‘Safer’ OxyContin Caused 7,500 Heroin Deaths, Researchers Find
It all started back in 1914 when Congress passed the Harrison Narcotic Act and created the “black drug market” for opiates… then in 1970 Congress passed the Controlled Substance Act which created the “war on drugs” to stop the “black drug market” that they had created… In 2010 they “convinced/forced” Purdue Pharma to create a abuse resistance Oxycodone… and from this article it looks like it directly contributed to the increase in Heroin use/abuse/deaths. The Feds just can’t stay out of their own way ?
Zachary Siegel
01.13.17 11:15 PM ET
Danielle Novascone was hooked on OxyContin for about a year when it suddenly got a lot harder to get high.
For years, people like Novascone crushed the pills and snorted the powder for an instant fix. In 2010, OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, changed the opioid painkiller to supposedly stem the abuse epidemic it ignited. When new “abuse-deterrent” OxyContin was crushed, it would turn to jelly, Novascone said.
“It didn’t stop a damn thing,” she added.
Like a burglar confronted with a new safe, Novascone came up with novel methods to break in.
Novascone would shave the pills down with a metal file or chisel, then microwave or bake the jelly until it hardened, crush it and snort or inject it just like the old Oxy.
“It would take 45 minutes to set up one pill,” she said. “It became a pain in the ass.”
When Novascone realized she could buy heroin already in powder form at a fraction of the cost of OxyContin, she switched without hesitation.
New research by the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the RAND Corporation has found OxyContin users like Novascone made the jump to heroin and thousands didn’t survive.
“Our results, imply that a substantial share of the dramatic increase in heroin deaths since 2010 can be attributed to the reformulation of OxyContin,” the study’s authors wrote.
As much as 80 percent of the three-fold increase in heroin mortality since 2010 can be attributed to OxyContin’s reformulation, the study concluded.
As dangerous as Oxy can be, it is at least regulated by federal government and produced uniformly by a pharmaceutical company. Heroin, on the other hand, is is increasingly cut with fentanyl, an opioid as much as 80 times stronger than morphine.
Using the study’s estimate, that means the reformulation likely caused more than 7,500 additional heroin deaths.
In 2010, the year Purdue rolled out the new formula, there were 3,038 heroin deaths in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. By 2013, the death toll jumped to 8,260. Since then heroin deaths have continued to climb, hitting a record high of 12,989 in 2015, the latest year for which there is data.
“The reformulation totally screwed up our game,” said Kevin Joyce, 53, who started out using OxyContin before 2010. “We eventually moved to heroin and our addiction’s got worse.”
“In the past two years 7 of my friends have died,” Joyce said.
Purdue Pharma responded to the study in a statement to The Daily Beast.
“The White House, FDA, and DEA consider abuse-deterrent technology to be an important part of a comprehensive approach toward combating prescription drug abuse,” Purdue said, adding drug treatment and prevention should be part of that approach.
Despite previous studies that link OxyContin’s reformulation to increased heroin use, the CDC maintains that there is no causal link between supply reductions in prescription painkillers and the rise in heroin deaths.
It’s the second time in as many decades that Purdue Pharma tried to make its drug safer.
OxyContin was rolled out in 1996 and aggressively marketed by Purdue and pharmaceutical-giant Abbott Laboratories as a wonder drug for pain that only needed to be taken twice a day. Other painkillers like Vicodin would wear off after 4 to 6 hours, requiring several daily doses to relieve pain. Oxycontin, on the other hand, supposedly lasted 12 hours, requiring only two doses.
In advertisements for OxyContin, doctors paid by Purdue misrepresented the risk of the drug’s addiction potential.
“The rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than one percent,” a doctor said in this video advertisement made by Purdue. Though the risk of addiction in the chronic pain population is debatable, the problem is OxyContin was over prescribed and massively diverted from the medical system.
A Los Angeles Times investigation revealed that Purdue knew their blockbuster drug’s effects didn’t last that long. So they told doctors to prescribe stronger and stronger doses, increasing the risk of overdose for thousands of patients. The “extended-release formula” that supposedly made OxyContin safe was a total sham.
The marketing scheme was brought to light in 2007 when Purdue pleaded guilty to misleading doctors and regulators. The company paid out $600 million in fines and to this day is still fending off lawsuits by states that see the Purdue’s marketing campaign responsible for killing hundreds of its residents.
The grim irony is OxyContin was supposed to be safer than other opioids but instead turned out to be deadly. So Purdue tried making it safer with a reformulated version and the outcome was even more deaths, according to Wharton and RAND.
“They call these heroin deaths unintended consequences. If they had any understanding of opioid addiction they would’ve known that these consequences were inevitable,” said Sam Snodgrass, a former opioid user who holds a PhD in biopsychology, and works at a buprenorphine clinic that treats patients with opioid use disorder in Arkansas.
