OxyContin is extremely dangerous, and unless an individual requires immediate relief from extreme pain—say, from a horrific accident, medical procedure, or disease—it’s best avoided. Like its legion of prescription opioid brethren, it is, in effect, heroin in pill form. And yet thanks to the efforts of the Sackler family’s Purdue Pharma and the corporations that followed its lead, OxyContin is now consumed by millions of citizens who are addicted to it, and die from it, just like any other deadly narcotic. No matter Purdue’s protestations to the contrary, this so-called miracle drug has helped spawn a ghastly opioid crisis that from 2000 to 2019 caused 487,842 overdose deaths in America.
And as Alex Gibney’s latest documentary contends, this wasn’t an unfortunate side effect of a vitally needed treatment. It was a deliberate and dastardly crime, carried out in the name of profit.
Gibney’s two-part HBO documentary The Crime of the Century (premiering May 10 and 11) is an evisceration of Big Pharma, which it argues purposefully and aggressively flooded the market with OxyContin—and, later, the even more powerful fentanyl—in order […]
I would never take Oxycontin, but I also could not survive without the hydrocodone/acetaminophen that my doctor prescribes for me. What I do not like is the acetaminophen being in it because they discovered that it can and does cause cancer. My question to the government and the makers of it is: why just cut the dose of acetaminophen down from 500mg. to 325mg instead of eliminating it from and just giving those of us who need it hydrocodone without it. It will still cause me to get cancer with 325mg just not as quick. I am an 74 year old disabled person who could not do anything without pain relief. Why do I need to poison my body with this cancer causing acetaminophen?
P.S.: I should add that the VA was terrible at understanding my pain. Even though I had been treated for back pain back in the 1960’s when I was in the US Army, they had been treating me for my back problem, The VA said they did not keep records that long, so they did not give me good treatment for my very real pain. That led me to have to go to an outside-the-VA treatment center with a Great Doctor who examined me thoroughly and did recommend the pain medication which I need. The unfortunate side of this is that a monopoly (UPMC) took over the clinic which my doctor works at. Since that time, my payments for a simple 15 minute examination which he charged me about $40 or so has now become $176 for a simple visit. UPMC is a Capitalist Pig monopoly and that makes it corrupt in my mind. UPMC moved into our town and took over our small city and took over our hospital as well as almost all of our small clinics and all of the prices have gone up for everything from clinic visits to hospital visits. When my wife went into the hospital when she had a heart attack, Social Security payed for her two day treatment, but we were stuck with a co-payment of $1,500 per day. It took us ten years to pay that off because we were on Social Security alone with no other help. We had to decide that we would never go back to that hospital under any circumstances. My wife died at home two days after Christmas, because she would never go to the hospital, even if it meant her death. Capitalism is a killer! We need a Social Democracy here in the USA, just like Bernie Sanders suggests.