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by alottafunchata
2717 days ago
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“We have to hammer on abusers in every way possible,” Mr. Sackler wrote in an email in 2001, when he was president of the company, Purdue Pharma. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.” --but was he incorrect? |
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Sackler was correct by definition. It is evidenced that people become addicted to oxycontin _while_ taking it as instructed. Then they get physically sick when they stop, and have been powerfully psychologically conditioned to seek opioids.
If abuse means succumbing to the physiological compulsion to re-dose a drug you are addicted to, then one is addicted but not an abuser the day before the prescription runs out. But the next day they are either an addict in withdrawal, or an abuser.
Which one would you be? Could you quit a heavy opioid habit cold turkey? Good for you, but apparently lots of people can't.
People who are given prolonged high-dose self administered opioids should give informed consent to the serious risk of addiction. It's easy to argue in retrospect that, in fact, every reasonable person knows about this problem, but it is well evidenced that Purdue marketed it's product as having a low risk of addiction. I have never heard of a doctor saying: "You can take these pain pills for a couple of months. When you stop you'll get really sick for a very long time, and have a pernicious and overpowering psychological compulsion to take more opioids." That's what real informed consent would look like. People are angry at Purdue because they were dishonest.
Returning to the question of personal responsibility for addiction, if huge numbers of people don't quit a drug they got addicted to while using as directed, it is true but not helpful call them abusers. If opioid addicts could just quit anytime, we wouldn't be talking about this in the first place. How large a fraction of the population must fail in a way that is predictable by circumstance before we stop attributing failure entirely to a lack of individual virtue?
Even if your policy position on drug addicts is “kill em all and let god sort em out”, blaming abusers is not getting it sorted here on earth. If we want to make progress in this area we might have try something else.