[treefish]

Doctors who were prescribing medicine at the time that OxyContin hit the market were not in medical school, they had graduated already. If pharma lies about safety there is no way for a doctor to know unless they conduct their own study, which would require lots of extra time and massive funding. Pharmacists didn't know that the safety data was fudged either. Everyone got their oxycontin from a pharmacist after a doctor prescribed it, so having a pharmacist be the only one allowed to prescribe it wouldn't have changed anything.

[songshu]

Sorry, I meant that they should have learned about drug safety in medical school, not that they should have learned about this specific drug.

[vanderZwan]

That does change the interpretation of your earlier statement quite a lot, thank you for clarifying. Together with Scoundreller's observation it does seem that there are a number of systemic issues working together in the US to create this problem. And one of these seems to be how doctors prescribe medication.