I'm only thinking about this bc I just had surgery and I'm on oxy for the first time in 17 years, but, like...
Doctors really claim, like as a profession, that they just didn't know fucking opium was highly addictive and oopsie woopsie did a little fucky wucky and now like a million people are dead?
Cause I really never thought about that, but I took 1 "take 2 every four hours" pill SEVEN FUCKING HOURS AGO and I am still tripping balls and in my current altered state their cutesy little "We just forgot morphine was dangerous" shtick sounds pretty fucking ridiculous.
Oh and the DEA and FDA must have been in on this, too, right? The whole time? Because no one would actually be stupid enough to believe this shit, right?
Yes and no, you had plenty of doctors that were just riding the newest train in medicine and getting rich off it but you also had a lot of outright lies from the pharma side just stating that they weren't as addictive and were far more effective than older medications. Doctors are just as human as the rest of us and between some accredited doctors saying it's great, the pharma companies sending people to schmooze you with somewhat expensive gifts, and just the general feel of the medical community, you have the start of the opiate epidemic. There have since been laws made that the most pharma companies can do is give you a free lunch and maybe some pens. They still send sales reps out to schmooze and talk up various products.
Depending on the tolerance and severity of the pain different doses are necessary. Someone that has a massive tolerance is going to need 10mg of oxy every 4 hours. On the other hand, 10mg of oxy every 4 hours could easily kill someone else by just OD'ing them. Opiates are important in pain management and are still a staple of post-surgery recovery, it's just also important to pair it with as many non-opiate interventions as possible, stuff like scheduled Tylenol, muscle relaxants to stop muscle spasms, therapy if necessary, etc.
Still, in the end, there was a conspiracy. The Sackler family wanted to make more money and thus used their influence to make it happen while knowing exactly what they were doing.
What really sucks about this is that the people who actually need these drugs are now demonized. Chronic pain/nerve damage patients who essentially just need painkillers to function normally now have a harder time getting them because of the overcorrection by doctors.
Yeah the dude who shot up a hospital was denied the meds for back pain. Not saying it’s justified, but chronic pain can turn you into a completely different person if left untreated
I have someone close to me who's been dealing with it for 30 years after a workplace injury.
They've been refused medication by pharmacists frequently, they've been mistreated and abused by doctors for being an "addict" and they literally cannot walk without their medication because of how severely damaged their nerves are
Yeah, I've had this argument before and for me it always boils down into "no one can know everything and you have to be willing to trust experts in a field for any large scale system/society to work" and "it's literally got opium".
The opium argument has only surface validity to me, (think "vaccines have mercury/arsenic" vibes) just because how often and how much processing is done to things that otherwise we can't ingest but still use in medicine.
There is obviously somewhere along the chain where the good faith argument breaks down and people were actively consciously accepting murdering people for profit and I don't see a need to be cautious on drawing that line.