Opioid addiction is one of the biggest issues here in the United States right now. Overdose from opioids is killing tens of thousands of people each year, what is being done to combat this?
We are being showered in different types of opioid drugs. The market for illegal and legal opioids is so large that these pills are being mass produced and shipped to the United States from places like China. Emergency services are swamped and people are abusing anything they can get from synthetic opioids to heroin.
Pharmaceutical makers are continuing to create stronger pain medications and allowing doctors to over-prescribe them all because of greed. For once something has happened for the good of the people. While it may not last long several pharmaceutical executives have been arrested for scheming to create addicts. They were intending to create fentanyl addicts. Fentanyl is one of the most addictive and deadly synthetic opioids out there in the world today. It has an effect on the body that matches that of heroin. However, when it boils down to it fentanyl is at least fifty times stronger than heroin.
These executives were arrested earlier this month in the State of Massachusetts. They were executives for Insys Therapeutics, Inc. Their scheme was well organized and as it turns out they intended to get doctors to over-prescribe the fentanyl-based products coming from their company. They conspired to bribe doctors in several different states (mostly doctors who worked in pain clinics.) One Florida doctor is said to have made $275,000 in speaking free bribes from this company over the course of three years. This means that the executives paid doctors to give educational speeches on the use of their product. Something that is seemingly illegal.
The list of things going on behind the curtains with this company is almost endless. Medications like this are a gateway to heroin use without a doubt. This company was plotting to create addicts as I am sure many other companies are doing as well. They are ruining people’s lives, families. and even killing many. Greed is truly the root of all evil. We are in a national overdose crisis.