Big Pharma's Role in the Opioid Crisis

We get to the same place in healthcare. How the hell do we fix this? I can tell you what's wrong, but how the hell do we fix it? And we fix it with exactly the solution that you've proposed. That the constituencies that are affected need to move into positions of power in society. So we've got the constituencies are the doctors who are not getting good information. They think they are, but they're not. And the doctors got to understand that this is a very serious problem. And that they're trusted to be learned intermediaries to apply medical science in the service of the patients, and they can't do it under these circumstances. And we've got businesses, non-healthcare-related businesses that are paying a fortune for their healthcare and losing their competitiveness. And they should be in on this. Most of all, we've got consumers who want the best health. But in order for each of those constituencies to become competent political activists, they've got to understand what's going on. And right now they don't. They don't. And this term of diseases of despair is very accurate, right? Like if you look at West Virginia, and you look at these places where you have these look tremendous pill problems. This is what's going on. There's these people that really don't have anything to look forward to. And this is what alleviates some of their horrible feeling is just get drugged up. And the drug companies were very willing to make a buck doing it. Yeah. Have you ever seen the documentary, The OxyContin Express? No. Because it was on Vanguard, and it was essentially they showed that Florida had created this situation where they would have these pain management centers that were essentially just pill mills. The pain management center was connected to a pharmacy that only had pills. They only served opiates. So you would go to this pain management center, you go to the doctor, and you say, Dr. my back is killing me. The doctor said, well, you needed some OxyContin, son. And they would write your prescription. You would literally go right next door, and they would have the pills for you. And they also did not have a digital database. So you could go to Jamie and get a prescription from Jamie, and then leave him, and then go to another Dr. Mike right down the street and get a prescription from him. And you could do it all day long. And people were doing this, and then they were selling these pills on the OxyContin Express. They drove it straight up into Kentucky and Ohio and wherever the highway took it. And they were seeing how there was a direct chain of events where these people were going to these pill mills, stockpiling all these pills, and then they were selling them into these other states and making a lot of money. Right. So you see the synergy between the folks whose lives aren't working out the way they wanted to, and they're miserable. And maybe they're miserable because of back pain, or maybe they're miserable because life doesn't have the meaning they hoped it did. And you have the drug company, which is telling doctors that they've got a new product that's less addictive. It's so much less addictive that you can treat non-cancer pain and not get into trouble with it, that it lasts 12 hours. But they know it doesn't last 12 hours. And when it wears off before 12 hours, they tell the doctors to increase the dose because that means they're not taking enough, not that their drug doesn't last 12 hours. And that it can't be abused, and people are crushing it and putting it in a straw and shooting it up and so forth. So you've got the drug company that's an actor, and you've got the social circumstances where people are hurting, whether it's medical hurting or spiritual hurting or whatever you want to call it. And it's just a recipe for disaster. And without the appropriate oversight of the drugs, the spigots turned on. And that's, in this country, has been one of the most egregious offenses by the pharmaceutical drug companies is distorting the data on the addictive properties of opiates. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's a scary thing when you find out how many people. There was a statistic that was just released that from people 18 to 49, fentanyl was the number one cause of death. A hundred thousand people died in this country from fentanyl that are ages 18 to 49, the extremely potent opiate. And most of it recreational, right? Most of it is like from cut. All of it. Yeah. It's hard. I don't know if it's a hundred thousand. I think it's a hundred thousand deaths total. And fentanyl is a major proportion of those hundred thousand deaths. Oh, that's not what I thought. I thought I saw that it was, they were literally attributing a hundred thousand deaths. It could be. It's the number one cause of death between people aged 18 to 49, which is insane that we're not hearing about this because it's such a large number of people. This should be something that's on the news every day. It should be something that terrifies folks. Yeah. That's actually the way he said it. Say it again. It's the way he said it. Oh, so what is the actual number? The way the headline reads is. So the drug overdose death top a hundred thousand annually for the first time driven by fentanyl. Also it's all kinds of drug overdoses, but drug overdoses are the number one cause of death between people 18 to 49. But Joe, here's the problem. Drug overdoses are the number one cause of death, but that accounts for only a quarter of the excess deaths in that age group. What are the other three quarters? The other three quarters are the cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer. And that's the problem is that we do such a poor job in the United States of preventing preventable disease. We're last amongst developed countries in preventing preventable disease.