Big pharma are the worst drug pushers

Foreign Policy (Washington)

Donald Trump recently announced his intention to declare a formal state of emergency over America’s opioid crisis, says Laurie Garrett. Given that opioid overdose deaths in the US have nearly quadrupled since 1999, he would be quite right to do so. But this problem needs to be tackled the right way. Trump’s suggested remedies – cracking down on drug dealers and tightening security on the Mexican border – would simply perpetuate the failed policies of the “war on drugs”. Instead, he should go after the real villains: the pharmaceutical companies that create today’s “gateway drugs” in the form of synthetic opioid painkillers, some of which are “up to 10,000 times” more potent than medical-grade morphine. Across the US, state attorneys general have been filing lawsuits against these firms, claiming that they knowingly downplay the addiction risks of their products when marketing the drugs to physicians, and that they provide financial incentives to doctors to promote prescriptions. If the White House is serious about tackling the opioid crisis, it should throw its weight behind these legal actions. It should also disrupt the drug firms’ ongoing efforts to push these products into foreign markets. America’s reputation is bad enough already. We can’t afford to “let US pharmaceutical makers and drug retailers become the 21st century Medellín cartel”.