I like this approach to explain some of antivax as well. Essentially big pharma has just finished up a massive campaign that was the opioid pandemic. Essentially there’s going to be a large correlation between people with jobs that get them injured and targeted for opioid use, and those people being right. Opioid addiction that comes from that targeting isn’t just a single victim thing, someone addicted to something as hard as opioids is going to affect entire families and likely extended families. It’s going to essentially feel like a massive economic and spiritual attack to the family, by pharmaceutical companies (after all the news that came out of that social pandemic). So it makes sense that the seeds for not trusting the medical system are there and in insanely rich fertilizer to grow by even groups previously seen as insane like antivax groups (seriously both sides of the isle used to mock those groups). The worst part is that the people taking a drink of that koolaid, are able to literally take their life experience and draw a completely sane line from A to B that Big Pharma shouldn’t be trusted.
Whatever pharmaceutical companies have done, the drug war is what is directly responsible. Stigma, limiting options for treating addiction, and favoring extremely potent drugs are the big culprits here. Blaming a specific family or industry is a convenient cop out
while all that drama on the surface, the industry had coopted government's War on Drugs and pushed opiates (great thing when used as needed) into the opioid epidemics, and now they coopted government's War on Covid and has been pushing billions of doses of the vaccines (great thing when it works) which clearly fail to control the spread (and thus these vaccines have only limited use, i.e. only for the people who really need it (like high risk groups, etc.) - the situation pretty similar to opioids. And if one looks at those 3rd, 4th, ... boosters - sales tactic wise it looks eerily similar to the jacking up the "12hr" opioid dose approach as it simultaneously increases sales and creates addiction). I wonder if several years down the road we'll see vaccine trials/settlements similar to the opioids ones.
I mean big pharma creates mistrust time after time. Look up Bayer selling HIV infected blood products in Africa after removing it from the North American market.
Opiates were marketed as sleeping aid for babies.
Synthetic opiates, such as tramadol were marketed not to be addictive that turned out to be a lie.
Many medications were taken of the market due to side effects, and often the pharmaceutical company knew and downplayed the side effects.
Anti-depressants were also supposed to be safe and non addicting, but withdrawals are actually insane.
I have been nearly crippled by an antibiotic and again side effects are downplayed, and FDA is updating the label year after year adding more and more side effects and not recommending the medication as first line treatment anymore.
If you had read the article you would know that's exactly what it says. The definition has broadened. The pharmaceutical industry has a perverse incentive to medicate everyone. They are the invisible hand destroying America. They profit off of autism, ADHD, obesity, anxiety, and depression. The opioid epidemic is the tip of the iceberg.
And I know people who have been effected by big pharma. Anecdotal evidence doesn't fly in the face of a journalistic documentary. There's tons of docs on the crisis and the blame is squarely on big pharma.
ADHD meds and antidepressants are one thing, but the opioid epidemic is a scandal responsible for the hollowing out of entire communities. It’s outrageous. In any sane society the Sackler family would be in prison if not worse.
I’m vaccinated and boosted but I don’t know how I’d feel about people asking me to trust the Big Pharma if the life of my sibling or parent was pharmaceutically destroyed.
The disease of the modern age is the belief that ‘my opinion is better than your knowledge’.
An anti-vaxer is standing in the way of true knowledge. Opiate prescribing was driven by pharmaceutical interests and lobbying, as well as a misguided notion that pain is something to be conquered and abolished.
When I was in the US during medical school, I routinely saw people being discharged after simple procedures with bucketloads of opiates, things that I would discharge in Australia on simple analgesia (paracetamol and ibuprofen).
The public health stance on vaccines is not in any way analogous to the opiate crisis, and whilst I understand the layman’s distrust of medical experts arises in part from this, the two are separate issues stemming from different causes
The pharma companies have some liability, but there was a perfect storm
The "war on drugs", and the racially motivated moral panic about crack cocaine and addiction created a social attitude that casts addiction as a moral failing
Inadequate safety net healthcare provisions lead people to the cheapest treatment option, generic opiates fit this bill
Society refusing to draw a link between the homelessness/addition crisis in the States and the pharmaceutical companies becoming drug dealers/pushers of opioids that flooded the country is honestly shocking.
