Bodies Crushed By Freedom Of The Press - On Hearing A Family Member Has Resumed Using

I really wish I could find someone had gone through the program schedules of the biggest 1980s-2000s talk shows to find out the relationship of such widely pushed ideas like "the epidemic of untreated pain," opioid promotion on tv talk shows, I know I heard it on talk shows during that time, some of it probably on NPR, it's what I was mostly listening to then.   I would imagine that was one of the ways that the Sacklers and their ilk got the country back on even more addictive drugs. 

Purdue Pharma was founded in the late 19th century in New York City, and the firm was purchased in the by the Sackler brothers, three physicians. Some years later, the firm began producing opioid pain relievers.

One of the Sackler brothers, Arthur, who died in 1987, had been inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame for his promotional work in helping Valium to become the first US$100 million drug.

In 1996 Purdue Pharma introduced a new drug – a time-released formulation of oxycodone, an opioid painkiller. OyxContin, as the drug was called, was touted as having a low risk of addiction.

Purdue backed OxyContin with an aggressive marketing campaign. Key components of this effort were pain-management and speaker-training conferences in sunshine states such as California and Florida, attended by more than 5,000 physicians, nurses and pharmacists, many of whom were recruited to serve on Purdue’s speakers' bureau.

The company also used a bonus system to incentivize its pharmaceutical representatives to increase OxyContin sales. The average bonus exceeded the representatives’ annual salaries.

Of course, Purdue was not alone in marketing its pain-relieving products in this way. The Oregon assistant attorney general, for example, described the practices of Insys Therapeutics in marketing its oral spray painkiller as “among the most unconscionable I’ve seen.”

Psychiatry, the Sackler family profession, is a criminal and scientific fraud that was a natural to get into drug pushing.   Talk show hosts and programming directors were some of their biggest suckers. 

Update:  One of the idiots who troll me thinks I made this up.  As if the idiot thinks there's something unusual in 2019 in the United States about having a family member who is addicted to opioids (or alcohol, for that matter).  

It’s not just opioids. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, in 2016 approximately 20.1 million Americans 12 or older had a substance use disorder. About 2.1 million had an opioid use disorder. The biggest group was for alcohol use disorder, with about 15.1 million reporting an alcohol addiction. (A caveat: Since the survey is based on households’ self-reports, these are very likely underestimates.)

But opioids have been the key driver of the recent US increase in drug overdose deaths, from nearly 17,000 overdose deaths in 1999 to more than 64,000 in 2016. We don’t have reliable drug-by-drug data for 2016 yet, but over the previous few years nearly two-thirds of overdose deaths were linked to opioids.

In the United States, in 2019, EVERY major substance abuse problem has a major media component to the problem, in the form of advertising, product placement, media propaganda (note the "honor" given to Arthur Sackler above), etc.  The media are a major venue of promoting addiction.