“I truly believe that if the CDC, FDA, HHS, and other organizations that put their time, effort, and money into restricting access to pain pills and reformulations, had instead put resources into education, harm reduction, and treatment, so many of the dead would be alive. And that’s on them,” said Snodgrass, who is also a board member of Grief Recovery After Substance Passing (GRASP), a resource for families who have lost a loved one to addiction. Snodgrass’s work puts him on the frontlines of the epidemic’s tragic toll.
Leo Beletsky, an associate professor of law and health sciences at the University of California San Diego, who also holds a post at Northeastern School of Law, said that the story behind Purdue’s abuse-deterrent formulation is more “sinister” than it appears.
“A lot of the motivation behind the reformulation was arguably not about public health,” said Beletsky. “It was driven by the dynamics of one of Purdue’s patents expiring.”
In 2013, the exact day Purdue’s patent on OxyContin expired, the FDA made the decision that it would not approve any generic versions of OxyContin’s old formula because it was too dangerous.
That was after OxyContin’s sales increased from $45 million in 1996 to more than $3 billion in 2010.
The FDA’s decision was another win for Purdue, as the company was able to retain its share of the painkiller market without cheap, generic competitors—a practice in the pharmaceutical industry called “evergreening.”
“It was a brilliant strategy by Purdue,” said Beletesky. “But devastating from a public health standpoint.”
Beletesky sees policies that make painkillers more difficult to access too limited in scope. “I’m not arguing that the misuse of a medication should continue unabated,” he said. “As with any intervention, you need to be mindful to do more good than harm and balance various considerations.”
That didn’t happen with OxyContin’s reformulation, said Beletsky.
One of the study’s co-authors, David Powell, an economist at RAND, told The Daily Beast that instead of only focusing on the supply side of the equation, perhaps policy that emphasizes “demand-side interventions like harm reduction might be more effective.”
“Most drug policy tends to be supply side,” said Powell. But he noted that the heavily lobbied 21st Century Cures Act earmarked $1 billion to treat opioid addiction. This could mean the United States is moving away from strictly supply side interventions, said Powell.
For Snodgrass, who treats opioid addiction with medication, harm reduction policies and interventions include expanding access to naloxone, the lifesaving antidote for opioid overdoses, as well as providing medication-assisted treatment like methadone and buprenorphine on-demand.
Novascone kicked her heroin habit in September 2015, when she entered a methadone-maintenance program.
“My daughter turned 2 and I just had to take care of her,” Novascone said. “I’m so thankful for methadone. It doesn’t make me feel high or anything—I can’t even tell I’m on it.”
Without a robust strategy in place to treat the addiction that demands opioids, Snodgrass thinks the problem will worsen. “I know they believe that if they slam down on pain pills they’ll solve this opioid epidemic,” he said. “But if they take away hydrocodone, we’ll goto oxycodone. If they take away OxyContin, we’ll go to heroin. They slam down heroin, and we’ll go to fentanyl.”
“They need to give us a way out,” he said.
Filed under: General Problems
My question is whether the pharma companies now each have their own opioid formulation that isn’t off-patent? I read about promising non-opioid drugs that are just “dropped” by Pharma – like Effirma, which is being used in Europe. Would new drugs like that just compete with what they already have on the market? Are these patent laws preventing people living in chronic pain from getting access to new drugs?
Surely they don’t want to develop drugs that would compete with their current patent-protected drugs. There’s got to be a strategy that the drug manufacturers play out, and I wonder if it’s actually preventing people from getting access to alternative treatments.
I was hopeful for Effirma. I was dismayed when I was reading that a drug company was going to re-introduce cyclobenzaprine onto the market in a low-dose formulation that would become a brand-name drug. Evergreening may be cheating patients of treatment options.
I remember when asthma inhalers were re-patented because CFC-free formulations were being required by the government. What I heard later was that the drug companies themselves lobbied for this change – not because they cared about the environment, but because they stood to make money off the re-patented drugs. Years later, the patents are so complex that it’s not clear when they’d even expire.
These situations need to be investigated, but instead, patients will suffer at the hands of the government who will across-the-board limit access to opioids rather than truly investigate what’s going on. They treat chronic pain patients the same way they treat people who have substance-abuse problems. It’s completely ignorant of the needs of BOTH groups. We need research to learn what to do to help people who have substance abuse issues… but instead the “simple” solution of limiting opioids stands to drive chronic pain patients to commit suicide or to seek relief on the streets. I can’t imagine looking for relief on the streets. There are others who have started using Kratom, which is under fire from the government as well. Kratom is probably keeping folks from going to the streets. I personally wouldn’t want to use Kratom either but all of the choices left for people forced to discontinue their long-standing treatments that were working for them are hard choices, period.
