Politicians and Pharmaceutical companies spend months doing research but never release reports!!
Our federal government is controlled by pharmaceutical companies who spend $80m per year on lobbying
The opioid epidemic now claims close to 60,000 American lives a year
evolving into the biggest health emergency since HIV/Aids, as the medical profession’s caution about the prescribing of opioids fell away. Drug companies and some specialists pushed the notion that opioids were not addictive when used to treat pain based on the flimsiest of evidence, including a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine citing a small study that its authors say was misused. Out of that flowed a policy of treating pain as a “fifth vital sign” that corralled hospitals and doctors into mass prescribing opioids. Deaths from opioid overdoses quadrupled between 1999 and 2015; ninety-one Americans die from opioid overdoses every day.
April Rovero’s son, Joey, died from drugs prescribed by the only doctor so far convicted of murder for illegally supplying opioids, Lisa Tseng. Rovero came out of it determined to educate others and set up the National Coalition Against Prescription Drug Abuse.
With stigma and ignorance come fear. Sherrie Rubin’s son, Aaron, survived an OxyContin overdose but his brain was starved of oxygen. He was left paralyzed and only able to communicate using two fingers. Aaron collapsed after taking the pill for fun at a friend’s house but the family delayed calling the emergency services because her son bought the drugs illegally in Mexico. The parents of Aaron’s friend finally drove him to the hospital but pretended not to know what was wrong with him. Rubin, now the executive director of Hope2gether, channelled her pain into pushing through a Good Samaritan law in California to protect a person from being arrested for possession of illegal drugs when summoning help for someone who is overdosing.
Parents winning local battles but losing the war to change national policy in the face of the considerable power of the pharmaceutical companies. So they drew their disparate organizations together under an umbrella group, Fed Up!, to press for change in Washington.
