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Heroes, Heroines, and Heroin

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!) …

Margaret Soltan, June 25, 2014 11:38AM
Posted in: professors

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4 Responses to “Heroes, Heroines, and Heroin”

  1. dmf Says:

    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

  2. john Says:

    i prefer an off chance of addiction to an off chance of acute liver failure.

  3. Margaret Soltan Says:

    john: What’s great about the United States is that you can get both!

  4. Jack/OH Says:

    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.

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
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George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
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