------- Since the 1990s, doctors have been under more and more pressure to treat pain as a serious medical issue. Pharmaceutical companies took advantage of this desire, marketing opioid painkillers like OxyContin and Vicodin as a safe, effective solution to pain. ------

privatised health care and the profit incentive to prescribe high cost pain kills. I believe the Drs get a kickback from the companies for pushing a particular brand (could be wrong on that though).

Also, who put the pressure on the Drs to treat pain as such? Politicians? Why would they? I imagine leant on (or the term is "lobbied" by big pharma. Would be interesting to see the "donations"* paid to politicans from big pharma right around that time and who profited from this.

* I always find this funny who we in the west call this "donations" but when reporting on third world countries it is termed a "bribed". Paying money to get what you want from government so you can make more money....

> I always find this funny who we in the west call this "donations" but when reporting on third world countries it is termed a "bribed".

Well, if resolving the hypocrisy would mean calling our bribes by "donations", please, let it unresolved.

We at third world countries gain a lot from your transparent accounting of what happens here.

(it's probably even useful to speak of legal campaign contributions, because then when illegal bribes happen, they still get attention)

I don't have evidence of this, but I expect the patients. People don't like pain, and they want a silver bullet to make it stop.

no one gets rich from preventing the causes of pain, though of course the country would save money and less people would die

I highly doubt the acetaminophen in vicodin is to limit abuse. Some of the pills I've seen are 750/5mg. Even a moderate addiction of 100mg a could easily kill you at that rate (that's 15g of acetaminophen). Though if you had no choice, a simple cold water extraction will eliminate enough of the acetaminophen to make it safe.

While not quite as evil as all the deaths and stripping of civil liberties the "drug war" has caused, this is a pretty obviously wicked thing to do (while still ineffective).

I would submit to you that deliberate contamination of a drug for the sole purpose of inflicting harm in search of a greater good is an outrageous policy.

Adding risk (whether it's the risk of liver failure or prison time) to addiction behaviors doesn't do a damn thing, because addiction is a disease that fundamentally destroys our ability to make rational cost-benefit decisions when our drug or behavior of choice is concerned.