Mad Dog has not investigated the role the Sackler family played in marketing Oxycontin as a safe, non addicting opioid, which clearly, as time made clear, it was not.
But there is a reason Mad Dog has not bothered reading the court transcripts or much of the available content in the New York Times or elsewhere: Mad Dog is intimately and extensively familiar with drug marketing.
What is nowhere mentioned in any report about Oxycontin that Mad Dog has seen is the fact that most drugs are approved by the FDA and sent to market with precious little really known about their eventual risks. Eighteen month studies of eighteen hundred patients is not unusual.
Every practicing physician knows, or should know, there is a reason why drug companies are required to provide post release approval data on the safety and efficacy of the drugs they market: everyone in the game--apart from the patients--knows how little we know about any drug until 500,000 patients have taken it for at least 10 years.
In the case of DES (diethyl stilbesterol) a hormone used to prevent pregnancy loss, it wasn't until the daughters of the mothers taking it reached age 15 that the high incidence of vaginal carcinoma in the offspring, in the females who were receiving the medication in utero, became evident.
I remember, twenty years ago, when a physician, a family friend, employed by a drug company, told us over dinner how excited he was about this new drug the company he was working on. It was Oxycontin. He was working with a neurologist I knew well and respected immensely, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, and she was thrilled with this drug. She headed the pain center at MSK and she was happy to have that drug, he said.
I never called her to ask. Pain medicine was not much on my radar then.
But what this memory suggests is that at some point, at least early on, the people working with Oxycontin were true believers. What they knew later is another matter.
Of course, the whole structure of science and medicine is designed to test the hypothesis--and eventually, with enough data and study, the addictive potential of Oxycontin became evident.
Now enter the worlds of journalism, politically viable prosecutors, tort law, money and politics and the Sackler family becomes the prototype of the evil family making billions enslaving an unwitting population on this opioid.
You've got David Simon, (of all people!) tweeting the Sacklers should be brought to a public square and guillotined!
And this is the guy who brought you "The Wire"! The Wire, that wonderful, detailed exploration of the effects of drug addiction, the "drug fiends" of Baltimore. The Wire, which was unblinking in its portrayal of people Simon knew when he was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
The addicts themselves, blame nobody but themselves. They do not vilify the drug pushers, the touts, the corner boys or the drug lords. They know the problem is within themselves, to some extent, and their struggle is to face up to that. Temptation will always be out there in some form, whether it's heroin, alcohol or Oxycontin or Fentanyl.
Of course, David Simon, wonderful as "The Wire" and "Homicide" and "The Corner" were, is not the man I imagined, as is evident on his Twitter feed. But I expected better with respect to this story.
In the case of most drugs, big pharma is faceless, just corporate headquarters and coroporate boards--there is no one image to focus upon.
But America needs villains, scape goats and the rich, Jewish Sacklers fill that role admirably. We can hate them for their wealth, for their Jewish origins. Oh, they fill the bill.
Nowhere in here is any effort to examine the way Big Pharma advertises to the American public, i.e. "markets" its drugs, or the profits to TV stations from all that marketing.
In a corrupt society, there is no such thing as "clean money." The very media networks which are thundering on self righteously about the hideous, predatory Sacklers are themselves raking in millions from the Big Pharma accounts running drug ads on every network from Fox to CNN to CBS.
It's just so much easier to make this into a reality TV show with great villains and not think about it.
But there is a reason Mad Dog has not bothered reading the court transcripts or much of the available content in the New York Times or elsewhere: Mad Dog is intimately and extensively familiar with drug marketing.
What is nowhere mentioned in any report about Oxycontin that Mad Dog has seen is the fact that most drugs are approved by the FDA and sent to market with precious little really known about their eventual risks. Eighteen month studies of eighteen hundred patients is not unusual.
Every practicing physician knows, or should know, there is a reason why drug companies are required to provide post release approval data on the safety and efficacy of the drugs they market: everyone in the game--apart from the patients--knows how little we know about any drug until 500,000 patients have taken it for at least 10 years.
In the case of DES (diethyl stilbesterol) a hormone used to prevent pregnancy loss, it wasn't until the daughters of the mothers taking it reached age 15 that the high incidence of vaginal carcinoma in the offspring, in the females who were receiving the medication in utero, became evident.
I remember, twenty years ago, when a physician, a family friend, employed by a drug company, told us over dinner how excited he was about this new drug the company he was working on. It was Oxycontin. He was working with a neurologist I knew well and respected immensely, at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital for Cancer and Allied Diseases, and she was thrilled with this drug. She headed the pain center at MSK and she was happy to have that drug, he said.
I never called her to ask. Pain medicine was not much on my radar then.
But what this memory suggests is that at some point, at least early on, the people working with Oxycontin were true believers. What they knew later is another matter.
Of course, the whole structure of science and medicine is designed to test the hypothesis--and eventually, with enough data and study, the addictive potential of Oxycontin became evident.
Now enter the worlds of journalism, politically viable prosecutors, tort law, money and politics and the Sackler family becomes the prototype of the evil family making billions enslaving an unwitting population on this opioid.
You've got David Simon, (of all people!) tweeting the Sacklers should be brought to a public square and guillotined!
And this is the guy who brought you "The Wire"! The Wire, that wonderful, detailed exploration of the effects of drug addiction, the "drug fiends" of Baltimore. The Wire, which was unblinking in its portrayal of people Simon knew when he was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun.
The addicts themselves, blame nobody but themselves. They do not vilify the drug pushers, the touts, the corner boys or the drug lords. They know the problem is within themselves, to some extent, and their struggle is to face up to that. Temptation will always be out there in some form, whether it's heroin, alcohol or Oxycontin or Fentanyl.
Of course, David Simon, wonderful as "The Wire" and "Homicide" and "The Corner" were, is not the man I imagined, as is evident on his Twitter feed. But I expected better with respect to this story.
In the case of most drugs, big pharma is faceless, just corporate headquarters and coroporate boards--there is no one image to focus upon.
But America needs villains, scape goats and the rich, Jewish Sacklers fill that role admirably. We can hate them for their wealth, for their Jewish origins. Oh, they fill the bill.
Nowhere in here is any effort to examine the way Big Pharma advertises to the American public, i.e. "markets" its drugs, or the profits to TV stations from all that marketing.
In a corrupt society, there is no such thing as "clean money." The very media networks which are thundering on self righteously about the hideous, predatory Sacklers are themselves raking in millions from the Big Pharma accounts running drug ads on every network from Fox to CNN to CBS.
It's just so much easier to make this into a reality TV show with great villains and not think about it.
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