Quotes About Opioids

To end the drug crisis, we should educate everyone about the dangers of opioid drugs, help drug users get treatment, and aggressively prosecute criminals who supply the deadly poison.

Using prescription drug monitoring programs is an important step in identifying patients who may be improperly using prescription painkillers.

The damage caused by opioids is largely caused by their prohibition

Los alimentos altos en grasa y azúcar hacen que el cerebro segregue "opioides endógenos", alias morfina biológica.

Like the plague, opioids kill the young, the old, the healthy, the sick, the virtuous and the sinful.

But medicine has not simply neglected to research women's health; it has also failed to treat women who are sick. One study found that women in various ERs were 13 to 25 percent less likely to receive opioid painkillers (the strongest painkiller medicine has) than men were.

Drug overdoses are today the number one cause of accidental death in the United States as a result of America's historic addiction and overdose epidemic.* Overdose deaths rose from 17,415 in 2000 to 93,330 in 2020, a 536 percent increase.30 Significantly more people die of drug overdoses today than of homicide (13,927 in 2019) or car accidents (36,096 in 2019).31 The overdose crisis is worse in San Francisco than in other cities.

Some 80 percent of Americans addicted to opioids began with prescription painkillers, not with illegal street drugs. Essentially, pharmaceutical executives acted like Colombian drug lords, with legal approval. Many cities and states, including Baltimore, are now suing Purdue and other pharmaceutical companies to recover some of the costs of treating the opioid epidemic, but no one can ever give Daniel back what he lost.

That message was repeated many times throughout the event—that when morphine was used to treat pain, it was not actually addictive.

2019, a team of economists from Notre Dame, Boston University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published a dense research paper on the timing of the "rapid rise in the heroin death rate" in the years since 2010. The title of the paper was "How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.

They had passed a point of no return. And as it happened, there was an inexpensive substitute for OxyContin that was cheaper and stronger and widely available: heroin.

In fact, more Americans had lost their lives from opioid overdoses than had died in all of the wars the country had fought since World War II.

In some cases, these communities also happened to have long-standing problems with prescription drug abuse. In some parts of Appalachia, people would pair an OxyContin with a Valium—one of Richard Sackler's pills and one of his uncle Arthur's. They called this "the Cadillac high.

Some participants had said that "the only difference between heroin and OxyContin is that you can get OxyContin from a doctor.

According to a study by the Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity, Purdue and other drug companies that manufacture opioid painkillers spent over $700 million between 2006 and 2015 on lobbying in Washington and in all fifty states. The combined spending of these groups amounted to roughly eight times what the gun lobby spent. (By comparison, during the same period, the small handful of groups pushing for limits on opioid prescribing spent $4 million

Consequently, patients and their families were often reluctant to have doctors prescribe morphine, because in the popular imagination it was seen, as Richard put it, to be "a death sentence.

Opioids can deliver you, if only for a few minutes, from physical or emotional pain, from discomfort, from anxiety, from need. It is like no other human experience. "I'll die young," the comedian Lenny Bruce once said of his own addiction. "But it's like kissing God." (He did die young, naked on his bathroom floor, from a morphine overdose, at forty.)

In some ways, Richard's argument about OxyContin mirrored the libertarian position of a firearms manufacturer who insists that he bears no responsibility for gun deaths. Guns don't kill people; people kill people.

Ohio was an apt forum for this showdown. By 2016, 2.3 million people in the state—approximately 20 percent of the total population—received a prescription for opioids. Half of the children who were in foster care across the state had opioid-addicted parents. People were dying from overdoses at such a rate that local coroners had run out of room in which to store all the bodies and were forced to seek makeshift alternatives.

Between 1994 and 2015, the quota of oxycodone that the DEA permitted to be legally manufactured was raised thirty-six times. A subsequent report by the inspector general of the Justice Department criticized the DEA for being "slow to respond to the dramatic increase in opioid abuse.

The Sacklers took the view that the same should go for OxyContin. To the degree that people are misusing the drug and overdosing, the blame lies with any number of potentially irresponsible parties—the prescribing doctor, the wholesaler, the pharmacist, the trafficker, the abuser, the addicted person—but not with the manufacturer. Not with Purdue. Much less the Sacklers.

Richard's cousin Kathe Sackler would claim that it was she who first suggested oxycodone

Overdoses had now surpassed car accidents to become the leading cause of preventable death in America. In a midyear update to the Sacklers in June 2016, staffers told the family that, according to surveys, nearly half of all Americans knew someone who had been addicted to prescription opioids.

At a meeting in early 2011, staff showed the board data indicating that 83 percent of patients who were admitted to substance abuse treatment centers had started using opioids by swallowing them.