Quotes About Oxycodone

Drug abuse and addiction are very real problems, the remedy for which is education and medical treatment, not incarceration. In fact, the most abused drugs in the United States now appear to be oxycodone and other prescription painkillers. Should

In 1993, three years before OxyContin came out, the DEA allowed pharmaceutical companies to manufacture 3,520 kilograms of oxycodone. In 2007, the DEA signed off on the production of seventy thousand kilograms of oxycodone. Almost twenty times the amount manufactured just fourteen years earlier. Twenty times.

In 2010, ninety of the top one hundred oxycodone-purchasing doctors in the country lived in Florida. By 2014, the DEA said, the state contained only one. The number of oxycodone pills shipped to Florida dropped from 650 million in 2010 to 313 million in 2013.

Four of the doctors at American Pain were among the top nine physician purchasers of oxycodone in the United States, according to the DEA, which meant that together, they were a juggernaut. A

That's oxycodone—one of the most irresistible opioid narcotics ever cooked up in the six-thousand-year history of dope.

The third loophole that led to the oxycodone rush was that Florida law allowed doctors to sell narcotics themselves, no pharmacist needed. Pain clinics that charged for appointments and drugs could make a lot of money, and the one-stop shopping concept lured drug-seeking patients who didn't want to pay for prescriptions that might be hard to get filled.

By the height of the state's pill mill rush, Florida doctors were purchasing nine times more oxycodone than doctors in other states. That's nine times more than the other forty-nine states combined. In one six-month period, according to DEA records, Florida doctors bought 41.2 million doses while every other physician in the country collectively purchased 4.8 million doses.

Ohio was the second-ranked state in this category of physician purchasers. Its doctors bought about a million doses of oxycodone in 2009. The same year, through his doctors, Chris George bought more than twice as much oxy as every single doctor in Ohio. Four of American Pain's full-time doctors ranked among the top nine physician purchasers of oxycodone in the country.

But people had figured out that if you crushed the pills—even if you just chewed them with your teeth—you could override the controlled-release mechanism and unleash a mammoth hit of pure oxycodone. It did not take much trial and error to make this discovery. In fact, each bottle came with a warning that, in retrospect, doubled as an inadvertent how-to:

Richard and his senior executives now devised a cunning strategy, which they outlined in a series of emails. If the true personality of oxycodone was misunderstood by America's doctors, the company would not correct that misunderstanding. Instead, they would exploit it.

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.

The death of the actor Heath Ledger that January, from an overdose involving a long list of painkillers, including oxycodone, brought a new level of national attention to the problem.