What would happen to you if law enforcers discovered that you were distributing a lot of opioids in your area? The most likely outcome would involve a SWAT team storming into your home at oh dark thirty, shooting your dog, and holding your family at gunpoint until they become bored with tossing your joint and decide to kidnap you so they can go home. You would receive this treatment because of a combination of two factors. First, the government had decided that there is an opioid epidemic that it needs to fight. Second, you’re not a sanctioned opioid dealer.
But things are different for sanctioned opioid dealers:
Drug companies hosed tiny towns in West Virginia with a deluge of addictive and deadly opioid pills over the last decade, according to an ongoing investigation by the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
For instance, drug companies collectively poured 20.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills into the small city of Williamson, West Virginia, between 2006 and 2016, according to a set of letters the committee released Tuesday. Williamson’s population was just 3,191 in 2010, according to US Census data.
When you’ve received a government sanction to deal drugs you don’t end up looking down the barrel of a SWAT team gun in the middle of the night. Instead some letters of inquiry are sent to you and various oversight boards. You might be dragged in front of Congress to testify on C-SPAN so the country can see that their politicians are doing something. After being grilled by two or three members of Congress you will be allowed to return home and that’s where your hardship will likely end.
Situations like this really illustrate that the war on drugs isn’t about safety, it’s about the government ensuring it and its cronies get a cut. After all, if the government was actually concerned about the opioid epidemic that it claims to be fighting, opioids wouldn’t be legally available at all or, at the very least, situations like this would result in immediate arrests.
How can a drug mfg be blamed when –
– an MD is required to prescribe the Rx
– each patient bares the responsibility in adhering to recommended dosing or simply stop taking the Rx?
Even if the mfg and the MD act in collusion there remains that personal responsibility of the patient.
This seems a money grab since it is pharma which has the deepest pockets. It appears that for all the talk of individual responsibility, this case evidences it is nothing but talk.
Exactly. As with private lawsuits, government action tends to be aimed at those with the biggest pockets.
It is a redistribution of wealth but with special considerations. The redistribution is solely to the government, nay, to those certain few within the government. Here I am reminded of the legal actions against ‘Big Tobacco’, ‘Big Oil’, and ‘Wall St bankers’. Look to see which elected representatives were involved.
A side note: IIRC, one of the conditions of the settlement with ‘Big Tobacco’ was that was the end of it, that no further action would be taken against the tobacco companies. But now we see it is again heating up. I fully expect the tobacco companies will soon find themselves paying large sums of money to settle that which was already ‘settled’. To that end, these deep pockets represent the golden eggs to government.
Of course, “government” is a faceless entity. Therefore, to be more precise, it is to those certain persons within government who stand to profit.
By all that is holy do I declare it is time to cut off their thumbs and put them in the public stocks which should again become popular.
This is an awful lot like blaming a gun maker because they should have known the legitimate market for their guns wasn’t that big. The solution is pretty similar to “crime guns” as well–make things much more difficult for legit users.
I’m fairly indifferent to drug abusers–you should be free to take drugs, but there are other freedoms I care about a whole lot more. I’m willing to accept many, many recreational overdoses to ensure that someone in pain can get what they need legitimately. I’m also convinced we would have fewer recreational ODs if they could get pure heroin that isn’t laced with fentanyl.
(and side note, I lived in Williamson for two years as a child in the early 70’s)