The opioid crisis is still a five-alarm fire, as I’ve said before, and it couldn’t be more palpable than in Florida, where over the last two decades “pain clinics” were popping up faster than Starbucks. You could buy OxyContin almost as easily as Skittles or M&Ms in the Sunshine State. And people were popping ‘em like candy, too.
The situation in Florida was so dire that one of the biggest manufacturers of OxyContin, Mallinckrodt, sent 500,000 pills to the state between 2008 and 2012 to keep up with demand, according to 60 Minutes. That’s enough Oxy to supply each and every citizen of Florida with 25 pills apiece.
State attorney Dave Aronberg explained that Florida had more pain clinics than McDonald’s in 2010 and 2011.
I was struck by a recent 60 Minutes interview with Dr. Barry Schultz, who is currently serving 157 years in prison for prescribing enough opioids for a judge to call him one of Florida’s worst “drug dealers.” Schultz made more than $6,000 per day prescribing opioids.
The doctor believes he is a scapegoat. “I see myself as a healer,” Schultz told CBS News’ Bill Whitaker. “What I was doing was legitimate.”
And while Florida recently passed legislation to curb opioid as well as Schedule II through V drugs, including such prescriptions as Ambien, Adderall, and Ritalin, last year more Americans died of overdose than the entirety of people who died in the Vietnam War.
Florida now has a three- to seven-day waiting limit on prescription opioids for acute pain. A new database also monitors patients’ prescriptions so as not to allow people to go doctor shopping to receive multiple opioid prescriptions.
Chronic pain is, of course, a serious issue. But Oxys and even deadlier addictive opioids like fentanyl aren’t a long-term solution and so shouldn’t be handed out like cheese samples at the grocery store.
Last October, President Trump declared the opioid crisis a “national emergency.”
And while many a doctor has been sent to jail for a cavalier attitude toward prescribing opioids, no one responsible for the manufacture or
distribution of these meds has seen jail time. This must change.
No joke: The pharmaceutical industry pays doctors significant money for prescribing opioids as well as all prescription drugs — hence Dr. Schultz’s $6,000 a day allocation.
Big Pharma continues to provide six-figure paydays to doctors for speaking fees, consulting, and other services, according to CNN. Speaking fees are legal. What is not legal is for doctors to receive bonuses for their ongoing role in prescribing opioids, creating conflicts of interest.
“It smells like doctors being bribed to sell narcotics, and that’s very disturbing,” Dr. Andrew Kolodny, executive director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, told CNN.
Doctors should not be receiving kickbacks for prescribing these very dangerous drugs.
These speaking engagements are not mini trips to Minnesota or Idaho. They are all-expenses-paid jaunts to tropical locations where doctors are wined and dined with rented sports cars and Michelin-starred restaurants.
“Every decision, every recommendation a physician makes, should be in the best interest of the patient and not a combination of the patient’s interest and the financial interest of the doctor,” Dr. Anupam Jena of the Harvard Medical School told CNN. “If we lived in a different world where none of these payments to physicians occurred, how many fewer Americans would have [been prescribed] opioids, and how many fewer deaths would have occurred?”
The opioid crisis soldiers on, as Big Pharma continues profiteering from cultivating addicts, a shameful practice that should be banned.
