Are you a lobbyist? Do you not realize that these opiades have caused a Reduction in life span? Sure, some people may need them but pushing them to everyone like they did, was that necessary?
The largest meta-study to date found that among long-term opiate pain patients without a prior history of abuse, only 0.19% developed any sort of addiction or abuse.
I do agree with you that many heroin users start with prescription opiates. But the vast majority are not themselves prescribed the drug. Surveys show that they're either getting the drugs from friends or relatives or buying it from the black market.
There's no evidence that doctors are "handing out oxycodone like candy", as demonstrated by the vanishingly small addiction rate among actual pain patients. If a kid raids his grandma's medicine cabinet and steals her pain medicine, how is that an indictment of the doctor or pharmaceutical company?
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18489635 [2] http://sci-hub.tw/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.108...
What did I do with the ones I didn't need, which I was originally sent home with? Sold them or gave them away for recreational use after my recovery was over.
Opiates, in general, were poorly managed for decades. Vicodin just happened to be the most popular product and the producer never bothered to be responsible about the use of it's own medicinal product, despite being in the business of medicine. I'm sure J&J aren't special, as a company that would end up being willfully negligent in the face of a successful pain medication empire, but they were.
When you are encouraging doctors to prescribe oxycotin like it is tylenol, hiding research about the addictiveness and makeing sure its on the formulary of all insurance companies all the while making huge profits; then maybe there is smidge of responsibility to be shared by the corporations.
So far almost every point you've made in this thread can be directly sourced to Purdue propaganda. Doesn't that worry you?
There was "The Letter that Started it all": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-40136881
That caused the VA to say "pain meds aren't addictive if used to treat pain": https://www.va.gov/PAINMANAGEMENT/docs/Pain_As_the_5th_Vital...
Here's the paper that rebuts this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1924634/ (and note this is more than 10 years old)
Here's Purdue Pharma saying, as you are here, that pain meds aren't that addictive and don't we need to use opioids to treat pain (they are addictive, and they don't work for many types of pain): https://www.feinberg.northwestern.edu/sites/ipham/conference...