Martha Rosenberg – What Big Pharma Does Not Want You to Know About the Opioid Epidemic

The prescription opioid epidemic is not new. It began when Pharma rolled out and aggressively marketed time-released opioids like Oxycontin, driving “pill mills” that distributed as many as 9 million [3] Oxys in a six-month span. What is new is the media finally calling Pharma out on the many cagey ways it got people hooked on opioids and heroin (and continues to do so), how …

Joseph Mercola – Anxiety Drug Overdoses in U.S. Hit Record Levels

Prescription drug overdoses have become alarmingly common in the U.S., with opioid painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycontin, among the drugs most frequently making headlines. New research shows another class of drugs — benzodiazepines or “benzos” — is rising in the ranks of overdose deaths, however.1 Prescriptions for such drugs, which include brand names Valium, Ativan and Xanax, tripled from …

Martha Rosenberg -The FDA Now Officially Belongs to Big Pharma

It is hard to believe only four senators [3] opposed the confirmation of Robert Califf, who was approved today as the next FDA commissioner. Vocal opponent Bernie Sanders [4] condemned the vote from the campaign trail. But where was Dick Durbin? Where were all the lawmakers who say they care about industry and Wall Street profiteers making money at the expense of public health? Califf, chancellor of …

‘US drug industry, doctors contribute to overdose deaths’

“Many doctors overprescribe painkillers because they have relationships with pharmaceutical companies and they get pay offs,” said James Petras, a professor emeritus of sociology atBinghamton University in Binghamton, New York, and adjunct professor at Saint Mary’s Universityin Halifax, Nova Scotia in Canada. The US pharmaceutical and health industry as well as economic distress are largely responsible for the surge in drug overdose deaths across the country, an …

Mike Mariani – How the American opiate epidemic was started by one pharmaceutical company

The state of Kentucky may finally get its deliverance. After more than seven years of battling the evasive legal tactics of Purdue Pharma, 2015 may be the year that Kentucky and its attorney general, Jack Conway, are able to move forward with a civil lawsuit alleging that the drugmaker misled doctors and patients about their blockbuster pain pill OxyContin, leading …

Josh Mur – The FDA Just Approved OxyContin to Be Prescribed to Children

The infamously untrustworthy Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has furthered its reputation as one of America’s most beloved hypocrites with its latest motion. It was reported on Thursday that the FDA has just approved OxyContin prescriptions for children between the ages of 11 and 16 years-old. For those unfamiliar, OxyContin is an opiate-based pharmaceutical painkiller used to ease severe pain. …

Report: Number of US heroin users rose 300,000 over a decade By Mike Stobbe

Experts think the increase was driven by people switching from opioid painkillers to cheaper heroin. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the report Tuesday. It’s based on annual face-to-face surveys of about 67,000 Americans—the government’s main source of data on use of illegal drugs. In recent surveys, nearly 3 in every 1,000 Americans said they used heroin in …

VA turns U.S. military vets into suicidal drug addicts while Big Pharma rakes in profits by J. D. Heyes

A year ago, as the summer of 2013 dawned, the Obama Administration was hit with yet another scandal, one that would resonate with Democrat and Republican voters: VA Hospitals around the country were falsifying appointment records in order to satisfy treatment quotas, leaving scores of veterans without care which led to the deaths of perhaps 1,000 men and women who had honorably served their …