Painkillers, Marijuana, and Things That Are Legal

Our country is in the midst of an opioid epidemic that seems to have no bottom. Thankfully, there is a better way.

There were dueling, twin pieces about America’s opioid epidemic this week that showed the horrifying lengths that companies have gone to to make money off of a drug that kills more people every day.

In West Virginia, OxyContin has smothered several tiny, desperate towns:

The trail of painkillers leads to West Virginia’s southern coalfields, to places like Kermit, population 392. There, out-of-state drug companies shipped nearly 9 million highly addictive — and potentially lethal — hydrocodone pills over two years to a single pharmacy in the Mingo County town. Rural and poor, Mingo County has the fourth-highest prescription opioid death rate of any county in the United States.

The unfettered shipments amount to 433 pain pills for every man, woman and child in West Virginia.

The horrifying spread of the devastating epidemic was enabled by three major distributors (McKesson, Cardinal Health, and AmerisourceBergen), which accounted for more than half of all drug imports. Of course, they blame manufacturers, and doctors, the government, drug users, and everyone else. In return the CEOs of these three companies combined to make $450 million in the past four years.

The second article covered efforts drug companies are making to export the problem. being made drug companies are making to export it. The LA Times published the 3rd part of a massive investigation in America’s latest attempted export, our opioid epidemic.

The whole piece is incredibly well-researched and very worth your time. It caused a truly vile company, Munipharma, to delete a bunch of incriminating videos off of their website. The crux of the story is this — after having been a major contributor to hundreds of thousands of people becoming addicted to drugs that can be prescribed by doctors.

The two most infuriating tidbits:

• Opium was originally unleashed onto America by Purdue, who was fined 9-figures for lying about its addictiveness:

Some Mundipharma representatives and promotional material have downplayed the risk that patients will become addicted to their opioid medications. Those claims recall the initial marketing of OxyContin in the U.S. in the late 1990s when Purdue deceived doctors about the drug’s addictiveness.

Purdue and three executives pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges of misbranding drugs and were ordered to pay $635 million.

• The company pays a global network of consultants with sketchy credentials (some more than $1 million) to advise at medical conferences. Part of what they’re paid for is to assuage concerns that the rollout will go as badly as it did in

So now that you’re thoroughly angry and depressed, time for a bit of optimism. There is a proven solution to the problem of opioid abuse, and it’s becoming legal in four more states in 2017: Marijuana.

Making marijuana readily available reduces opioid abuse and death by 15–35%. It’s a natural painkiller, is much less addictive than opioids, and has been proven as a good way to battle things like PTSD.

So, aside from a stigma, what’s preventing us from having fully legalized marijuana? As The Intercept detailed here, the biggest donor in the fight against marijuana legalization in Arizona is a company that produces, you guessed it, opioids:

On August 31, Insys Therapeutics Inc. donated $500,000 to Arizonans for Responsible Drug Policy, becoming the single largest donor to the group leading the charge to defeat a ballot measure in Arizona to legalize marijuana.

The drug company, which currently markets a fast-acting version of the deadly painkiller fentanyl, assured local news reporters that they had the public interest in mind when making the hefty donation.

This is the natural end point of a system that allows corporations to spend untraceable sums of money on politics, allows those same companies to lobby doctors directly at conferences, and refuses to hold those companies accountable when they push dangerous amounts of drugs into small communities. The system is behaving exactly the way you would expect it to if you built it from the ground up.

Marijuana should be legalized for a number of reasons (not the least of which is the thousands of people we’ve locked up for no good reason), but it can be a real way to get people off of opioids and to serve as a replacement for people that legitimately need them to manage pain. Instead of selling millions of pills over the counter, let’s sell people joints and save people’s lives.

The companies, fraudulent doctors, and politicians that have looked the other way should all be held to account. There should be hearings, and if someone doesn’t end up in handcuffs, the politicians that are too scared to put them on them should be voted out of office. These companies have no regard for the people that buy their product, and do everything in their power to push as many pills as possible on to people. It’s time for them to not exist anymore.