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OxyContin Billionaire Patents Drug To Treat Opioid Addiction (cbsnews.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the corrupted-by-money dept.

Richard Sackler, the billionaire businessman behind Purdue Pharma, has patented a new drug to help treat opioid addiction (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The news of the patented form of buprenorphine, a mild opioid that is used to ease withdrawal symptoms, comes as Colorado's attorney general is suing the OxyContin creator for profiting from opioid addictions. Some now believe that Sackler and his family, who owns Purdue Pharma, will be trying to profit from the antidote. The Washington Post reports: The lawsuit claims Purdue Pharma L.P. and Purdue Pharma Inc. deluded doctors and patients in Colorado about the potential for addiction with prescription opioids and continued to push the drugs. And it comes amid news that the company's former chairman and president, Richard Sackler, has patented a new drug to help wean addicts from opioids. "Purdue's habit-forming medications coupled with their reckless marketing have robbed children of their parents, families of their sons and daughters, and destroyed the lives of our friends, neighbors, and co-workers," Colorado Attorney General Cynthia Coffman said Thursday in a statement. "While no amount of money can bring back loved ones, it can compensate for the enormous costs brought about by Purdue's intentional misconduct."

The lawsuit states that Purdue Pharma "downplayed the risk of addiction associated with opioids," "exaggerated the benefits" and "advised health care professionals that they were violating their Hippocratic Oath and failing their patients unless they treated pain symptoms with opioids," according to the statement from the Colorado attorney general's office. But Purdue Pharma "vigorously" denied the accusations Friday in a statement to The Washington Post, saying that although it shares "the state's concern about the opioid crisis," it did not mislead health-care providers about prescription opioids. "The state claims Purdue acted improperly by communicating with prescribers about scientific and medical information that FDA has expressly considered and continues to approve," a spokesman for Purdue Pharma said in the statement. "We believe it is inappropriate for the state to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the regulatory, scientific and medical experts at FDA." The report makes note of the patent's description, which acknowledges the risk of addiction associated with opioids and states that the drug could be used both in drug replacement therapy and pain management.

38 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Drug lords... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you are a multi-billion drug lord, you are called "big pharma". If after a while your product (Heroin, Cocaine etc) is banned, you switch to something else and the "evil" drug lords that are not big enough to be called "big pharma" take over those products.
    Getting rich by both getting your users addicted and also selling them treatment is a further step in this theatre of the absurd we live in...

    1. Re:Drug lords... by alvinrod · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I'm not a fan of making drugs illegal at all, but I'll take "big pharma" over the drug cartels. You end up with people consuming drugs and ruining their own lives either way, but at least "big pharma" isn't leaving a pile of extra corpses with Colombian neckties lying around.

    2. Re: Drug lords... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yup.

      Meanwhile in Colorado, my wife had back surgery and the Dr. is so paranoid of being labeled a pusher that he tried to prescribe ibuprofen as her only post OP painkiller.

    3. Re:Drug lords... by shaitand · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'm not sure I would. People die all the time for all sorts of reasons. columbian neckties are a relatively tiny statistic. Big pharma jacking up costs and reducing availability of medication on a mass global scale is responsible for millions of deaths and billions of people being impoverished because of the additional costs to their healthcare.

      Ditch big pharma, fund drug development at the fed tap managed by a private non-profit with a board of medical researchers and with all staff researchers paid 250k/yr(adjusted over time to keep them in the 1%) and outsource the actual production of medications to anyone and everyone who wants to do it with FDA oversight of quality control much like food production but not on distribution or consumption.

      Breaks big pharma and leaves plenty of incentive in the field, just not the get rich screwing people kind or the slow to size of government kind.

    4. Re: Drug lords... by sjames · · Score: 2

      In cases where the victim received every assurance from a certified medical professional that it would be just fine, yes.

      Especially when we have law enforcement practicing medicine without a license and refusing to allow the resulting addictions to be treated as a complication to be treated medically.

    5. Re: Drug lords... by sjames · · Score: 3, Informative

      More likely, you are the shill. Doctors are feeling increasing pressure (again) not to prescribe opiates even where they are clearly called for.

      Go away popo, you're neither qualified nor licensed to make this decision.

    6. Re:Drug lords... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Tell that to the families of those lost in Kentucky and West Virginia from Opoid addiction?

      Better yet tell that to the families of those who died due to denied treatment from the lack of insurance thanks to big pharma endless needing profits?

