Last week the Senate passed sweeping legislation to address the opioid epidemic, which President Trump says he will sign into law. The bill, known as the Substance Use Disorder Prevention That Promotes Opioid Recovery and Treatment for Patients and Communities (SUPPORT) Act, tackles prevention, treatment, and recovery as well as enforcement.
However, the legislation can’t fix the one thing that is driving the health crisis: greed.
Five New York doctors were charged Thursday with running illegal prescription drug mills that flooded the state with more than 8.5 million oxycodone pills.
The opioid pills resulted in the deaths of several people and multiple overdoses, according to Manhattan federal prosecutors.
“Anderson often saw those purported patients, some of whom displayed visible signs of drug addiction, without appointments, in the middle of the night — sometimes at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning — and required that they pay hundreds of dollars in cash for each prescription,” court papers say.
In my opinion, we should throw the book at these doctors and others who exploit and profit off the misery of addicts and would-be addicts. Instead, we criminalize addiction and let these docs run their profitable pill mills. Yes, the doctors (some of them at least) have been charged but why did it take so long to catch them?
How many people have to die or become unneccesarily addicted to potent pain pills for our country to recognize the real problem and then do something about it?