[rosser]

Please remember that Purdue were the ones who marketed Oxycontin on the premise of one dose for 12-hour pain relief.

When they learned doctors were prescribing it for eight hours, they tried to "re-train" them to use the "proper" (read: their) dosing recommendation, because there were cheaper drugs with six of eight hour doses.

Sure, the doctors made the prescriptions, but you, and I, and everyone who thinks honestly about it for two and a half seconds realizes that no matter what the recommendation is, enough people who are in bad enough pain to be prescribed oxy will take it when they need it, recommendation be damned, that to have issued that recommendation in the first place was an act of bad faith.

They marketed the drug on a lie in order to get doctors to prescribe it, which fueled — if not created — an epidemic, which has killed tens of thousands of people. Their hands are not clean, here.

[bilbo0s]

Actually, this makes me think we should be going after doctors too.

[DebtDeflation]

We should be. We should also be going after the distributors who were shipping millions of pills a year to small towns with a population of 6000. This is not an either/or situation, there is plenty of blame to go around.

[buildzr]

> that recommendation in the first place was an act of bad faith.

This seems a bit of a stretch to me.

The doctors prescribed it, even given readily available research, the FDA approved it, knowing full well this was a risk. Those are the guilty parties here. Purdue filled their role just fine, they just happened to be making an opiate and so they're getting chased for it now because China is dumping fentanyl. Pretty ridiculous really.

[simonh]

According to the congressional report:

“Purdue Pharma used front organizations and sponsored research to deceive the World Health Organization and corrupt global public health policies”

If that is true and public policy was corruptly manipulated , how can you claim that this is all ok because it was allowed by public policy?

[rjf72]

I do not agree with him, but I think you're making a much more salient point indirectly.

Public policy that can be readily manipulated by bad actors (as the drug industry is certainly full of) should not be used as the final say for anything. Systems need to be able to tolerate: corruption, false information, and true but misleading information. Our regulatory systems in general seem to struggle with any of the above. If "health authorities" (to avoid naming any particular organization) can only effectively screen out good actors inadvertently engaged in bad behavior, then they're effectively useless - because bad actors do exist, and they're vastly more dangerous than the former.

[Retric]

WHO is not a regulatory agency and does not have finally authority for anything. https://www.who.int/about/role/en/

[rjf72]

It's not just the WHO. The same arguments apply equally to e.g. the FDA who played a similar role in this by rubber stamping the drugs. And similarly it also doesn't just end at the FDA as there are numerous smaller level regulatory agencies and operators involved on the medical side. Even non-regulatory agencies, such as the American Medical Association also showed themselves to be somewhat useless by decisions such as choosing to play into lobbying for consideration of pain as a vital sign.

The same is even true of things such as the FAA and the aviation industry where there were analogous issues. All of this is emphasizing that these organizations, which can be quite the burden on 'good players', are ultimately ineffective at restraining bad players which (I suppose depending on your philosophical view) should be their primary purview.

[Retric]

The FDA does quite a bit to keep both good and bad actors in check. They are not perfect, but for example they regularly track down outbreaks of food born illnesses in ways the producers simply can’t. https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...

Making wide sweeping statements based on very specific issues simply demonstrates ignorance of how these organizations actually interact with the systems they regulate.

PS: As to FDA ‘rubber stamping’ the drug, using opioids for treatment of end of life cancer pain is perfectly reasonable. OxyContin is just one of a huge list of similar drugs that have been in use long before this outbreak. It’s not the chemical that’s the problem is the other actions by the company.