Huntingdon lawsuit against pharmacies "distributing opioids illegally"

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If I'm not here, I'm doing photography. Or I'm asleep. Or in lockdown. One of those three, anyway.

The current titlebar/avatar setup is just normal.
So in my attempts at procrastination I came across this little clip about Heroin in Huntingdon, and how they're combating it.

[Warning, footage of a guy OD'ing at one point, though thankfully he recovers]
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-us-canada-39343289/the-heroin-ravaged-city-fighting-back

Now the lawsuits began sometime in January this year, so this isn't "new" news, however it's interesting how they're tackling it. Similar stories were heard coming out of other towns in West Virginia afterwards. As quoted by the Mayor of Huntingdon;

Quote
Rather than going to the taxpayers of the community and saying 'We need to raise your taxes to fight this epidemic', we need to go to those who are complicit in causing the epidemic.

The citizens in our city, our region and our state are living a nightmare that was avoidable.Profits have been pocketed while our community has been left with the fallout and stigma of the opioid epidemic.

A majority of heroin/opiate abusers started out just taking prescribed pain relief medications for injuries, which then went to taking larger doses, bribing for forged prescriptions, and some eventually moved on to straight-up heroin. Rather than only targeting the dealers and junkies, the city (and others) have decided to take on the companies that are shipping the drugs that are being abused and oil up the slopes in the first place. Judging by what facts the Mayor shoots out, I'm inclined to agree with him:
- Huntingdon is a county of <50,000 people
-The County (Huntingdon, Pennsylvania) is just around ~96,000
- In an (undisclosed) 5-year timeframe, 40 million doses of opiates were legally distributed (and assumedly, prescribed) in the County.


Then in the article linked above, there's some other distressing facts were released from the neighbouring state;
Quote
Current West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey filed a lawsuit against San Francisco-based McKesson Corp. a year ago, saying at the time that an investigation by his office found that McKesson delivered about 99.5 million doses of hydrocodone and oxycodone to West Virginia between 2007 and 2012.

...

A medical practitioner in Barboursville admitted in federal court that he wrote a fraudulent prescription to illegally obtain more than 100 oxycodone pills from an employee.

Where those went exactly, you can only guess. But then it raises several difficult questions, most of which will have to be decided in the courts.

Is "Big Pharma" primarily at fault for distributing these pain relief medications and turning over massive profits without raising questions as to why such large orders are being requested, or is it the shady practitioners, GP's, pharmacists and what-have-you who are truly at fault for forging prescriptions for large doses for their "patients", or is the population under such addictions the main cause for such over-indulgence and abuse of the drugs available in the system in the first place?

I hope the news reports on the outcome of this, I want to see what happens and if the problem is ever truly resolved. Personally I think the corrupt practitioners and distribution companies are at fault for this. Not to reduce the responsibility of the people abusing the drugs themselves, but the system for acquiring such drugs so readily is what has started the problem in the first place which has since snowballed into something out of proportion and made those dose distributions so high.
Last Edit: May 03, 2017, 12:44:13 PM by Môr-ladron


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Why don't they just take the Duterte approach to drugs?


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It's a huge clusterfuck, and I largely blame pharmaceutical companies. It's actually illegal for doctors to refuse pain medication in a lot of cases, and it's incredibly easy to get a legitimate prescription. These laws are lobbied by pharmaceutical companies, who just don't give a fuck.


 
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Pharma companies just distribute orders to pharmacies. They have no obligation to investigate the end use of their products and capping shipments to questionable areas would only hurt people who actually need painkillers. The fault for the opioid crisis lies in medical professionals who will carelessly or fraudulently  write scripts out for them, thus making these substances widely available.

The heroin epidemic is a byproduct of the widespread opioid problem because it's cheaper and fairly available in these areas. And I do mean much cheaper. I could go in to kutztown with twenty bucks and come back with enough shot to kill myself with.  It's fucked up.  Lancaster, York, and Dauphin counties are big procurement areas where product flows in to the state, and then the highway system makes Reading the best spot for storehouses and staging for distribution all up in to appalachia and new england. So I'm basically sitting in the middle of this shit. Local police are underfunded, State Troopers are too busy harassing drivers for looking at them funny, and  federal assets from the DEA are still too concerned with busting pot growers.
Every other week I hear about either a death from overdose or how police stopped an overdose with Narcan in a nearby town or Reading proper.

There is no end in sight to this problem until  we the people flush out and kill the dealers because the State is not hard enough on these people.


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Ya fuckin' ganderneck.
Meanwhile medical cannabis lowers the rates of opioid use/abuse/overdose in states that have it over 20% and the federal government continues treat it as more dangerous and having less medicinal value than methamphetamine and cocaine. On top of that, the natural herb kratom, which is objectively safer than synthetic opiods like methadone or suboxone and does not induce respiratory depression, also helps addicts to kick their opiod use, and the DEA wants to make it a schedule 1 substance like cannabis.