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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.

8 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 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.

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

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      Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
    4. 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."

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      Om, nomnomnom...
  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. 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.

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    I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
  4. 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.