More than enough blame to go around

Once the news broke that Purdue Pharma will no longer market OxyContin, my first thought was “that’s great, but who is going to stop another pharmaceutical company from marketing their next poison?”

[clickToTweet tweet=”Who is going to stop another pharmaceutical company from marketing their next poison?” quote=”Who is going to stop another pharmaceutical company from marketing their next poison?”]

One of the brothers who founded Purdue Pharma created direct to consumer advertising for prescription drugs in the 1960s, so they have been doing this forever. Instead of the idea that doctors should be the ones learning about the drug and sharing it with their patients, Purdue introduced the idea of marketing highly addictive drugs straight to the consumer like they are tennis shoes or hamburgers.

And nowadays, Americans are being brainwashed during every commercial break with ads from big pharma. Turn on CNN or any cable news. It’s unbelievable.

While I am glad to see they are open to changing their practices, we have to remember that saying that they have “reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers” means nothing if there is not a cooperative effort in America to prevent the next drug addiction epidemic from happening. Some other drug will come out that’s either ineffective or destructive and there’s no telling what kind of damage it can do.

Purdue Pharma is partially responsible for what has happened in America and they know it. But they aren’t the only ones to blame – there’s more than enough blame to go around.

Extreme capitalism with no good consciousness is why we are where we are. We’ve got a federal government that is supposed to be the “protector of the people,” yet they just roll over for anybody who has money. Wall Street is corrupt, only concerned with hitting quarterly numbers and keeping their shareholders happy. And the cherry on top is the doctors who advocated opiates for pain – they were the last people who should have protected their patients, yet they were complicit in creating this epidemic in America.

We have to get rid of this dangerous and deadly pharmaceutical marketing, and the federal government has the ability to do just that. It’s easy. But they are all in the pockets of big pharma and care more about getting re-elected than saving our country from this epidemic.

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