Opinion | Health
What if We’re Wrong About the Prescription Drug Crisis?
Is the prescription drug epidemic more myth and moral panic than reality?
If you’ve been on the internet at any point over the past fifteen years, you’ve heard of the prescription opioid crisis. The words “opioid crisis” are regularly strewn across headlines, capturing our attention and imbuing us with an unnerving sense of disquiet. News outlets use the term liberally, evoking phantasmagorias of death. Reading them, we effortlessly imagine people dropping dead everywhere after taking medications prescribed by licensed doctors and issued by legitimate pharmacies.
If the non-fiction media doesn’t terrify you, there’s an abundance of fictitious or semi-fictitious media to help prod your imagination in that direction. The Netflix drama series Painkiller depicts, with some creative license, the history of Purdue Pharmaceutical’s hit drug OxyContin. Dopesick is Amazon’s eight-part series telling the same provocative story.
Purdue Pharmaceutical was forced to pay $4.5 billion for misrepresenting the drug OxyContin, contributing to over 500,000 U.S. overdose deaths. They understated the addictive nature of the semisynthetic opioid, leading to carnage and misery. The company subsequently filed for…
