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Drug Firms Shipped 20.8 Million Pain Pills To West Virginia Town of 2,900 (foxnews.com)
A congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis has discovered out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers over a decade to two pharmacies in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people. From a report: Between 2006 and 2016, two drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, the Charleston Gazette-Mail reported. "These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia," the House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore. and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J. said in a joint statement.
Meds Per Person: 22800000.0/2900.0 = 7862.07
Meds Per Person/Year: 7862.07/10.0 = 786.21
Meds Per Person/Day: 786.21/365 = 2.15
Now it is unlikely that the Town is all on these Meds and 2 of these meds a day is very high. I have family suffering from constant pain, and they only use these once a week, in case of extreme pain (And unlike the media, these meds do work), to bring the pain to a manageable level.
However my main point is the news shoving people with big scary numbers, to really prove a point, but while there is still a problem, the real numbers are not as obvious as the article is lead to believe, as this is over 10 years. Not one big shipment.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If you break down the numbers, it's far less outrageous, but hey, why bother with the math? 20.8 million sounds like a crazy, impossible number, right? 20.8 million over 3650 days and 2900 people is less than 2 pills per person per day. Some people may be taking 4~6 pills a day on a regular basis (not saying that is good, but it is in line with a typical prescription), while others won't have any at all. It doesn't seem that unreasonable, given how opioids are prescribed these days.
realistically how many people per thousand actually need heavy opiates? How many would be in a town that size? 1 in 3 adults are getting prescriptions from the numbers I am finding. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/m...
Let's adjust by 50% to cover children, pregnant women, macho men (I can take the pain), masochists, etc. and divide by 3. That works out to about 483.
483/60 = 8.05 which seems excessive.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I'm still having a hard time deciding which side of the fence I'm on here.
When I'm presented with the choice of:
A) Having access to the medications I'm legit prescribed by my surgeon or doctor, while abusers of the same drugs also have easy access to them
and
B) Not having access to the medications I'm legit prescribed and living in agony, while abusers of those drugs still maintain easy access to them
I find it very difficult to support "B"
As someone who recently had open heart surgery and could only get my initial five day prescription filled followed by my second five day refill being delayed a very miserably long three extra days and having to go without pain relief - I frankly don't at all care what law enforcement wants when their desires result in people immediately out of major surgery are left in agony with no other recourse than wasting (in essence) the ERs time and resources to deal with a problem that shouldn't exist and has a well laid out plan to manage.
Especially combined with the fact that only 4 or 5 less people out of 100 are able to abuse those drugs as a result.
However even if they could promise and follow through on claiming the reverse, that is preventing 95% of the abusers instead of just 5%, the cost of that is simply far too high.
Laws and enforcement isn't the right answer to this problem in the first place.
Laws that result in people out of major surgery being in agony are not an answer to anything.
A very small part of me almost wishes for people who support these laws, and people tasked with enforcing them such as those at the DEA, would get to experience some major surgery that involves their body sliced open and bones sawed apart and sent home with no pain relief, just so they are personally connected to and aware of exactly what they are doing to other human beings.
Yet far more so than that, I wish they actually just spontaneously developed the human ability of empathy instead, as no one deserves to experience such a thing.
So, in your dog-eat-dog world, the children of the unemployed get squat which translates into a new generation of un-educated, malnourished sprogs who will be a burden when they turn to crime to make ends meet. Their parents might be able to give them pointers on how to do it well.
You can either pay them now or pay for them later, either way, you will pay.
Nothing Marsha Blackburn supports has a bright side.
1 in 3 adults are getting prescriptions from the numbers I am finding.
Let me just say: WHAT THE FUCK!
I did the math...that's 7,172 pain pills per person, if every single resident was gobbling them down at ~20 pills a day.
But there's nothing to see here, no siree, just move along. And whatever you do, don't say anything bad about the Sackler family, who almost single-handedly created this problem by deceptively marketing these opioids as being safe and manageable.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Nothing like a quote from the jack booted thugs in the DEA for how to ruin America.
You know how you actually ruin America? You put law enforcement in charge of a medical issue. Then they do things like threaten people with jail which cuts the pharmaceutical supplies of a drug with physical addiction issues so the users have to immediately turn to street drugs to reduce withdrawl side effects.
Then on top of that you stigmatize drug treatment so that seeking help makes you a looser, then add in a little random drug screening at employers so the person gets fired as well.
Our war on drugs is the most fucked up thing you could EVER do to this country.
Up the script to 3 pills per day as needed and you've got a standing prescription for about 1,925 people.
That's quitter talk, every baby should also be on opiates. You'll shit your pants when you see what happens to stock prices and revenue when we get babies addicted as earlier as possible. Because that's literally the only thing that matters, stock prices, and revenue. In fact, the real story here is that these babies ONLY get 2 doses of neo-heroin per day. Those are rookie numbers.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
So anyway, yes, these numbers are notorious half-truths and trumped-up to boot. But at the same time they might still point at a problem.
Is that your takeaway from this story? 20.8 million doses of heavy opiates shipped to a town of 2,900 over a decade and you're takeaway is that this "might point to a problem?" I realize you don't live in the US, but do you understand the number and frequency of opiate overdose deaths that are occurring in the US? Do you understand that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are culpable for pushing this product to people who don't need it so that they make more money, while Congress passes laws to restrict it so that people who actually do need it can't get it? Nothing that I just said is political, people would only have a political position on that if they're being paid to have one, or if they have been preached to by a spokesperson with a profit motive.
And then it's fairly important to frame (or re-frame or counter-frame) the narrative into something reasonably solvable
Holding doctors accountable when their patients die from overdose on an unnecessary medication prescribed by the doctor is a good first step. Maybe it will drive some of them away from prescribing without another thought just because they're going to get a kickback when they do prescribe something the person doesn't need. In other words, the profit motive needs to be removed. A complete overhaul of the health care system would also do that, but there are too many people making too much money in order to expect any meaningful change there.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Do you have any friends taking 2 opiate pills 3 times per day, at least that you know of?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black