Doctors can’t just deny that these patients have pain. What do they expect to happen if they just deny that patients have pain? Why are patients not entitled to have access to treatments?
I wouldn’t be able to continue working if I lost access to opioid treatment. People say medical marijuana is an option, but it’s not a one-size-fits-all treatment. It’s also not paid for by insurance and is very expensive. Cost figures into what people will do, too… They’ll become more comfortable with something they can afford than something that also introduces financial hardship and therefore knowing that they can afford it “this time — but what about next time?”
We need better solutions. The government is doing harm and they don’t care, either.
I met a wonderful ER physician I Texas about 8 years ago who had understanding that very few have. My hubby was in the hospital having just had MAJOR surgery when I got a major headache. Being the hospital was not located in the state where we live I couldn’t go to my own provider and went to the ER hoping to get even a little relief. After giving me a shot of stadol he wrote a prescription for 30 pain pills. I was totally shocked , hugged him and started crying. When he asked why I was crying I told him I was just overwhelmed that he would do that for me because at the hospital back home I would have been extremely lucky to get a shot of something that would barely take the edge off OR an rx for 5 pills, never more cuz I might be a “drug seeker”. He then shocked me further by saying he would rather take the chance of treating 10 addicts than to leave even one person in pain to suffer! Why the hell can’t more people get this? Certainly those in power will never get it!
jmo,,,,there are some laws of nature that will always hold true,,,such as when u get arrogance combined w/ignorance concerning a life or death issue,,,u get death towards thee innocent…When u get ,”witch hunts,” u get death towards thee innocence..When u get men in power that abuse it or corrupts it purpose,,u get death onto the innocent,,When u reduce mankind to absolute DESPOTISM,, u get death onto the innocent,,for no man will be forced to live a life in forced physical pain,,,hell that is why u shot animals who have injuries soo severe their screaming in pain,,,Our government has forgotten its purpose,,has forgotten humanity,and have corrupted their purpose,..They have forgotten how to actually listen,,instead of talking at us,,,We are adults not children,yet they constantly blur those line..As FREE ADULTS,,WE HAVE THE RITE TO DECIDE HOW AND WHAT WE PUT INTO OUR BODIES,,AND THE FREEDOM TO KNOW THAT RITE WOULD NEVER BE TAKEN FROM US,,,BUT IT HAS,,,The truthful fact is,,,it is literally impossible for anyone to factually physical feel the physical pain of another,,thus NO-ONE should ever be allowed to
decide who suffers to death and who does not,FROM PHYSICAL PAIN,,, but too many thought they had that rite,,to force others to suffer in physical pain,,by restricting our access to life saving meds,,soo we die,,,or fight back,,for when-ever any form of government evinces by design,to reduce its citizens to absolute DESPOTISM,, it is our rite,,it is our duty,,to alter or abolish ,for the betterment of our civilization,,,For a humane civilization,,,maryw,
This mess needs cleaning up, by someone who knows and follow the truth.
Chronic pain will not go away neither will abuse. Why can’t we find a solution to help both sides, not just stabbing for answers to only one side abandoning the other?
Thanks more info Steve……
Well as i say ALL THE TIME,,when i see propagandist like this,,usually i will comment on their site,,but this site doesn’t allow for comments,,,Soo,,,Ill do it here…..1st off its laymen like this that has fueled our FORCED PHYSICAL PAIN,,,,now i think i tried oxycontin 1 time for 5 month,,,i hated it,,,,if it didn’t work,,u were screwed,,cause u could not take another for 8 hours,,Those that did,,,got sick,,or worse od,,cause it took away the ability for the patient to choose his pain medicines time to take w/the level of pain they are in,,,but for others,,,,it worked,,,,I always say,,,it is literally impossible for anyone to physically feel the physical pain of another,,,thus no-one has the rite to decide how much u r too suffer in physical pain…but people,laymen started using their pens like poisen,,and we the chronic physical pain people started getting dropped by doctors by thee 1000’s,,,,,forced to endure physical pain for some that was controlled w/oxycontin,,,Now u have taken away their medicine that lessen’d there physical pain,,,,,what r they going to do???Anyone who has suffer’d severe pain will tell u,,,,either u end w/death or because they don’t want to die,,but want their physical pain to stop,,,some,,,,went to heroin to stop their physical pain…IT WASN’T A PILL,,, that caused them to heroin,,it was taking away thee only medicine that once lessen their physical pain,,dahhhhhhhhhhhhhh,,,,but i am learning common sense isn;t just a given,,to me it is,,,but some,,,,,,it has to be taught!!!sadly,,,,and people have died because of their STUPIDITY!!!,,mary