Pharmaceutical Industry Profiting From a Solution to a Problem They Helped Create

Without getting into a complex discussion about regulatory law, the proper scope of government authority or the dynamics of a free market economy, I'd like to remain in the realm of gut-level common sense and ask one simple question: How much should the same industry that unleashes a devastating public health crisis be allowed to profit from any potential solution to that crisis? If your answer is "completely" or "as much as they want," you can probably stop reading now. But if you think there's something inherently predatory, repugnant and dangerous about such a scenario, you may want to know about one of the biggest ironies and injustices currently playing out on the sad and complicated battlefield our national opiate epidemic has become. In what has sometimes felt like a slow-moving avalanche of doom, prescription painkiller addiction has been steadily smothering our country in ruined lives and premature mortality for well over a decade. Fueled in large part by deceptive marketing and aggressive sales tactics unburdened by ethics, opioid pain medication's surge up the hierarchy of pharmaceutical prominence has been awe-inspiring. And as they would with any powerfully addictive drug -- illicit or prescription -- astronomical sales can bring catastrophic societal consequences. Initially, the consequences from the painkiller explosion were linear and foreseeable -- the drugs became increasingly overprescribed and utterly ubiquitous in American medicine, and a populat...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news