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    7. Re: Drug lords... by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 2

      That may be true, but when the person you love is in agony you have to start wondering who exactly IS qualified, why certain decisions were made and why they are being changed AGAIN. I personally know of two people who tried alternative cures for cancer and both are still walking around when they should have died ages ago. Not saying it cured them, because they were also doing normal chemo etc. but who knows? The people in charge are clearly fucking clueless or self serving. Personally, I think they are getting laws changed to suit their own agenda, and not for the public good. Hemp (not weed) is a prime example, you can't get high on it, but it got banned along with weed, it was highly durable, it was comfortable and you could grow it in your backyard.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
    8. Re:Drug lords... by LordWabbit2 · · Score: 2

      Thank you, the reason the drug cartels exist is because "Big Pharma" changed the laws and outlawed drugs that worked perfectly well and "replaced" them with "safer" drugs. Turns out they were still the same old drugs they replaced, but this time they got royalties. My wife has always advocated banning alcohol instead of weed. Alcohol causes a LOT more death and misery and broken families than some guy smoking a joint. Of course alcohol is too easy to make, it's NEVER going to go away, but then neither is weed, heroine, morphine and all the other natural drugs. In my mind the only major leap forward in medication was penicillin, it stopped people from dying from an infected splinter, but they fucked that up as well by giving it to fucking everything so now we have super resistant bugs. Thanks to all the fucking EXPERTS.

      --
      There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
    9. Re: Drug lords... by sjames · · Score: 2

      Medicine is still art as well as science and doctors are far from perfect. But I do know that cops who have never even met your loved one and legislators who show no sign of ever having felt pain worse than a paper cut (neither apparently care if people scream in agony for a week) are not remotely qualified to make the decision.

    10. Re: Drug lords... by sg_oneill · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I had something happen to me like this. I had some surgery last year that was notorious for being really goddamn painful. I agreed only on the condition that the doc implement a pain management plan. Essentially Oxycontin for 4 weeks followed by 2 weeks of tapering off. After the surgery, a hospital ADMINISTRATOR decided that they where going to block sending me home with the meds or a script for them due to controversies in the media. I ended up in stupid amounts of bleeding everywhere pain at my parents house, and fortunately my dad had some pills lying around to get me through the night and in the morning I went to the GP who was absolutely furious that they did THAT procedure on me without letting me have pain killer. In fact the GP told me his usual recomendation for that particular procedure is a week or two INPATIENT recovery on morphine and possibly Ketamine if the morphine isn't cutting it.

      I was incredibly tempted to ask my lawyer to file suit against the hospital. My surgical consent was ONLY given on the condition of adequate pain relief, and some fuck-head business suit decided to override the anaesthesiologists judgement. Worst of all Insurance threatened not to cover it, because in their view that particular procedure is irregular without adequate pain relief. Fortunately the Hospital itself smoothed that nonsense out for me.

      --
      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    11. Re: Drug lords... by Mashiki · · Score: 5, Insightful

      That's a crock of shit. Doctors are so afraid of prescribing opiates, that the pain clinic I goto is now shutting down. The wait for a new pain clinic another 85km away(the one I went to was 30km away), the waiting list for the 1st appointment is now 17 months. That left me in one hell of a spot, because my neurologist handed my pain treatment off to them while she continued to monitor my spine damage(broke my back in two spots about a decade back now). Let me make it clear, testicular torsion rated at a 7 out of 10 on the pain scale in my book when I was a teen. That's when my nut swelled up to the size of an apple. The two shattered vertebra that sliced into my spine, is a 9 or 10 out of 10 nearly all the time. The damage is bad enough I have a baclofen pump to reduce the muscle spasms, cramps, and loss of motor control. Luckily my neurologist had no problems picking up the prescriptions I was on, or replacing the ampules every 2-3 months.

      I'm not alone in this. It's absolutely rife in Canada and the US over junkies causing those of us with long-term pain control use problems. The whole "opioid epidemic" is hurting those of us the most, who need pain management. The ONLY way I function is by having something that will suppress the pain enough that I can work(even then I take a long term pill, and a short-term pill for breakthrough pain), and I'd rather work then not even being able to get out of bed, being on welfare/disability and other forms of social assistance. Read this article. Chronic pain patients are the ones being most fucked over by all the hand wringing of habitual drug abusers popping themselves off with illicit drugs, laced with heavier drugs.

