In the 80's pain was one of the fifth criteria
of wellness - what was your pain level. The
Veteran's Administration at that time started
evaluating pain - you know people in the service,
military. Then Purdue Pharma comes out with
a miracle drug called Oxycontin - it's supposed
to give you 24 hour relief, 1 pill, no addiction.
And the FDA approved it. So we have a pharmaceutical
company - brand name, very well respected,
we have the FDA - the Food and Drug Administration
who's supposed to be looking out for our welfare,
and then we have our doctors prescribing it
at unprecedented amounts because they thought
it was the new miracle drug, if you will.
But before you knew it, we had, the genie
was out of the box. And then it just exploded.
And I believe it became a business model.
I believe there're a lot of people who are
culprits here that basically have responsibility
for what's been done to society, knowing that
they put a product out there that could do
what it has done -
destroyed lives and taken lives.
We've lost 200,000 Americans since 1999 - 200,000.
In the state of West Virginia - 1,800,000
people - I lost 630 people last year. More
people died of legal prescription drug overdoses
than anything else in my state. So this is
an epidemic. And we talk about Zika, we talk
Ebola, we talk about all these things that
we should be very much concerned about, but
we get very few people talking about opiate
addictions.
