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It is ironic that the pharmaceutical companies that have helped spread the national epidemic of opioids have everything to gain from reacting.
If we are generally reluctant to call for more regulation from the private sector, then legislators must step in to make addiction treatment available, effective and affordable for all.
In the current regulatory system, this simply does not happen. Witness the latest patent application for an addiction treatment.
Richard Sackler was one of the people listed as an inventor in the treatment application, who would provide patients with a dose of buprenorphine, a mild opioid that helps drug addicts to wean themselves off harder drugs, via a rapidly dissolving blister. on the tongue.
The Sackler family, of course, owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of the deadly painkiller OxyContin, which hit the market in 1996. Purdue Pharma faces hundreds of lawsuits – including one from the state of Massachusetts – for its role in the opioid epidemic.
"Purdue's strategy was simple," Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey wrote shortly after the state's lawsuit was filed in June. "The more drugs they sold, the more money they made and the more people died.
This company is engaged in a multi-billion dollar business to mislead us about their medications. They have pushed physicians to prescribe higher doses to keep patients on longer, regardless of the increased risk of addiction, overdose, and death. They claimed that opioids were safer than drugs like ibuprofen and Tylenol. They pushed their medications to prescribers whom they knew were writing illegal prescriptions or whose patients were dying of an overdose. And they have targeted vulnerable populations such as veterans and the elderly to increase their profits. "
Although Purdue Pharma has promised to make amends, it is clear that the company is still considering taking advantage of OxyContin. Its so-called "anti-abuse" version of the drug – which the company claims is harder to crush and ingest – is not available in a cheaper generic form. Purdue Pharma and other companies have acquired the ability to slightly modify the composition of their drugs in order to protect them under patent and thereby remove them from the hands of generic drug manufacturers.
And even in this case, there are real questions about the effectiveness of Purdue Pharma's version of the drug "safe from abuse". In its own patent application, the company noted that the most recent pills, once crushed, took a consistency similar to that of a gel and that "the intravenous administration of such a gel would most likely result in obstruction of the blood vessels, associated with severe embolism or even death of the aggressor. "
In the meantime, the patent application filed by Sackler and others on behalf of Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, a subsidiary of Purdue, could allow the company to take advantage of the drug dependence treatment being sold.
It's hard not to have that reaction of, like … those vultures, "NPR told David Herzberg, associate professor at the University of Buffalo, who is studying the opioid epidemic.
In 2011, the then President, Barack Obama, signed the America Invents Act, which allows generic drug makers to more easily challenge the most fragile patents. The idea was to protect companies that often spent decades and millions of dollars in developing a drug before seeing a return on investment while ensuring that these drugs would eventually be available at public at relatively affordable prices. Shortly after the law came into force, several members of Congress introduced bills to deprive regulators of their power.
At the very least, lawmakers should reject the impulse to yield – once again – to the giants of the pharmaceutical industry. It is better to work so that people who have benefited from addiction do not benefit equally from their treatment, and those who need it get the help they need.
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