Deregulate!

[stpioc]

The drug pushers from industry

Andi Peterson never thought twice about taking Percocet. After all, the powerful painkiller had been prescribed by a doctor. "I didn't think what I was doing was that wrong. It felt more like a have-fun-once-in-a-while thing. It was not going to lead to this crazy addiction," she told Business Insider. The first time Peterson tried Percocet she was 16. The last time she used any substance was when she was 23, she said. She was finally free from the addiction that had spiraled from painkillers to heroin and cost her custody of her son, tens of thousands of dollars, and a year in prison.

Peterson is the face of what America's drug epidemic looks like today. She is young, white, and middle-class, and she lives not in a city but in a suburb. She has been part of an epidemic ripping through towns and cities that's left a trail of broken families and struggling addicts in recovery — and many others not as lucky as Peterson...

At the same time that these industries were collapsing, pharmaceutical reps and medical professionals began pushing opioid painkillers as an effective and low-risk treatment for pain, based on a now debunked study that suggested fewer than 1% of opioid users become addicted. Medical groups began telling doctors that treating pain was as essential as checking patients' blood pressure. It was a new paradigm in medicine.

Purdue Pharma introduced and aggressively marketed two powerful new painkillers, MS Contin (morphine) and OxyContin (oxycodone), to fill the void. With the explosion in prescriptions, opioids went mainstream. Clinics known as "pill mills," whose purpose was to prescribe legal opioids, sprang up nationwide. By 2011, Americans received 219 million opioid prescriptions each year. While many prescriptions went to patients in need of pain relief, many more went to those suffering less serious ailments.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, doctors prescribed opioids "for everything," Dr. Houman Danesh, the director of Integrative Pain Management at Mount Sinai Hospital, told Business Insider last year. Many primary-care doctors, who prescribe the vast majority of opioids, didn't fully understand the risks of the drugs.

Painkiller prescriptions brought a heroin crisis to the suburbs - Business Insider