Quotes About Opioids

Purdue also explicitly instructed sales reps to target family physicians who were likely to be naive about opioids, "opioid naive"—doctors who had little experience prescribing this kind of medication. To

mean, we have an OC pill that's 80 milligrams per pill. Now, that is as much oxycodone as in 16 Percocet tablets . . . That's why the addicts want to go after our pills.

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.

Richard Sackler was a key proponent of Purdue Frederick's transition into pain management.

And heroin was a street drug, sold out of the back of a car by anonymous young Mexicans of uncertain immigration status, whereas OxyContin had been approved by no less an authority than the Food and Drug Administration. The Sacklers were legitimate businesspeople, pillars of American society. Even after the felony conviction for Purdue, as controversy continued to swirl around OxyContin, Richard Sackler served on the advisory board of the Yale Cancer Center.

African Americans had been spared the full brunt of the opioid epidemic: doctors were less likely to prescribe opioid painkillers to Black patients, either because they did not trust them to take the drugs responsibly or

Today, 80 percent of the world's opioid prescriptions are written in the United States, even though only 5 percent of the world's population lives there.

Self-injury is a coping mechanism that BPs use to release or manage overwhelming emotional pain—usually feelings of shame, anger, sadness, and abandonment. Self-mutilation may release the body's own opiates, known as beta-endorphins. These chemicals lead to a general feeling of well-being.