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Last time you made this claim, someone DID bring up the point that the overdoses vastly accelerated with the crackdown on Oxycontin, more than its introduction.
Sneering isn't much of an argument either. Many of the legalize-all-drugs people would object to a drugmaker claiming an addictive drug is non-addictive.
No, they didn't.
Ok, let's not sneer. Let's be straight. There is no such thing as a coefficient of addictiveness. There is no such line in the parameter space of coefficients of addictiveness with which to draw a distinction between "addictive" and "non-addictive". It's entirely about them being all, "It's less addictive," other people not liking that, and the lawyers/courts doing what you always expect them to do: beat up on somebody that they don't like, based on extremely squishy, subjective shit, like what you always complain about constantly. Moreover, please find the pro-legalization folks who have some sort of plan for how their new world is going to manage this issue. How they're going to draw lines, require certain types of disclosures, and police squishy statements about various products. Oh, and how strict their regulatory regime (that I'm sure you'll love) will be when it comes to exhaustive testing of unfindable coefficients of addictiveness for every minor drug variant that any producer wants to put on the market.
No, that's all bullshit. The reality is that someone outside of the Overton Window, like we have plenty of here, should at least be able to stand up and say, "We can debate how disclosure should work and whether the Sacklers screwed up there, but we absolutely cannot blame them for the opioid crisis, because they're the only people who are doing the very thing that we want to happen in order to help the opioid crisis." The italicized part is important. Somebody, even one, should be up yelling that the fundamental project of the Sackler Family is Good (TM), and that we shouldn't lose sight of that, and that we definitely shouldn't be blaming them for the opioid crisis.
The closest you're going to get is that pharma companies are fundamentally in the business of solving their patients' pain issues (the "doing good" part), that the opiod overdose crisis is unrelated to this, and that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. In short, Richard Lawhern is arguing that we have an overdose crisis A. because synthetic opioids that became pervasive in street drugs during the 2010s have a very low margin for user error and B. we have too many people suffering from something akin to shit life syndrome.
Perhaps a good sanity check would be to check on non-opioid problems with addiction. Say what you want about the Sacklers, but they aren't in the food and beverage industry, and thus can't plausibly be blamed for the rise in alcohol deaths or 10% of Americans being morbidly obese.
I don't want to live in a world with more pillheads, think that full libertarian wet dream drug legalization would be a disaster (It would almost certainly lower the death rate among active drug users, but you'd almost certainly get a lot more users, as happened with Marijuana legalization.), and even accept that crucifying the Sacklers may be a societally necessary action, but I'm not convinced that Oxycontin in particular is what broke everything.
I'm also not on the train that Oxy in particular broke everything, FYI. I'm just wanting to find someone who is willing to go the step further, using the axioms of the drug legalization movement, to come out and say that it doesn't actually matter whether the pharma companies parrot the line that they're just trying to solve patients' pain issues. That it's nice, but also unimportant that overdose deaths aren't correlated with prescription rates. What's important is that they get pharmaceutical drugs into the streets, as many as possible. Because that allows users to carefully and scrupulously use drugs in the way that they prefer, knowing exactly what they'll get, and which is definitely not dangerous to their life or their lifestyle (and like, probably won't increase usage or something).
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Sorry about that, I did see that claim, but it was over at Data Secrets Lox, based on (unsurprisingly) a Cato Institute analysis
You're still sneering. Anyway, there are certainly plenty of legalization proponents who would want more regulation than me.
The italicized part is not, in fact, true. The Sacklers did not invent pharmaceutical-grade opiates, and they certainly were never the only producer.
Fair enough. They should be able to stand up and say, "We can debate how disclosure should work and whether the Sacklers screwed up there, but we absolutely cannot blame them for the opioid crisis, because they're some of the extremely few people who are doing the very thing that we want to happen in order to help the opioid crisis."
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