      The people I know who have serious chronic pain? The ones that are using opiates so they can just function day-to-day? There's an awful lot of "well if they cut me off, what's the easiest way to commit suicide" going around. Those are people who suffer from chronic migraines(I have those too), to the people who've had serious spine injuries, or other issues related to diseases or complications like diabetics that have severe nerve damage to their feet/hands due to poor blood circulation. Again, read that article. The people who are saying "you don't need those drugs" are the ones who don't know what constant, unbearable pain is like. They simply think "you'll get over it."

      --
      Om, nomnomnom...
    12. Re:Drug lords... by StikyPad · · Score: 2, Informative

      Drugs in general, and opiods in particular, are not the problem. Drug abuse is a symptom of deeper issues like isolation, depression, and hopelessness. It's literally self-medicating. This is not an epidemic among healthy, well-adjusted adults with stable incomes and functional social support networks. There is some of that, to be sure, but not an epidemic. It's impoverished areas of the country among people who have given up and feel left behind that are hardest hit. And again, drug abuse is a symptom of that.

      The overwhelming majority of people don't become addicted to their prescription painkillers. All available evidence supports this. Of course corporations are greedy, and they need regulation, but opiods are the best treatment currently available for pain management, and if you've ever needed them, you know they are the difference between agony and relief. Limiting their availability or doctors' ability and discretion in prescribing only harms people who genuinely need them. Addicts will find a way regardless. Should we have support systems in place for those who do? Absolutely. But demonizing the supply side misses the point entirely.

      For some reason, most people understand that brewers and distillers -- despite their much heavier advertising and glamorizing of alcohol than, say, opioid manufacturers of fentanyl -- don't create alcoholics, and that prohibition just made the problem worse, but everyone wants to believe that it's completely different this time. Because opiods. Yes, it's a compelling and easy-to-believe story that "big pharma" is responsible, but it doesn't really make sense at the end of the day. If manufacturers and prescribers were responsible, we might expect to see people with the most access to healthcare and the most dollars to spend have the most problems as a percentage of the respective demographics, but the reverse is true.

      Nobody wants to talk about the socioeconomic drivers of addiction, because it means a) admitting a problem with the social structure in our country, b) it's hard to generate the same emotion and outrage about underprivileged segments of society as a story about a big bad enemy does and c) it's a much more difficult problem to solve.

      I came across this in looking for supporting data, and it seems to be a good description of the real problem: https://tonic.vice.com/en_us/a...

      See also:
      https://jamanetwork.com/journa...
      https://www.drugabuse.gov/abou...

      --
      https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
  2. Gold mine... by bkmoore · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The American healthcare industry is really just a gold mine for those on the right side of the equation. This person has given up any hope that the American health care industry can ever be reformed to put curing disease and human welfare back into the center focus.
    1. 1. Get a government granted monopoly in the form of a patent.
    2. 2. Make sure the government health insurance programs such as Medicare and Tricare cannot negotiate drug prices with the pharaceutical companies.
    3. 3. Get insurance companies and government to make your drug the only approved method for treating opioid addiction.
    4. 4. Jack up the price to an astronomical level. Anyone without sufficient insurance coverage will go bankrupt and ruin their livelihood buying your product.
    5. 5. Take 10% of your earnings to hire more lobbyists to protect your goldmine
    6. 6. Get talking heads to scream at the patients and voters that any effort to control cost or reform the system is SOCIALISM and we'll all be "eating rats" as in VENEZUELA, or Obama will come and pull the plug on granny because she's a conservative christian.
    7. 8. Profit
  3. Opioids and withdrawal by lenski · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After a relatively serious motorcycle accident (36 years ago, it's all good since...), I received a prescription for percodan. I resisted the temptation to try it for a while, but one night I caved and took the pill.

    *Never Again.*

    I don't know whether it was a reaction to the drug, or a small taste of withdrawal. But every cubic millimeter of my body was uncontrollably itchy, for about a day and a half. EVERYTHING was itchy. Inside and out.

    Pain is nothing compared to that experience.

    That said... A guy making billions peddling that shit, then patenting a drug to treat the consequences of having taken the original known-addicting drug is magically, cosmically evil.

    Some bullshit slashdot commenter talking about "personal responsibility" is almost as evil. I remember the Scientific American article written about opioids back in the '90's, in which the authors declared that opioids are not really addictive for patients in real pain. I don't remember whether there were any disclaimers. Now we know they were lying. Now we know that these "trusted sources" with money to be made were fucking over their customers.

