Pharmaceutical Needle - US Narcotic Drugs

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

It is no secret that the pharmaceutical business is one of the most profitable today. What methods are used by wholesale companies supplying drugs to the market to achieve their lucrative goals, one can only guess. Ksenia Palchun translated the text of the investigation of the American journalist Eric Ira.

Eric Ira of The Charleston Gazette-Mail won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Best Investigation. He found that the largest pharmaceutical companies sell a huge number of addictive prescription drugs to small remote towns, where doctors easily go to prescribe a couple of extra prescriptions for a patient, and pharmacists do not ask unnecessary questions. The pharmaceutical department responsible for controlling the circulation of these drugs turned a blind eye to the lack of reporting, the growing number of overdose deaths and the raging epidemic around it.

To the south of West Virginia, in small towns like Kermit, freelance pharmaceutical companies supplied nearly 9 million highly addictive and potentially fatal drugs - hydrocodone tablets. Poor rural Mingo County was ranked fourth in prescription opioid deaths out of all counties in the United States.

OxyContin overdose deaths in Wyoming County are the highest in the country. Investigations revealed that wholesale drug suppliers filled the staff with 780 million hydrocodone and oxycodone tablets. At the same time, 1,728 people overdosed with these two pain relievers. The uncontrolled supply of narcotic drugs has reached 433 tablets for every West Virginia resident.

Classified reports from the US Drug Enforcement Administration reveal the number of pills - sold to every pharmacy in the state - and the shipments of pharmaceutical companies to all 55 West Virginia counties between 2007 and 2012. The reports show the number of fatal drug overdoses in the southern counties of the state.

For more than a decade, the same distributors have failed to report suspicious orders of controlled substances in West Virginia to the State Board of Pharmacy. The council, in turn, without proper regulation, has since 2001 provided flawless inspection reports on pharmacies in small towns and localities in the southern districts that ordered more drugs than could be taken by those who needed them.

Overdose deaths from hydrocodone and oxycodone increased by 67% from 2007 to 2012. During this time, the CEOs of the supplying companies received salaries and bonuses amounting to tens of millions of dollars. Their companies have made billions. McKesson, one of the nation's prescription drug wholesalers, has become the fifth largest corporation in America.

The company's CEO, a drug distributor, was the highest paid official in the country in 2012, according to Forbes magazine.

In litigation, the companies have denied their role in the national pain reliever epidemic. Their reasoning was that suppliers ship drugs from factories to licensed pharmacies that sell drugs on prescription from licensed doctors. If doctors didn't write prescriptions, drugs would never fall into the hands of dealers and patients. “It all starts with a doctor's prescription, a sale by a pharmacist, and a supplier distribution. They are all three in the same boat. The distributors knew what was going on. They just didn't care,”said Sam Suppa, a retired Charleston pharmacist who spent 60 years in West Virginia pharmacies.

Mary Catherine Mullins' story is one example of this heinous crime. Mary got into a car accident, after which she suffered from severe back pain. The doctor prescribed OxyContin for her.

“She would take 90 or 120 pills and drink them in a week. She went to Beckley every month. There they took $ 200 in cash from her, did not ask for insurance and gave them pills that ran out in a week,”recalls Kay Mullins, Mary Catherine's mother. The woman hardly remembers the last 10 years of her daughter's life - all the lies that she used to hide her addiction, how she stole from her own brother, how she once shot herself in the stomach in an attempt to commit suicide.

Mary Catherine went to dozens of doctors on a prescription hunt. She always managed to get her medicine. She sold a certain number of drugs to others. Once, after another portion of pills, Mary died in her own bed, at the age of 50.

In the drug distribution industry, wholesalers McKesson, Cardinal Health and Amerisource Bergen are referred to as the “Big Three”. Collectively, these companies generate revenue from 85% of the US drug market.

From 2007 to 2012, the companies jointly shipped 423 million pain relievers to West Virginia, according to the DEA, and generated approximately $ 17 billion in net profit. Over the past 4 years, their CEOs have jointly received salaries and other bonuses and compensations totaling $ 450 million. In 2015, McKesson's CEO received $ 89 million in compensation - more than the average of 2,000 West Virginia families combined.

In southern West Virginia, many of the pharmacies that received large quantities of prescription drugs were small private pharmacies that ordered between 600,000 and 1.1 million oxycodone tablets annually. They were also local pharmaceutical companies in Mingo and Logan counties, where wholesale suppliers supplied up to 4.7 million hydrocodone tablets per year. At the same time, Walmart in Charleston - one of the largest retail stores in West Virginia - received about 5 thousand oxycodone tablets and 9, 5 thousand hydrocodone tablets per year.

In addition to the ever-increasing supply of prescription drugs to West Virginia, there were other warning signs of an impending epidemic.

Wholesale companies received fewer and fewer drugs at a dosage of 5 milligrams and more and more at dosages of 15 and 10 milligrams. Thus, the consumption of more and more powerful doses of drugs was constantly growing. This made people more addicted. The more powerful drugs the patient uses, the more he is inclined to increase the dose.

Chelsea Carter stopped using drugs in 2008 after she was sent to prison for participating in a robbery. She shares her memories: “They put handcuffs on you, you walk in the doors, you are wearing an orange robe, and the door slams behind them. At this moment, you ask yourself the question: “Is it worth 2 to 20 years of imprisonment for one OxyContin?” “So, she took an oath never to use any drugs or painkillers again.

We see that the arms of the pharmaceutical industry are tightly closing around us: never-ending commercials on television, on the Internet, advertising brochures in hospitals, recommendations from physicians, nutritionists, fitness trainers, etc., the ubiquitous number of pharmacy kiosks and entire supermarkets, craze for examinations, vaccines, vitamins … But we can make our informed choice!

Our body is a perfect self-regulating system. Any disease occurs as a result of a violation of the normal lifestyle. And therefore, before running for a prescription to a doctor or to the nearest pharmacy and poisoning the body with chemical drugs, you should do everything to restore the natural, natural state of your body and a normal lifestyle.