If you visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and go to the north wing called SACKLER WING you will be amazed when contemplating the pieces of art displayed. You will not know that the fortune behind the museum was based on human misery and death.
Nietzsche once wrote that behind every fortune there is always a crime. In this case behind the Sackler‘s fortune the crime is called addiction and the cause is Oxycodone. Many people end up abusing opioid drugs such as oxycodone and heroin after starting off with a legitimate prescription for pain. Oxycodone was marketed in the late 90’s as a pain medication with less than 1% rate of addiction. You Tube has the original commercial with Dr. Alan Spanos MD making such a claim. Now twenty years later we know that this are all lies. PERDUE PHARMA, the makers of Oxycodone, in 2007 paid $600 million when they pleaded guilty of misleading the public about the addiction. Some executives paid a total of $35 million dollars and had to serve 400 hours of community service.
Nothing was done about the patients who suffered as a result of the medication. A study in JAMA Intern Med in 2018 entitled: “Association between US State Medical Cannabis Laws and Opioid Prescribing in the Medicare Part D Population” found that prescriptions filled for all opioids decreased by 2.11 million daily doses per year from an average of 23.08 million daily doses per year when a state instituted any medical cannabis law. Prescriptions for all opioids decreased by 3.742 million daily doses per year when medical cannabis dispensaries opened.
The evidence for cannabis as a safe and proved alternative for opioids use for chronic pain is so overwhelming that the New York State Department of Health announces opioid use to be added as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana.
I see the evidence in my practice every day. Patients addicted to narcotics are able to wean
themselves and eventually stop its use. The proof is in the pudding, I just hope our political
leaders like the pudding.