    And now we have shitheads commenting with such glibness about personal responsibility. To which I reply: Piss off boy. If you are lucky enough never to have experienced it, or possibly lucky enough to have experienced it and gotten past it, that's all fine. You are the exception. But that does not give you the privilege of dismissing the effects of such executive lying on other people who for one reason or another fell victim to the Royal Scam.

    1. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You took one pill 30 years ago, had what obviously is an adverse reaction to the drug, and now feel like you're some kind of authority on drug withdrawal and addiction. Okie dokie.

    2. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by piojo · · Score: 3, Informative

      You misunderstood him/her. That anecdote was an introduction to the topic, and an explanation of a narrow escape. It was not a claim of expertise.

      --
      A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
    3. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 2

      You had an allergic reaction. Has nothing to do with "personal responsibility." And making moral equivalence with a slashdot commenter? WTF Grandpa?

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    4. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by alvinrod · · Score: 2

      I realize that this is not going to be a popular opinion, but aren't you the very example against the argument you're making though? You took an opioid and did not become addicted (just as a number of other people, such as myself who took a strong painkiller exactly once and never again due to not liking the side effects) and took some personal responsibility to realize that even if the pills would treat your pain, it may not be a good idea for you to take them. There are clearly some people who should not be given opioids under any circumstances as they're exactly the type who are susceptible to becoming addicted. It's about as irresponsible as giving an arsonist a book of matches.

      Executives lying about the effects of a medication is its own matter. Let's suppose there were no lies (or that this drug was never released and we're still using morphine instead) and we knew exactly how addictive this medication was. Does it still excuse anyone who disregards that information and uses is anyway, or continues to use it after they have a good reason to believe that they need to tell their doctor to switch them to another medication? If we were talking about crack cocaine, you'd tell people that they have a personal responsibility not to get addicted to crack. You wouldn't completely absolve those people who do get addicted just because there was a dealer who sold it to them and told them that everything would be fine.

      I think that a person has to be severely mentally retarded (in the actual medical sense) before their own lack of ability to be personal responsible for themselves means that they're better off completing largely or completely abdicating that responsibility to someone else. How many less addicts would their be if patients were a little more responsible and did some of their own research instead of blindly trusting a physician, and how many physicians would have written prescriptions if they'd been a little bit more responsible instead of blindly trusting the sales rep from the pharmaceutical company? I really do think that if you want to get through life with a minimum amount of suffering that you do have to try to take as much personal responsibility as possible, even if no one else would blame you if you didn't. No one else is going to do a better job of having your own best interests in mind than you yourself. It might feel comforting to be able to blame someone else after the fact, but I'd rather not have to have the bad experience and look for where to spread the blame in the first place. Even when you don't have malicious assholes lying to you, other people are still capable of making innocent mistakes that can bite you in the ass.

      Prosecute the executives to the full extent of the law if you can prove that they intentionally mislead the FDA, but don't throw personal responsibility out along with them.

    5. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That wasn't withdrawal you experienced, Grandpa. That was an allergic reaction. Withdrawal is a tremendous craving. As if you're thirsty in the desert, but instead of water you need opiates. Moreover you have to use the drug for a period of time before you get physically addicted. You took it once? Jeez louise, Grandpa.

      --
      Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
    6. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by hey! · · Score: 2

      Here's the problem with personal responsibility: you can't do it without your brain. When you're talking about drugs which derange the reward systems of the brain, getting over addiction is not a matter of virtue.

      It's basic cybernetics: behavior is controlled by various kinds of feedback loops; break those loops and the system becomes unstable.

      When the system goes haywire, it needs support from the outside.

      Now it's true that people who have a propensity for risky behavior have a higher risk of addiction. It's also true that people who lead lives of constant, unrelieved stress (soldiers in war zones, poor people) have a higher risk of addiction. But if there's anything the opioid crisis has taught us is that if you expose enough people to the stuff, you'll get countless addicts who don't fit any kind of profile.

      The opioid crisis kills many, many more people than terrorists ever have, year after year after year. The problem is they die alone, in their homes, so their invisible except to first responders. If you could somehow gather all the bodies from one year and put them all in one place on a single day, maybe people would take this more seriously.

      --
      Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
    7. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by demonlapin · · Score: 3, Informative

      It probably wasn’t an allergic reaction. Opioids make some people itch intolerably. Not allergic at all, though.

    8. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by sjames · · Score: 2

      Except the only way to find out who shouldn't be given opoids is to give them opoids. Kinda like the cashier at the grocery store doesn't KNOW he's selling matches to an arsonist, especially one who is about to offend for the first time.

