The
same pharma companies that profited from the opioid epidemic in the
US by hooking patients on their drugs are profiting again as their
victims migrate to heroin and participate in needle exchange
programs, an attorney told RT.
The
opioid epidemic is one of the biggest stories of 2017. The number of
people dying from big pharma’s prescription narcotics has
skyrocketed. But the same pharmaceutical companies that profited from
creating the crisis in the first place, and received a slap on the
wrist for it, are now profiting from it again, attorney Peter Mougey
said in an interview with RT America’s Mike Papantonio.
“The
migration from the prescription opioids to heroin is integral to this
whole problem. At the end of the day, you are 80 times more likely if
you are on heroin to have abused prescription opioids. It’s common
sense. No one starts by wrapping a tourniquet around his arm and
putting a needle into it,” he said.
“But
something I find even more disgusting – I was with my co-counsellor
in West Virginia last week, and we were looking through one of these
needle exchange program packages. It has syringes and cotton balls
and spoons to reduce the Hep-C and HIV. And sure enough, one of the
companies that was selling – their logo was on the inside of the
package – was McKesson. So, McKesson profited from the needle
exchange program – and this is the same company that was charged
with responsibility for controlling the overflow of the opioids into
our communities.”
Interestingly,
the pharma companies were never really punished for the damage they
have done by aggressively pushing addictive drugs on the market,
Mougey said. They successfully settle cases, paying meager sums of
tens of thousands of dollars, and attorney generals (AG) allowed
this, instead of pushing for fines one or two orders of magnitude
higher, which they could have won.
“Well,
‘AG’ in most cases stands for ‘aspiring governor.’ These AGs
run these cases and want turnarounds really quick so they can use a
$25, 30, or 40 million settlement, splash across the headlines, get
their name out there in the press, when most litigation cycles
nowadays unfortunately take five, six, seven years,” he
explained.
“So,
they settle on the cheap, get their mugs in the paper. And at the end
of the day, there have been hardly any depositions taken; there has
been hardly any discovery done, and there is a quick settlement. With
the real damage you could probably add a couple of zeroes onto the
end of these $25 million settlements.”
Mougey
also talked about how the corporate media, which receives advertising
money from big pharma, ignored the unfolding epidemics for a decade,
until its lethality surpassed that of the Vietnam War. And so did
regulators and lawmakers. Watch the full interview to learn the
details.
Source,
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