.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The wide-spread support of a massive number of people is sometimes required to cause the sort of change that’s necessary to address public health crises. There were Johnny-Come-Latelys for the AIDS crisis and the MADD/SADD days, and they were welcomed. While we might wish people had come around more quickly then they had, rejecting the support of people because they came around a bit late doesn’t advance the goal. People should have been attentive to the drug crisis years ago. It is a shame they were not, but the greater shame would be in abandoning the goal of solving the crisis in favor of looking down our noses at peeps late to the party.

Maybe. But maybe there's a lesson in the response to the AIDS crisis that we shouldn't ignore. The people who came late to that party (because as long as they thought AIDS would only kill gays they were fine with it) went on to support distribution programs for the eventually produced medications that punished "high risk lifestyles." In short, the people who are late to this party are very likely to push for life saving medicine and rehabilitation distributed in the white bread suburbs that finally got their attention without changing their views that urban and minority addicts need to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps or face the overdose they deserve."

 

[Commodore]

I might agree if the pharmaceutical companies that created the crisis were made to provide it as a penalty, but to them this solution to the crisis they caused is basically a new profit center.

Almost as if they planned it that way...

 

[BvBPL]

That's why Tim can't stand it. He knows they planned it. He's going to set it straight, this Watergate.

 

[rah]

Pot will solve it. Unless it's that synthetic pot that make you bleed out your ears.

 

[Cutlass]

Allow unrestricted suing of drug makers. No more opiods, no more opiod epidemic.

 

[Arwon]

Forgive my ignorance but what is this opioid crisis? Are we taking heroin or what?

 

[stinkubus]

Heroin is cheaper so eventually many people "graduate" to it, but most get started on prescriptions. Abuse of opiates is a huge problem in the United States.

 

[Cutlass]

Forgive my ignorance but what is this opioid crisis? Are we taking heroin or what?

No. Not heroin. Although it often ends there, that's not where it starts.

Short version, US drug makers got sufficiently deregulated that they were allowed to say for themselves how bad their drugs were. So, of course, they lied. They came up with a series of synthetic alternatives to opium, called opioids, which they claimed were sufficiently different that they were not addictive.

Turns out they're about the most addictive substances known to man.

But since they were officially 'not addictive', and they were profitable as all hell, they are massively over-prescribed. Leading to a massive addiction problem to something which is effectively heroine in a pill form. Meaning much easier to transport and use. And it is as deadly as heroine. But since it comes in a pill, you can't even cut the dosage. So it is both addicting, and killing, a lot of people.

But, because the American medical establishment is racist, white people 'feel real pain, and so need real pain medication', while black people are just looking for a fix. So white people, particularly white working class people, and frequently that overlaps with white rural people, can get a prescription for an opioid far more easily than a black person can. As a result we have a drug epidemic which is hitting white people hardest. And therefor, is 'a problem requiring medical attention', rather than 'a bunch of scumbags that should be locked up'. Which is what happens when a drug epidemic is mainly non-white people.

So we have to DO SOMETHING!

 

[stinkubus]

As a frame of reference to the scope of the problem:

Two pharmacies in a West Virginia town with a population roughly 3000 distributed 21 MILLION doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone between 2006 and 2016.

https://futurism.com/west-virginia-town-3000-received-21-million-opioid-pills-10-years/

Hamlen County Tennessee had 3 opiate prescriptions written PER PERSON in 2008.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/ne...ioid-progress-see-interactive-map/1088031001/

 

[Lemon Merchant]

I refuse to take them under any circumstances. The last thing I need is a monkey on my back. Thankfully my patients aren't of the type to usually ask for prescriptions of opioids.

And I don't handle addiction based therapy.

 

[Lexicus]

Forgive my ignorance but what is this opioid crisis? Are we taking heroin or what?

A drug addiction epidemic started to widely affect white people.

EDIT: Cutlass explained it better

 

[Cutlass]

I refuse to take them under any circumstances. The last thing I need is a monkey on my back. Thankfully my patients aren't of the type to usually ask for prescriptions of opioids.

And I don't handle addiction based therapy.

I've always been kind of afraid to take drugs myself.