Hundreds of thousands or millions of Americans became opioid addicts because they were prescribed unnecessary pills by their own doctors, and became hooked (the risks of opioids have been known for what, thousands of years?). We have barely given the pharma industry a slap on the wrist for the harm they've caused and the direct link between the two crises is never drawn in the public sphere.
While there will be some overlap there was also a lot of perverse behavior. Basically the drug company creates a drug that it wants to sell, drug reps travel to doctors explaining the drugs, when the doctor does the prescription, the doctor and sales rep get cash.
Now you have an incentive structure where doctors are prescribing drugs to patients that may not need them, may not need the dose prescribed, and so forth.
That combined with how addictive any opioid can be leads along with the trust common people put in doctors, assuming that what they are being prescribed is safe, leads to the problem.
The more of the drugs that get prescribed the more everyone makes in the process.
Same thing that happened with all of the shady loans during the housing crisis. All you have to look for is the financial incentive and lack of punishment and you get the same cycle repeated.
The analogy is apt, because those opioid deaths are a direct result of someone taking advantage of others' emotions to set wide-sweeping policy, with no regard for anyone else -- causing drastic harm to people.
This is no different from the example above.
Pharmaceutical companies push opioids on doctors -> doctors push opioids onto people -> someone gets uppity and decides something should be done now -> opioid access is quickly curtailed -> people now need to get their fix because pharmaceutical companies have upregulated their opioid receptors, causing life to be living hell -> people go acquire opioids through the black market -> it's laced with fent and then people die
Alcohol poisoning was common in the bootleg era, when some people got uppity and decided something must be done now about alcohol -- and people do as people do, went to go get their fix from shady suppliers with tainted product; then they were seriously injured or killed.
> Perhaps you could include poverty and despair (and trace back from there to a collapsing education system, ideological pathology...).
It's really not about that -- although that certainly contributes to some drug use.
"The opioid epidemic began in the 1990s, when doctors became increasingly aware of the burdens of chronic pain. Pharmaceutical companies saw an opportunity, and pushed doctors — with misleading marketing about the safety and efficacy of the drugs — to prescribe opioids to treat all sorts of pain. Doctors, many exhausted by dealing with difficult-to-treat pain patients, complied — in some states, writing enough prescriptions to fill a bottle of pills for each resident."
This is not about people in poverty turning to drugs -- this is about people in pain going to the doctor, and being prescribed an addictive, dangerous substance as treatment.
"Over the past couple of decades, the health care system, bolstered by pharmaceutical companies, flooded the US with painkillers. Then illicit drug traffickers followed suit, inundating the country with heroin and other illegally produced opioids that people could use once they ran out of painkillers or wanted something stronger.
"The other opioids arguably pose even bigger risks than painkillers. Heroin is generally more potent, so it’s more addictive and more likely to cause overdose. And fentanyl is even more potent than heroin, and it’s also often laced into illicitly sold heroin without a user’s knowledge — increasing the odds he’ll take a much bigger dose than he can handle.
"The result is that as opioid painkiller deaths leveled off over the past few years, heroin and fentanyl deaths have rapidly increased."
As much as the pharma industry and medical practitioners were irresponsible in their contribution to opioid addiction, there is a dimension to this problem that does still does not get enough attention: that people may really be in pain. Over the past couple decades economic conditions have stagnated at best and for many declined causing a lot of people chronic stress, depression, and anxiety. The food industry has raised generations of people on abysmal nutrition causing a rash of chronic health conditions, many of them inflammatory in nature. Whole cities have gone into decline and precarity because their core industries have laid off workers in droves and left. ... and so forth. The backdrop of the "opioid epidemic" has been a population that had arguably been already been declining in physical and mental health for decades. It is not too much of a stretch to suppose people are actually in more pain. This does not mean that the right thing to do is to allow the pharma industry to push pills on people, but if the underlying issues that cause this pain are not addressed people in pain are just going to move on to more alcohol and street drugs.
It is really scary how trustful people are of pharmaceutical corporations. We don’t even need to go back to DDT; the opioid epidemic was quite recent.
What happened to the skeptics?
In short: pharma companies for misrepresenting an editorial in the 80s about addiction rates, medical industry calling pain the fifth vital sign, and enterprising drug dealers setting up Domino's like delivery services for heroin.
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