Big Pharma's Opioid Drug Pushers Are Destroying Lives

Learn more about opioid dangers here

According to the data for the Centers of Disease Control, 91 Americans die every day from overdosing on opioids in the form of both prescription drugs and drugs like heroin, but now opioid painkillers are becoming one of America's people killers.

Ring of Fire's Mike Papantonio and attorney Peter Mougey discuss this.

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According to the data for the Centers of Disease Control, 91 Americans die every day from overdosing on opioids in the form of both prescription drugs and drugs like heroin, but now opioid painkillers are becoming one of America's people killers. The opioid painkiller Oxycontin was approved by the FDA in 1995 and it made it's way on to the market in 1996. That first year it pulled in 45 million in profit for Purdue Pharma. At the time, few people had ever heard of this drug company, but the company knew that their blockbuster painkiller was going to make them hugely wealthy. In just 15 years, their profits from Oxycontin had topped more than 3 billion a year. While Purdue was busy counting their cash, they completely tried to avoid counting the dead bodies that their product was leaving behind, but Oxycontin was just one of those several based opioid drugs on the market that were killing patients addicted and, ultimately, causing their deaths.

In no time at all, Purdue's competition, they entered the market of painkiller and we soon saw pills being pushed by Pfizer and by Johnson & Johnson and by Teva and countless others. They became FDA approved addictive drug pushers almost overnight, so it's no surprise that in the years since 1999 prescriptions for opioids have quadrupled in the United States and, not surprisingly, deaths from prescription painkillers have also quadrupled. Again, an average of 91 Americans die every day from an opiod overdose. It's that spike in deaths that's created a new wave of lawsuits against the drug companies that I just mentioned.

According to lawsuits that have been filed by the state of Kentucky, the city of Chicago, and a hand full of other counties across the country, these corporate drugs hustlers clearly knew about the addictive qualities of their drugs. They knew that overdoses and death were, overwhelmingly, common, but they did nothing, nothing at all to warn the public about what their own data was showing. The lawsuits show that as a result of the companies withholding information, the cost of hospitalization, ambulances, and all that treatment fell on the cities and the states. Taxpayers had to pay for that at the end of the day.

Lawsuits also show that these drug companies engage in consumer fraud, misrepresentation, false statements, false claims, false insurance fraud, and just a whole host of different types of unjust enrichment, but Big Pharma had other plans in dealing with their self-created opioid problem. Anytime there's an ugly epidemic of death in the United States, even one created by Big Pharma, you can bet the drug company executives are working on a way to profit from it. That's where the prescription painkiller story starts taking a really interesting turn. Recognizing that the corporate-driven drug abuse problem was getting out of hand, the drug Suboxone is created for the purpose to wean people off of painkillers. Suboxone combines an opioid painkiller with a drug that causes intense withdrawal effects. The idea is to break addiction because the body begins to associate painkillers with negative symptoms.

Indivior, the maker of Suboxone, is now the target of lawsuits brought by 35 state attorney generals for illegally blocking competitors from even entering the market. Not only did Big Pharma bring us the opioid epidemic, but they also created the cure and then tried to block cheaper, alternative drug therapies from even entering the market. Exactly the kind of conduct that we've learned to expect from the 21st century drug cartel.