Tag Archives: opioids

This topic is blowing up in the news. Politicians claiming recipients are laying out cash for drugs and other unneeded things. Funny thing, they didn’t give a damn when 20 million hydrocodone and oxycodone tabs showed up at five pharmacies in 4 small towns having a total population of ~22000 in 2016. Gotta keep those pharma contributions rolling into their campaign funds. I featured this in a 2018 post, if you read it . . . How are Low Income...

“The Justice Department moved on Thursday to block a bankruptcy plan that grants broad legal immunity to the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, whose drug OxyContin has been at the heart of the nation’s opioid epidemic. William K. Harrington, the U.S. trustee for the Justice Department, filed a motion in federal court to halt confirmation of the settlement while the department appeals the judge’s decision to approve the deal. In writing...

A little history: In 1980, the Porter and Jick letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine by the Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program stated: “the risk of addiction was low when opioids such as oxycodone were prescribed for chronic pain.” It was a brief statement by the doctors conducting the study, taken out of context, and cited many times afterwards as justification for the use of oxycodone. In a June 1, 2017 letter to the...

Here’s is a PBS commentary by law professor Ekow Yankah: That Kroger, the Midwestern grocery chain, has decided to make the heroin overdose drug naloxone available without a prescription is a sign of how ominous the current epidemic has grown. Faced with a rising wave of addiction, misery, crime and death, our nation has linked arms to save souls. Senators and CEOs, Midwestern pharmacies and even tough-on-crime Republican presidential candidates now speak...