WATCH – Die Suckers Die –
August 29, 2020 – The pharmaceutical industry’s opportunism — enabled by the backing of politicians and federal regulators — along with the emerging medical consensus that opioids were highly effective for pain management, led to opioids taking hold in American society.
Furthermore, money pouring in from Big Pharma and a green light from D.C. provided American doctors with a financial incentive to prescribe more opioids.
“People have blamed all sorts of things, heroin from Mexico and fentanyl from China and economic decline and so on and so forth,” Dr. Janet Currie, a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University and one of the co-authors of the paper, told Yahoo Finance. “But really the issue is that a whole lot of people got addicted because they were prescribed pain medications which aren’t prescribed in the same way in other countries. They’re much more controlled.”
Opioids are prescribed and abused in the U.S. at a significantly higher rate than any other country.
“If you recognize that a lot of the problem has to do with regulation … most other countries, when they do allow opioid prescription, they don’t know how high doses of opioid prescriptions are but we do,” Currie said. “Most other countries don’t allow advertising medications direct-to-consumers but we do. There’s a whole list of things like that which have made things worse.”
