- Every day, about 50 Americans die from prescription painkiller overdoses.
- Its not crack weed cocaine or any of the inner city drug. This drug to the people of power in America is more dangerous cause,It effects the people that looks just like them and work right beside them. They got a dilemma keep making all that money from prescription pills or find another way to fight the war on Opioids
- Recent statistics from the National Institute of Drug Abuse show that 1 out of 15 people who take prescription painkillers for recreational use will try heroin within 10 years. And this problem is growing - in 2004, 1.4 million people abused or were dependent on pain medications and 5 percent used heroin. By 2010, 1.9 million people abused or were dependent on pain medications and 14 precent used heroin.
- The first drug to ever reach $1 billion in sales, Valium, was introduced in 1963. The drug’s manufacturer was one of the first to use an aggressive marketing and advertising campaign to launch a drug, something that is commonplace today. Researchers estimate Americans took more than two billion pills of the depressant in 1978, but its numbers decreased to 14.8 million in 2012, according to the Wall Street Journal.
- The next revolutionary depressant to hit the U.S. was Xanax, introduced in 1981. Its manufacturer was the first to market a drug to treat panic attacks in addition to anxiety. It is still the most popular psychiatric drug today, according to Forbes.
- The first antidepressants hit the market in the 1950s, but they came with serious side effects. Prozac was the first selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), which targets just one brain chemical instead of many. When the FDA approved Prozac in 1988, doctors prescribed it for 2.4 million people. That number grew to 33 million in 2002, and antidepressants were the third-most prescribed drug in the U.S. by 2008, according to the New York Times.
- A large increase in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses during the last decade led to an increase in the prescription and availability of stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall. According to the CDC, doctors diagnose 6.4 million children ages 4-17 with ADHD at some point in their lives, an increase of 41 percent from the last decade
Americans spent a staggering $200 billion a year on prescription drugs, and that figure is growing at a rate of about 12 percent the year 2012
US giant Pfizer, the world's largest drug company by pharmaceutical revenue, made an eye-watering 42% profit margin in 2012 and increased almost every year from then.
Big pharma companies say they only have a limited time in which to make profits. Patents are generally awarded for 20 years, but 10-12 of those are typically spent developing the drug at a cost of about $1.5bn-$2.5bn.
This leaves eight to 10 years to make money before the formula can be taken up by generic drug companies, which sell the medicines for a fraction of the price.
The government has long singled out the pharmaceutical industry for premium patent protections while leaving drug pricing up to the whims of the market, and consumers in the United States now pay some of the highest prices in the world for many life-saving drugs. Recent reports show that critical cancer medicines, for example, cost as much as 600 times more in the United States than other countries. The industry has a clear interest in maintaining the political status quo.
Pharmaceutical and health product companies injected $51 million into the 2012 federal elections and nearly $32 million into the 2014 elections, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
(CRP). The industry has already spent way over $10 million on the 2016 elections
Industry giant Pfizer was the top spender among drug companies during the 2014 elections with $1.5 million in federal campaign contributions, followed closely by Amgen with $1.3 million and McKesson Corp with $1.1 million. All three companies spent more on Republicans than Democrats year.
One million dollars plus is a lot of money, but it pales in comparison to the annual salaries of the CEOs at some of these companies. Pfizer CEO Ian Read, for example, raked in more than $23 million in 2014, and Amgen CEO Robert Bradway made a cool $14 million, according to the industry publication FiercePharma.
From 1998 to 2014, Big Pharma spent nearly $2.9 billion on lobbying expenses
The U.S. is one of only two countries in the world whose governments allow prescription drugs to be advertised on TV (the other is New Zealand).. A single manufacturer, Boehringer Ingelheim, spent $464 million advertising its blood thinner Pradaxa in 2011. The following year, the drug passed the $1 billion sales mark
Big Pharma also has a track record of hiring former government workers with valuable connections to gain political clout. The trade group PhRMA has more than 50 current or former staff members who once served in the political arena, including:
- 36 who worked for a member of Congress
- 13 who worked for a federal agency
- 12 who worked for a congressional committee
- Two who worked for the White House
- One who worked in the courts system
U.S. law allows drug companies to set the prices for drugs and protects them from free-market competition. Other countries set a limit on what companies can charge based on the benefit of the drug
According to a 2013 Forbes comparison of profit margins in the five primary industrial sectors, pharmaceuticals tied with banks for the highest average profit margin at 19%. This was well ahead of the average profit margin for media stocks, oil & gas companies, and automakers, which produced mid-single-digit profit margins (automakers) to low double-digit profit margins (media).
Of the 21.5 million Americans 12 or older that had a substance use disorder in 2014, 1.9
million had a substance use disorder involving prescription pain relievers and 586,000 had
a substance use disorder involving heroin
Drug overdose is the leading cause of accidental death in the US, with 47,055 lethal drug
overdoses in 2014. Opioid addiction is driving this epidemic, with 18,893 overdose deaths
related to prescription pain relievers, and 10,574 overdose deaths related to heroin in
2014.5
From 1999 to 2008, overdose death rates, sales and substance use disorder treatment
admissions related to prescription pain relievers increased in parallel.
The overdose death
rate in 2008 was nearly four times the 1999 rate; sales of prescription pain relievers in
In 2012, 259 million prescriptions were written for opioids, which is more than enough to
give every American adult their own bottle of pills
Four in five new heroin users started out misusing prescription painkillers.
94% of respondents in a 2014 survey of people in treatment for opioid addiction said they
chose to use heroin because prescription opioids were “far more expensive and harder to
obtain
- Opioids, like Oxycontin, affect the same receptors targeted by heroin.
- Prescription depressants (tranquilizers), like Valium, produce effects similar to GHB and rohypnol (also known as Rufilin).
- Stimulants, like Ritalin, act on the same neurotransmitter systems as cocaine.
- Dextromethorphan, the ingredient in many cough medicines, acts on the same cell receptors as PCP and ketamine.
- Nearly 20 percent of those surveyed received their drugs through a prescription from one doctor. Another 10.9 percent bought them from a friend or relative. In addition, 4 percent of respondents took pain relievers from a friend or relative without asking. Many abusers or addicts may also 'doctor shop' - visiting several physicians to gain access to multiple prescriptions at the same time.
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