I think the cultural aspect is also very important. I Europe, having used drugs a couple of times is viewed as completely fine, as long as you are not currently addicted to them. Add to that the lack of a social net in US and you have the perfect storm.

I’m still rattled by videos of the homeless camps in US. Those people have no way out. Drugs at least provide an escape.

When I saw sports on US television for the first time I was horrified by an advertisement of an opiod from astrazeneca. I still remember that ad today, suggesting to have an opiod prescribed by the gp.

TF? How is that allowed?

I think it’s also cheaper medicine access, so you can get a proper treatment rather than just temporarily stopping the pain.

You’d have to be very very sick to get a prescription for opioids at all in Europe.

prescription pharmaceuticals.

there is plenty of ads for over the countrr medicine like aspirin or the wici medinait, which is hilarious to be sold otc. It contains alcohol, ephedrine (methamphetamine precursor), dextromorphan (opiod) and paracetamol (tylenol). That is quite a drug cocktail right there.

But yeah, advertisment for prescription drugs is insane. Nobody should ask there doctor if some drug they saw on the tv could be right for them.

It’s no surprise that you get addicts when you push a “12-hour” painkiller that only lasts for around 6-8 hours

No, it works for 12 hours for most people. Meaning that a small bit sizable percentage would have been better off on the old kind. Which isn’t anything new in medical fields, it’s true for damn near every “extended release pill”.

But Sackler buried that, they would make way more off XR, so they wanted docs prescribing it as normal to everyone. Then the patients and the doctor could work it out on their own.

But a patient telling their doc their 12 hour opioid where’s off in 6 so they need more…

Sounds like an addict. So doctors wouldn’t and the patient had to turn to the streets. Or the doctor didn’t care and would give them multiple extra refills.

If you wanted to come up with a program scientifically designed to create opioid addicts…

You couldn’t do much better than this without giving people 5 gallon buckets of pills for a headache.

But the Sacklers are billionaires. So when they got sued the US government agreed that it wouldn’t be fair to allow their victims to touch any of the billions in personal wealth they got fucking over Americans, and definitely no jail.

Quick science edit:

The difference is our liver enzymes, everyone has different amounts. I’m a rare case where my body can’t even break down the normal opioids into their effective parts. Except for morphine, pretty much every opioid is just a chemical out body metabolizes into morphine.

My body sucks so bad at doing that, I get absolutely nothing out of even something like Percocet.

Some livers are really good at it. They’re the ones that can burn through a XR in half the time. Meaning if they follow directions they’ll twice as doped up at first, then intense pain till their next one.

Sacklers and Purdue *knew" that. But they picked the option that made them the most money, even though it created a generation of addicts

I worked in a pain management clinic in the 2000s. The drug reps came daily, would have lunch catered from every restaurant, would go golfing with the docs and take them out for expensive dinners, and would bring branded gifts. They couldn’t force the docs to prescribe their particular pill but they would stop coming if you weren’t pushing enough of their product. It was sort of an unspoken agreement that they wrote the scripts and the reps would keep showing up.

It’s kind of crazy looking back. We were one of the clinics that took the enormous responsibility seriously and tried to serve the community and I think we did genuinely help people that were suffering. But I think that we were ultimately naive as shit about the drugs we were pushing and there’s no doubt many of those patients we had probably would go on to struggle with addiction problems.