      What's really despicable is that tapering an addicted patient off of opiates is legally risky for a doctor. They're supposed to cut them off cold turkey so they can be driven to a street dealer if that often ineffective "treatment" doesn't work.

      There is no special virtue in luck of genetics and circumstance leaving you without an addiction problem. Count your good blessings but don't look down on others who weren't as fortunate.

      Addiction is insidious. By the time someone realizes that their medically justified and prescribed pain medication might become a problem, they're already addicted. In other cases, they may know it could become a problem, but the pain is a problem right now and it just laughs at a couple aspirin.

      If someone Was taking prescribed ibuprofen after an accident and developed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...">Toxic epidermal necrolysis, would you be asking what moral failing on their part caused their misfortune?

      Really, here in the 21st century you would think we would be past ascribing medical problems to unrepented sin.

    9. Re:Opioids and withdrawal by lenski · · Score: 2

      OK, apparently it was not MY "withdrawal", I can accept that. I'll stay the hell off that shit because my own side effects include the itchiness.

      I stand by the basic analogy though: Opiates were prescribed too frequently based on willfully inadequate warnings. It's still irresponsible to label the patients as irresponsible who as often as not, start down the road while in recovery from accidents, or operations, or whatever distracting experiences caused the pain in the first place. Imagine someone who was given that stuff in the delirium after an operation, getting out their laptop and doing a well-informed literature search. I can see how well that advice works. or not. That was in fact nearly my situation: Badly busted up, in recovery, thinking about the busted up and not so much the drugs that were legitimately prescribed.

      That is part of the overall problem with medical treatment: Being a well informed shopper when you're well or only mildly inconvenienced is a reasonable expectation. It is not reasonable to expect someone who cannot even remember how old he is (the day of my accident, I couldn't compute my age...) to do your literature search on the effects of the prescribed treatments.

      My original comment was based on the idea that addiction (whether from short term use or not) is such a serious problem that it should have been reported as such. Having full and correct information on which to base a rational decision is required, and based on my reading at the time, that information was being willfully withheld.

  4. Like giving an alcoholic a drink to cure them? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is just a repeat of all their former drugs.

    The government should issue the patent at great cost ($1B), then ban the specific drug in question. And use the money for addiction counseling.

    But of course $$$ are more important than human life in this country.

  5. Lemme just take one guess here... by Narcocide · · Score: 2

    This pill to combat the addiction to the previous pills... it's addictive too, isn't it?

    1. Re:Lemme just take one guess here... by fredrated · · Score: 4, Funny

      That's where the third pill comes in....

  6. Re:Worth mentioning by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    He'll solve the opioid problem. It really won't be that hard. He's got some great ideas on how to solve it, very great. He's got the best people working on it, very good people. And Mexico will pay for it, believe me.

  7. Re:Meanwhile, the FDA continues its war on Kratom by jwhyche · · Score: 5, Insightful

    One of the problems with modern capitalism is we have removed all responsibility from the equation. This mother fucker, and mother fuckers like him, can line their pockets at the expense of the health of people. This mother fucker should be sitting in a prison cell some where. But instead he gets to hide behind a corporation and count his money.

    The capitalist system is the best economic system we have come up with. But we have freed to many people from responsibility of their actions.

    --
    I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  8. Frustrated Incorporated by istartedi · · Score: 2

    We could build a factory and make misery We'll create the cure; we made the disease

    --
    For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  9. What's supposed to be the alternative to opioids? by Pinky's+Brain · · Score: 3, Informative

    After a recent operation the first thing they did in the recovery room is shoot me full of opioids and I'm in commie Europe. When I went home I got a small number of oxycodone tablets for if things went off the deep end and the NSAIDs became useless (as they tend to do for serious pain). What's supposed to be the alternative?

  10. Re:What's supposed to be the alternative to opioid by Notabadguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    After a recent operation the first thing they did in the recovery room is shoot me full of opioids and I'm in commie Europe. When I went home I got a small number of oxycodone tablets for if things went off the deep end and the NSAIDs became useless (as they tend to do for serious pain). What's supposed to be the alternative?

    CBD. Cannabidiol. People primarily associate marijuana with THC, which is the euphoria-inducing drug, but the other piece of marijuana is CBD, which is one, if not the most effective and non-addictive painkiller available.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    That's where medical marijuana is finding its niche. People who need pain relief get CBD; you can get patches, ointments, tinctures, sublingual drops, pills, or vape pens. People who want to replicate opiods get CBD with a bit of THC. People with panic attacks, PTSD, mental disorders, etc get THC. The ratio of the chemical formulation provided depends on your symptoms.

