Perdue Pharma, the Sackler’s, and why America is inundated with Pills instead of better solutions for your chronic pain.

The opioid crisis,  the opioid crisis, the opioid crisis, how did we get here? With the help of Perdue Pharma, uninformed physicians, corrupted regulators, and an over-reliance on pain relief medication instead of affordable effective options, that’s how.

Everyone tries to avoid pain, Pain medications such as aspirin have been around what seems like forever and are designed to be used in the short term only to provide temporary relief. According to Newsweek, the CDC reported that 11 people died from drug overdoses every hour in the USA during 2020. The problem has been worsening since the 1970’s heroin epidemic.

The Saklers and Perdue Pharma were a symptom of what was wrong with the American healthcare system.

The Sackler’s, through their company Perdue managed to kill half a million Americans according to the NY Times. They manufactured and marketed pain relief products such as Oxycotin. They used and manipulated the healthcare system to make the distribution of this heroin derivative much easier through doctors who had no idea how addictive it was, or that they lobbied regulators to change the verbiage inside the bottle to allow it for long-term usage.  There was no science behind any of this.

Worse, regulators who helped them were rewarded with high-paying jobs as Perdue employees which is unethical and immoral. This was top-down corruption that filtered into the lives of patients who were looking for pain relief.

Now, as the courts try to hand out justice to Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, and others who made an absolute fortune selling this stuff. They also manufactured other pain medications that are harmful and not designed for any long-term usage and even went so far as to purchase a generic drug manufacturer to protect themselves from liability.

Delaying safe and drug-free treatment options causes chronic pain.

Medical treatment methods such as pain management either in the primary care setting or in pain management specialty treatment delayed appropriate treatment for many conditions, resulting in patients with chronic back, knee, shoulder, and many other painful conditions. These studies have been published in respected journals such as BMJ where the evidence behind natural methods and their safety is growing.

On the other hand, professions that are drug-free and are very effective and less costly still do not have full coverage under Medicare preventing many patients from seeing these lower cost and lower risk providers under programs such as Medicaid.  Commercial health insurance now has high deductibles and higher copayments that are incompatible with rehab or chiropractic, yet they will gladly pay the higher costs when small problems develop into preventable big problems.   Prevention is not even part of the discussion.

The Sackler’s were a huge problem, but can we just blame them? Greed was spread around the system using doctors and their prescription pads.  Many had no idea what these medications actually did, or if they would cause their patient to become addicted.

Americans have a pain problem but the problem may have to do more with sensible treatment options being less affordable through high copayments, deductibles, and such than it was ever due to the opioid crisis.

You can help by being part of the solution.

The American Chiropractic Association is working on making sure chiropractic gets fully covered with a new chiropractic modernization act that your legislator can support right now. It takes only a couple of minutes to ask them to support the bill that is currently in Congress and will soon be offered in the senate.  Something has to change.

Sure the Sacklers are evil, but they didn’t do this alone.   It took doctors who still offer pills for pain when the newest protocols advise that patients see chiropractors or therapists first.  They are simply ignoring their own Annals of Internal Medicine guidelines from 2017. Ironically, the recommendations have changed but most doctors have not.

You, as a patient, can make better choices, as it is your life that will be affected.   The right choice avoids addiction, chronicity and helps you find a faster path to a pain-free lifestyle.   The other path results in chronic pain, specialists visits, and procedures that can permanently injure you.

If you are curious about what the Saklers did, check out this NY Times article.   This has also been covered by 60 minutes.  Life is full of choices.  Choose chiropractic first. Request an appointment using this link.

How Did the Sacklers Pull This Off?

By Patrick Radden Keefe July 14, 2021

In 2016, a small-time drug dealer in Leesburg, Va., named Darnell Washington sold a customer a batch of what he thought was heroin. It turned out to be fentanyl. The customer shared it with a friend, and the friend died from an overdose.

To combat the opioid crisis, prosecutors have begun treating overdose deaths not as accidents but as crimes, using tough statutes to charge the dealers who sold the drugs. Mr. Washington had never met the person who overdosed. But, facing a mandatory minimum prison sentence of 20 years for distribution resulting in death, he pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of distribution and is now serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison.

I thought about this the other day when it became clear that members of the billionaire Sackler family will most likely soon receive a sweeping grant of immunity from all litigation relating to their role in helping to precipitate the opioid crisis. Through their control of Purdue Pharma, the families of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler made a vast fortune selling OxyContin, a powerful prescription opioid painkiller that, like fentanyl, is a chemical cousin of heroin.

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