When it comes to smoking guns, here are the ones that will matter:
“we know that contin formulations don’t work to deter abuse; we’ll argue for schedule downgrades anyway.”
and
“the addictive nature of our products helps our sales.”
anything less is just capitalism. Within the bounds of legality, despite not being a an example pf supererogation
Well, surely El Douche would support a full prosecution and punishment of such a heinous… wait, rich white dude? Nevermind.
An oubliette does sound better than a guillotine. It removes the potential for martyrdom.
let’s not forget that just like richard sackler, 45 was handed the keys to the kingdom by his father. generational wealth built on generational corruption.
pretty much. yes. i mean take a look at epi-pens, or the price of insulin - there’s earning a fair return on producing a product, and there’s greed.
should life saving drugs really cost more than, say, the cost of a meal? what about the fact so much of the research for transformative drugs - the justification people tend to cite for high drug prices - comes from public money in the first place?
that drugs are advertised on television as if they were cologne or something is literal insanity. and marketing departments as a way to educate doctors? this isn’t public health policy, it’s solely about money making.
i don’t have any suggested solutions, it just seems wrong how fundamentally out of whack things are. even in cases where it’s “working.”
I like how people who aren’t lawyers feel qualified to make sweeping statements about evidentiary standards and legality. I appreciate it when people who aren’t going to argue in good faith identify themselves early and clearly.
Just going to point out that the pharma company educating doctors is, in limited cases, useful and necessary. In fast-moving fields like oncology, keeping up with which new drugs are well-supported and which are not is a huge time-sink that oncologists struggle to balance with clinical work. National orgs that release treatment guidelines and meta-studies like AACR, ASCO, and NCCN are slow. So someone like Loxo Oncology coming in and letting an oncologist know that they have a test and a drug that can really help with very specific cancers can be a faster way to spread good news about an effective treatment (this is based on a real example; Loxo makes a drug that is specific for a rare mutation in cancers and the drug is spectacularly effective in those cancers; their test identifies which patients will benefit from the treatment and which it won’t help). However, in other fields where generics are getting reformulated and rebranded as somehow superior to cheaper, known, and effective drugs, no, the marketing pushes are not necessary and wind up being harmful.
it seems – as a person who admittedly knows little about the industry – a huge conflict of interest. and i’d be curious if any other countries do things differently.
to me it’d make more sense for there to be an independent buffer between doctors and pharma who’s job it is to track and report on drugs. to be the clearing house and source of education. ( probably more than one such source, competing similar to academic journals. ) without that, you’re going to get pharma paying doctors to prescribe.
even if there’s one – or several – cases where the current setup has worked well. the opioid epidemic is a direct result of the current setup, with more than a 100 people a day dying of overdose
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/11/health/prescription-opioid-payments-eprise/index.html
direct kickbacks are illegal, but payments for consulting, conferences, training, etc. are legal. it’s a system setup to be abused.
I mean, isn’t that what the intent has been ever since medical insurance was conceived?
Can’t comment on oncology, but in pediatrics I have established a rule for any drug rep coming into my office. DO NOT tell me your expensive, branded product is “just as good” as my standard, generic, inexpensive first line drug. If you can PROVE your product is better, more effective, fewer adverse events, and do so with at least one peer reviewed independant journal article, I may listen to you. Remarkably, I have not had to interact with a drug rep in years.
Now, it is worth pointing out that in general peds, we just do not have new drugs come out much at all. There are zillions of new psych meds, because if you get on one you will probably be on it for years. Cancer drugs are ungodly expensive, but if they work, they can be worth it. But, the oxycontin scam was just that. I remember in the late 80s, early 90s being taught as fact that the long acting formulations were less addictive because they avoided the “rush” of short acting drugs, and as long as you were treating actual pain, addiction just could not happen. This gave them the obvious out that if someone became addicted, it was their own fault, since, obviously, they had been lying about their pain.
Nobody cited studies, just stated that this was “obviously” true and implied researchers must have been stupid to miss it. In retrospect, an obvious scam (and a theme played on by the writers of The Big Bang Theory pretty regularly.) It left me with a very low opinion of drug reps, hence my rule.
As a nurse who’s been dealing with this for the last decade, pretty much all of this is because of the Sacklers. So much so that when I was in nursing school in 2009 they told us that a patient couldn’t get addicted to opiates I’d they had actual pain. Such lunacy. I got in at the height of the insanity and I’m burned out now that it’s sort of ending a bit.
I’m disinclined to call anyone a monster ever. But this guy is mengele level. And his asshole family. de[quote=“snigs, post:2, topic:139529, full:true”]
Bit of an understatement, but Christ, what an asshole.
I wonder how much of the opioid crisis that exists is solely because of this family company, or if others would have similarly exploited this regulatory niche. Hell of a legacy.
[/quote]
Yes, they wasted no time in creating accounts and spouting the current top 5 taking points about AOC. No sign of them in here at all.
The best outcome would be to have Sackler sent to prison for a looong time. The alternative would be to give him ever-increasing doses of his own product until it kills him.
Translates to:
snxxxxxxx 
WAIT, WHAT? 
Actually, you just showed the real cause of problems with vaccination - not big pharma, but idiots. “Medicine” doesn’t have a credibility problem because of Sackler, it has a problem because of halfwits who can’t keep things separate in their minds and conflate totally unrelated inputs into a hopless mental hash. People actually do make decisions regarding vaccines and childrens’ health because of vague suspicions about a corporate fatcat and opoids, instead of because of what they’re told by doctors? Then those people are damn fools.
I’ve spent some time in Europe. People there think our mass-media drug advertising is proof that the USA is run by wealthy psychopaths and our population is collectively insane for letting them get away with it. And I can’t think of one good argument to refute them.
I just don’t think that you can prove a case against Sackler using those documents without making a case against rapacious capitalism.
I don’t see a problem with this approach. 
