Lawsuits target industry pushers of opioids
The opioid crisis dominates American media headlines. The report from Wednesday’s Washington Post warned that “America’s opioid problem is so bad it’s cutting into
U.S. life expectancy.” The gist of the story: While data from the National
Vital Statistics Systems
Mortality file showed the average American life expectancy grew overall from the years 2000 to
2015, the rise in opioid-related deaths whittled away two and a half months off of the improvement.
The leading cause of accidental death in the U.S. is drug overdose. The American Society of Addiction Medicine reports that there were 52,404 lethal drug overdoses in 2015. Opioid addiction related to prescription pain relievers resulted in 20,101 of those deaths. Another 12,990 overdose deaths were connected to heroin in 2015, ASAM says.
Of the 20.5 million Americans age 12 and older who had a substance use disorder in 2015, 2 million had a substance use disorder involving prescription pain relievers and 591,000 had a substance use disorder involving heroin, according to data in the ASAM’s Opioid Addiction 2016 Facts & Figures. ASAM also reported that 23 percent of those who use heroin develop opioid addiction.
Opioids are a class of drugs that include the illegal heroin as well as prescription pain relievers like oxycodone, hydrocodone, codeine, morphine, fentanyl and others.
Now that drug abuse and its related deaths have moved off the inner city crack corners to the quaint subdivisions and small towns of America, we have a crisis that demands care not criminalization. Interesting, isn’t it, how attitudes change when the problem is in the bedroom upstairs or the house next door?
The rate of heroin use among white adults increased by 114 percent between 2004 and 2013, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From 2000 to 2015 more than half a million people died from drug overdoses and the majority (six out of 10) involved an opioid, CDC reports. Ninety-one – 91—Americans die every day from prescription opioids or heroin.
It is easy to see how this happened. If you have a condition that involves chronic pain, there’s a physician and a pill that will help manage your symptoms – and that’s not a bad thing. But, the undiscerning have created a problem – and an epidemic.
A recent article in The Economist reported that between 1991 and 2011, the number of opioid prescriptions supplied by American pharmacies increased from 76 million to 219 million. “As the number of pain pills being doled out by doctors increased, so did their potency,” The Economist reported. “In 2002 one in six users took a pill more powerful than morphine. By 2012 it was one in three.”
The state of Ohio took action back in May by suing five major drug manufacturers for their role in the opioid epidemic. In the lawsuit, the state’s Attorney General Mike DeWine alleges the companies “helped unleash a health care crisis that has had far-reaching financial, social, and deadly consequences in the state of Ohio.”
The suit accuses the pharmaceutical companies of engaging “in fraudulent marketing regarding the risks and benefits of prescription opioids which fueled Ohio’s epidemic.” The state believes there is evidence to show that the companies being sued misled doctors about the dangers of pain medications, and that they misled physicians for increased sales and profits. A similar lawsuit was filed earlier this year in
Mississippi.
It will be interesting to see the outcomes of these lawsuits. In the meantime, take a look at the website for the Center for Responsive Politics (OpenSecrets.Org) and see how much the pharmaceutical industry donates to your federal officials: https://www. opensecrets.org/industries/indus. php?ind=H04.
Sadly, there’s no magic pill for this public pain. When an industry pays out $30-$50 million, depending on the year, to political campaigns — and lobbyists for specific companies contribute millions more — you know it’s an investment in getting their way.
Shea Wilson is the former managing editor of the El Dorado News-Times. Email her at melsheawilson@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @sheawilson7.