A exposé by the Los Angeles Times last year caught my attention. As you may remember, once upon on a time I briefly worked in the pharmaceutical industry — and I couldn't exit it fast enough once I glimpsed how morally bankrupt the sector is. However, this article shows how it's a hell of a lot more predatory than even I realized.
The Los Angeles Times piece was an investigation of Oxycontin and Purdue Pharma’s role in introducing that pill, which is at the very heart of the opioid epidemic. Certainly there are a lot of people in physical and emotional pain who benefit from solutions that provide relief, but they are “assisted” by a pill formulation that is specifically, in a word: Evil.
The basic outline of the story is that Purdue Pharma had a morphine formulation going off patent. They were, shall we say, eager to replace that product with another.
So their research team sought to find a few differentiating characteristics of the expiring formula that they could patent for pain relief. One feature of morphine and other opioid derivatives is that they wear off somewhere between 4-8 hours. So patients have to dose 3x to 4x per day.
Perdue got FDA approval for a time-release formulation on the back of their submitted data that showed a 12-hour efficacy, which required only a 2x daily dosing. This was heralded as a huge improvement in pain management.
The only problem was that despite the 12-hour claim, relief really only lasted for 8 hours.
by lesphelps 