    Its no surprise that anti-marijuana research and lobbying is primarily funded by big pharma - its competition.

  11. Re: Meanwhile, the FDA continues its war on Kratom by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Capitalism was great, up until we started protecting corporations from the law for no apparant reason.

  12. Re:I've got a patented way to treat addiction as w by sjames · · Score: 2

    You are exactly the sort of person who is sure all paraplegics are just lazy and could stand up if they set their minds to it.

  13. Reminds me of a song I know... by Kevin108 · · Score: 2

    We'll create the cure; we made the disease.
    -- Soul Asylum; Misery, 1995.

    --

    It's a perfect time for being wasted.
    A perfect time to watch the stars.
    - Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
  14. Re:What's supposed to be the alternative to opioid by GrBear · · Score: 2

    CBD. Cannabidiol. People primarily associate marijuana with THC, which is the euphoria-inducing drug, but the other piece of marijuana is CBD, which is one, if not the most effective and non-addictive painkiller available.

    After going through all the hoops in Canada to get a medical MJ license, I was disappointed as hell that CBD didn't do a damn thing for me for pain or depression. The two things CBD reportedly was supposed to help.

    I half wonder if the people that claim it helps aren't just making this shit up to sell it.

  15. Re:Everything thats wrong with 'merka by ChrisMaple · · Score: 2

    Dear ignoramus: Do you know what a merkin is?

    --
    Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
  16. Re:Your strategy is noble, but flawed by shaitand · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "The structure you describe discourages risk-taking & disruption, and encourages groupthink. History has taught us that the engine of progress is decentralized innovation."

    Exactly the opposite. Big pharma is anything but decentralized. Big pharma is also failing to produce anything earthshattering and new that revolutionizes medicine. Stop and think about it, how many miracle drugs have you seen in the last 30 years? Not new surgeries or cancer busting treatments but actual medications? Not many. For the most part you see new drugs that are minor variations on old drugs so the patents are new and doctors given heavy incentives to prescribe them. If we tried a new structure existing medications wouldn't disappear and it is unlikely to do worse. There is actually more medical innovation coming out of Europe than the US these days and they are completely socialized.

    This would allow anyone with the qualification to do so to individually jump right in and develop drugs which will hit the market at rates we pay for generics now. You don't need a handful of people to have a chance of winning the lottery to motivate, a top 1% salary is plenty of economic motivation to go into the field and everyone, wealthy or not, has a shared interest in offering that incentive.

    "Capitalism isn't necessarily the only way to get there, but it's an extremely powerful way to harness human greed & status-seeking behavior. It's foolish to disregard that."

    Big Pharma isn't capitalism at all, it is exactly the opposite. People are right to not want government controlled healthcare because our government will do a terrible job of it. But it is also true that market economics work poorly for healthcare and research. There is no real limit to what you can squeeze from a person for good health and there is a greater profit to be made if you can make someone continue to pay for treatment rather than cure them.

    When it comes to the health of citizens that is unacceptable and a non-profit (although there is nothing to say there can't be more than one to compete) run by actual experts solves both problems, the staff will be well compensated for the work they are doing but also will have to convince their peers they are in fact doing valuable work and progressing medicine without any attempt to halt and maximize the monetary benefit of a discovered medication before going on to the next beyond the minimum necessary to break even. By taking funds from the fed tap, it's a loan, there is still interest to be paid back and so still pressure and that interest varies with the economic state of the country we will just be investing these funds into medical progress rather than banks. And of course we will still be privatizing the production, distribution, and sales of the drugs produced with FDA control only on quality and purity to make sure nobody is cheating or ignorantly producing poison.

    This has an excellent side effect. You'll certainly want to see your doctor to figure out which medication you should take or if you should be taking any at all but it will eliminate 90% of the repeat visits which are just to get a new prescription you already know you need. This frees up doctors offices to treat more patients and/or provide more attention and care to those they see.

    It's very simple, human greed in medicine conflicts with the interest of every other human when it comes to producing medication. Status-seeking behavior and wealth is only one form of status, you can seek status in a non-profit environment. On the other hand, so long as you have controls that prevent cheating, human greed can work just fine on production and distribution where for-profit competitors all have access to the same medications and compete for the profits to be had on manufacturing them and getting them into the hands of those who need them. Small company? Great, make your profits on the medications needed by a smaller number of people that are going to be higher cost. Big company? Great, use your ability to invest in mass prod