Quotes About Addiction

The Sacklers had already been rich, by any measure. But with the introduction of their first painkiller, they suddenly became a lot richer.

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

Having sold some $35 billion worth of OxyContin over two decades, the company might now be down, according to press reports, to as little as $500 million in cash.

The Sacklers have done a pretty good job of sucking the life out of Purdue," she said. "Year after year, month after month, they were draining hundreds of millions of dollars." All that was left at this point, she said, was "essentially a shell.

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.

Your priority is to sell, sell, sell OxyContin.

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.

Some communities began to resemble a zombie movie, as the phenomenon claimed one citizen after another, sending previously well-adjusted, functioning adults into a spiral of dependence and addiction. You could spot them out and about, pillheads, fiending outside the mini-mall, or nodding off in a parked car, a toddler bawling in the backseat.

not everyone who developed a problem with OxyContin started out as a recreational abuser. In fact, many people who were prescribed the drug for legitimate pain conditions and took it precisely as the doctor ordered found that they, too, had become hopelessly addicted.

As the negative publicity continued to swirl around OxyContin, Richard Sackler was privately seething. "The whole thing is a sham," a sympathetic friend reassured him. If people die because they abuse the drug, "then good riddance.

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.

Within four years of the launch celebration at the Wigwam in Arizona, OxyContin hit $1 billion in sales, surpassing the quintessential blockbuster drug of that era, Viagra.

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.

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.

Purdue argued that the patented Contin coating on a dose of OxyContin would obviate the risk of addiction.

People microwaved the pills, baked them in the oven, stuck them in the freezer, soaked them in all manner of solvents. But if Purdue's narrow objective was to prevent people from breaking down the pills, then this new coating seemed to work. In fact, there were telling indications, almost immediately, in Purdue's own sales data, which suggested that some habitual OxyContin users were frustrated by the tamperproof pills.

It was now in the grip of a full-blown opioid epidemic. Millions of Americans had become addicted to OxyContin and other opioids, whether they had done so through recreational abuse or under a doctor's care. Indeed, whatever the Sacklers might have wanted to tell themselves about their own intentions and the nature of the business they were in, this large population of addicted people was part of the reason that Purdue's sales were still so strong. The numbers didn't lie.

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.

Like a lot of people who use heroin, she found a certain glamour in it, until she didn't. She used the drug on and off for years, but in the late 1980s, it took over.

Goldin knew about the drug, knew its reputation for being dangerously addictive. But her own history of hard drug use, rather than making her more cautious, could sometimes mean that she was cavalier. I can handle it, she figured.

At a certain point, her doctors caught on to her and she was struggling to access enough black-market OxyContin, so she lapsed back into using heroin. One night, she bought a batch that, unbeknownst to her, was actually fentanyl, and she overdosed.

I'm told that we addictive-type personalities want to cover our pain, so we use food, spending, sex, drugs, sleeping, gambling, alcohol, work, people, blame, social activities, the Internet, etc., to distance and disguise what we don't know how to solve inside of us. The

We all know that one of the most successful ways to stop pain and presence is to drink or use other drugs. The reason that drunks are dangerous and boring is that they are not there with you, but are lost in another world. Driving when drunk is destructive because you are not present to the road and the traffic around you. You are not in a place of survival and your inability to survive could harm others.