OxyContin A Major Factor In World’s Deadliest Pandemic « Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

July 21, 2009

OxyContin A Major Factor In World’s Deadliest Pandemic

Filed under: Big Pharma, pharmaceutical giants, pharmaceuticals, prescription drug abuse, prescription drug addiction — Rod Malcolm @ 9:52 am

If anything deserves to be called a pandemic, it’s the scourge of prescription drug addiction, especially opioid painkillers, and particularly OxyContin.

I’ve been wondering about pandemics and mass deaths lately. It’s a morbid kind of preoccupation, but reading the daily news can do that to a person.

I’ve been observing, like you, like everyone, how governments around the world, prodded along by the World Health Organization and a fairly steady media frenzy, are gearing up at great public expense to do battle with the H1N1 “swine flu” viral infection. And I’ve been comparing all the noise and fanfare surrounding the so-called “swine flu pandemic” with the complacent foot-dragging here and in most other Western nations regarding drug addiction and abuse, by far and away the deadliest pandemic in the history of mankind.

If one counts, as one must, that drug addiction and abuse has continued to rage uninterrupted and effectively untreated for decades, and one also factors in the widespread devastation and sheer numbers of injuries and deaths — hundreds of thousands here, millions around the world — there can be no argument as to its status as a pandemic.

No one knows for sure how many hundreds of billions of world-wide law-enforcement tax dollars have been thrown at it in vain. And if you count medical and productivity losses, we must be looking at $trillions.

I’m just guessing. But maybe some study somewhere, some United Nations or WHO study, has accurate figures of the total costs, both financial and human, of the most ignored pandemic in our history.

So far, swine flue has sickened some 28,000 or so people in the entire world. And in all the world only 144 people have died. These figures are roughly parallel to those appearing in studies and media reports concerning just prescription drug abuse in the U.S., never mind the rest of the world, and that’s before adding in the common illicit street drugs. And that’s for every year for a quarter of a century or more.

In the past decade alone, prescription drug addiction and abuse has taken many thousands of lives, and ruined the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S.

If that’s not a pandemic, nothing is. And the most abused, most dangerous drugs, are the opioid painkillers. These are the root viruses that are driving and spreading the prescription drug pandemic.

In the U.S. at least, one prescription opioid painkiller could easily make a bid for the dubious distinction of the leading cause of death, injury, and family devastation of all of them — Purdue Pharma’s notoriously addictive and harmful OxyContin.

OxyContin is featured daily in news reports from around the country about dead babies, dead mothers, dead fathers, dead brothers and sisters, dead uncles and aunts, dead cousins and friends, dozens of arrests, drugstore robberies, even a murder or two, every day, somewhere in America.

OxyContin has addicted, injured and killed so many people for so many years, that Americans are sick and tired of it. The fact that the company, Purdue Pharma, along with several of its executives, was fined $634 million for lying about its addictiveness, and that no one went to jail, has America up in arms.

A petition calling on the FDA to ban it from the marketplace, and revert to any of several equally effective and less dangerous drugs to control chronic pain, has appeared on the internet. Sponsored by a concerned pharmacist and a drug detox specialist, the petition has already attracted nearly 3,000 signatures.

We urge you to sign the petition. And you should browse the brief stories from hundreds of signatories who describe their personal tragedies, and occasional triumphs, concerning OxyContin.

Medical Detox Programs in a stress-free environment

July 21, 2009

OxyContin A Major Factor In World’s Deadliest Pandemic

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