America’s adorable, folksy, opioid epidemic now has Chicago and other locales suing drug-makers for lying about the dangers of pain pills. More municipal lawsuits are on the way.
“For years, big pharma has deceived the public about the true risks and benefits of highly potent and highly addictive painkillers in order to expand their customer base and increase their bottom line,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement today. “It’s time for these companies to end these irresponsible practices and be held accountable.”
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What’s this got to do with a blog called University Diaries?
Without the pharma-sponsored labwork of university professors all over this country, this epidemic would never have worked out so well. You can’t put a price on being able to draw on the scientific integrity of universities when it comes to convincing a whole nation that it should be taking OxyContin. Without the close industry relationships forged by, for instance, the University of Washington’s Dennis Turk (updated information about Turk here; scroll down), you simply wouldn’t get the necessary information out there that you need to get out there (“100 million [Americans] … suffer from chronic pain”) (it’s true!) …
June 25th, 2014 at 12:54PM
what a remarkable development, too bad these things are likely to go to our corporation worshiping Supreme court but I like the fight.
http://siouxcityjournal.com/iowa-researcher-charged-in-major-hiv-vaccine-fraud-case/article_2d0719da-6d7d-553c-8694-cd1cf1f1dcb5.html
June 25th, 2014 at 4:56PM
i prefer an off chance of addiction to an off chance of acute liver failure.
June 25th, 2014 at 6:25PM
john: What’s great about the United States is that you can get both!
June 26th, 2014 at 8:01AM
The conflict of interest thing is really bad. A very naïve philanthropy tossed a seven figure sum at a local institution for the study of X. What the philanthropy didn’t know, or want to know, is that the institution has no real interest in aggressively studying X, because that would mean undermining the raw self-interest of important internal institutional constituencies and seriously jeopardize relations with bigger outside donors.
Yeah, you bet, the philanthropy has already got its name on a “seminar” a “distinguished speaker”, and I expect other treading-water stuff that will sure as heck give the illusion that X is being studied.