As with many if not all issues in the US it comes down to the lies everyone get fed and subsequently buys into.
Instead of looking into root causes, quick fixes and promises are all that is ever supplied. At best they never really work and at worst they make things worse.
Look at prisons, childbirth and deaths of infants, healthcare in general, energy or food. It doesn’t really matter, because you see first hand what a unregulated economy that is 100% for profit leads to.
Nothing… absolutely nothing gets better for the average citizen (who in a democratic system should be the beneficiaries) but be it big oil, big telecom or big pharma are the winners.
Also nothing will improve because the system by now is so rigged that change is nearly impossible.
That is why I moved my family back to Europe after 20 years in the US.
Main reason being that the EU doesn’t allow advertising for pharmaceuticals.
prescription pharmaceuticals.
there is plenty of ads for over the countrr medicine like aspirin or the wici medinait, which is hilarious to be sold otc. It contains alcohol, ephedrine (methamphetamine precursor), dextromorphan (opiod) and paracetamol (tylenol). That is quite a drug cocktail right there.
But yeah, advertisment for prescription drugs is insane. Nobody should ask there doctor if some drug they saw on the tv could be right for them.
I think the cultural aspect is also very important. I Europe, having used drugs a couple of times is viewed as completely fine, as long as you are not currently addicted to them. Add to that the lack of a social net in US and you have the perfect storm.
I’m still rattled by videos of the homeless camps in US. Those people have no way out. Drugs at least provide an escape.
You’d have to be very very sick to get a prescription for opioids at all in Europe.
Which is also fucked up. It’s either one extreme or the other. Overprescribing to cause addiction, or forcing people to suffer when they don’t have to because doctors assume everyone’s an addict until they prove otherwise, and nothing convinces them. These drugs have a purpose. Just use them for their purpose. It’s not that fucking hard.
I think in some countries it’s fine if it doesn’t need a prescription, right
I think it’s also cheaper medicine access, so you can get a proper treatment rather than just temporarily stopping the pain.
I mean I just watched “Painkiller” on Netflix (but I heard “Dopesick” is better) and it explains a few things.
Like the insanity of advertising for a drug (like going to doctors and promoting your drug). Or the way Oxycodone was pushed through the FDA with bribes. It’s no surprise that you get addicts when you push a “12-hour” painkiller that only lasts for around 6-8 hours, sending patients into withdrawal. But if they allowed doctors to prescribe a lesser dose every 6 hours for example there would be cheaper alternatives (the 12-hour thing was the entire marketing selling point). Just awful :-/
I worked in a pain management clinic in the 2000s. The drug reps came daily, would have lunch catered from every restaurant, would go golfing with the docs and take them out for expensive dinners, and would bring branded gifts. They couldn’t force the docs to prescribe their particular pill but they would stop coming if you weren’t pushing enough of their product. It was sort of an unspoken agreement that they wrote the scripts and the reps would keep showing up.
It’s kind of crazy looking back. We were one of the clinics that took the enormous responsibility seriously and tried to serve the community and I think we did genuinely help people that were suffering. But I think that we were ultimately naive as shit about the drugs we were pushing and there’s no doubt many of those patients we had probably would go on to struggle with addiction problems.
America is a fucked up place. Europe is much less so. That is why.
Good podcast series on the opioid crisis: https://wondery.com/shows/american-scandal/season/51/
It’s the freedom drugs
