On 1 October, the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general reported that the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) approved increases in the production of painkillers despite the fact that deaths from opioid addiction have been rising at epidemic levels.
One example cited was oxycodone, one of the most commonly abused prescription painkillers in the country. According to the report, the DEA increased quota production of the drug by about 400 percent from 2002 to 2013.
This, despite the fact that the most popular oxycodone drug, OxyContin, is among the top three opioids responsible for overdose and death according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Evidence of the drug’s danger has been evident for over a decade. In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning to the manufacturer about misleading advertising of the drug’s benefits and the lack of warning statements about its addictive nature.
In 2007, the Purdue-Frederick Company, Inc. (now Perdue Pharma) pleaded guilty to the felony charge of misbranding OxyContin and agreed to pay over $600 million in fines.
More than 900 people a week die from opioid-related overdoses and millions more Americans suffer from opioid addiction.
Opioid addiction is also causing stress to the economy, as it has been linked to declining labor-force participation among prime-age workers. Princeton University economist Alan Krueger wrote it could account for 20 percent of the decline in work among men and 25 percent among women from 1999 to 2015.
The National Institutes of Health has reported that physicians’ interactions with pharmaceutical sales reps have been found to influence the prescribing practices of physicians to favor more expensive drugs over generic alternatives and to rapidly increase the prescribing of new drugs, often ignoring dangerous side effects.
TREND FORECAST: Major industries and corporations run governments.
In the U.S., politicians are paid off with what school teachers, Presstitutes, and brainwashed citizens call “campaign contributions,” but the awake and aware call “bribes and payoffs.”
Since money and power are primary political ambitions, little serious action will be taken to curb the flow of deadly prescription drugs, just as little will be done to stop the flow of deadly chemicals, plastics, and array of toxins poisoning the earth, water, and air