from The Gray Area:
9/18/19:
This is a tough one for me. People in pain need strong drugs like Oxy. Having taken it myself, I know how strong it is - and it works! Because it works people with chronic pain use it. And thank God that it exists for relief of their pain.
Unfortunately, you have doctors who over prescribe it. You have other people, lets call it the black market, who get access to the drugs and sell them. And, you have people who cannot take personal responsibility for handling a strong and potentially dangerous drug.
Oxy is not the only strong and potentially dangerous drug on the market designed to help people. If any prescription drug is abused, it is harmful and potentially fatal. So where does the responsibility lie?
Corporations who make and sell these useful drugs get targeted by class action lawyers because, guess what, the lawyers can make money. How can they make money? Targeting a company with a lot of money. Does a successful trial verdict solve the problem? No. Are the company's guilty? Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe a little. We don't know, because it gets covered up in victimization, headlines and the bias presentation of facts. Politics gets involved, as it does in everything, with the left going after corporations as evil, forgetting to mention the millions of people that company has helped. And, the right standing up to defend the company for filling a community need.
So my question is where does personal responsibility come in? We seem to have lost that character and virtue. Its easier to be a victim and blame others. Especially when we have powerful legal teams and governments who want to profit off your misery. Do we not present effective drugs to the market to help people?
We have to remember that corporate judgements won't fix the opioid crisis. It just gets headlines and money for lawyers. We have to focus on the cause of the crisis. Like some many other issues in our country, we focus on headlines and not remedies. There are many more important areas to pursue to solve the opioid crisis.
A good conversation on the subject below from The FIVE, September 11th show.
div style="font-size:75%">from FoxNews,
9/11/19:
A major new battle in America's opioid crisis.
A new Washington Post story says the opioid crackdown is forcing chronic pain patients, people who need the drugs to taper off them. And the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma reportedly now reaching a $12 billion agreement to settle thousands of opioid cases.
if Purdue decides to make that decision, enter in the settlement that hopefully will go a long way. I do think that this is a really interesting problem though about what's happening to people who actually do have chronic pain.
Purdue Pharma, whatever the culpability, whatever they admit to, set that aside. There is a black market problem. There is an illegal market problem and that has caused people who deserve the care that they can be given to have to suffer.
That's really wrong. Imagine - and we don't have - we don't live with chronic pain. We don't know what that's like. It absolutely destroys your life. And so, what I pray for is an amazing innovation, something that will deal with people's pain in a way that doesn't cause the additional problems. But I also think that the federal government's crackdown on the black market and the illegal mixing of these drugs is so critical beyond this settlement. That has to keep going.
This is a really interesting conversation, Katie because in fact there are people who need pain medication, but at the same time, we're talking public policy. And without a doubt, we've had an opioid epidemic. So, how do you balance it. And are we at the point where we should be concerned about individuals who say I need the medication versus the large number of people who we know have become addicted if not dying from the abuse of opioids.
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