Audio Transcript Auto-generated
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Yeah.
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Hello today I'm going to be talking about the opioid crisis in the
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United States and how it's affected millions of people throughout the country.
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And so the opioid crisis all started with the Sackler
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family who owns this company um this company called Purdue pharma
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and they started producing oxyCODONE.
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It's just a really powerful opioid and it basically um
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numbs any pain from like physical pain to like emotional pain
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and the way they market it was that they said that
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um the OxyContin would be released gradually.
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So it had like this time releasing coding within it.
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And um they also marketed it as like a non addictive drug
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and
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since it wouldn't make you high like right off the bat super quickly
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they said that it was non addictive
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and um
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people got really hooked onto the drug
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because of that. And there was no testing
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or like qualifications that it
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went through
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um
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to be like
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valid I guess
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hold on.
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And since this drug is super addictive since um 99 9 roughly
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like 500,000 people in the US have died from opioid overdoses overdoses.
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And um
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as well as that since opioids are really expensive
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to get and you get a prescription for them,
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80% of their users turned to heroin as an alternative when they couldn't
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receive the opioids.
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And um
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for a drug like
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OxyContin you need
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um like there needs to be like an FDA like approval for it since it's so powerful
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and um
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in the packaging label they put
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That it was non addictive and that there was a statistic
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statistic that like 99% of the users did not get addicted.
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And so um the person who was behind putting
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they're like approving this like labeled prescription which
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was not true at all was curtiss wright.
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And he worked for the FDA obviously so he was able
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to get it approved and then a year like roughly,
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about a year later
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he left and started working for Purdue pharma
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um the cyclers company
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and um
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they started coming out with different milligrams like
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10 mg and then if you were still feeling pain you keep up your doses by like 20 mg.
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And um then they started this program called individualized the dose.
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And so basically like
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right off the bat you could receive about like
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50 mg of like
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um ox cotton.
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And so they just kept selling more and more to these
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people and then along with that they had pill mills,
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so pill mills were basically like in the mid
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nineties these like corrupt doctors would basically just like
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start prescribing pain meds and all you had to do was like go in there like pay X.
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Amount of money um to get this prescription and since there's
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like the doctor patient confidentiality it was like really hard um
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to kind of like crack down on it I guess. And
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um
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also once people started realizing that it was super super powerful
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and had like heavy effects on people that was super addictive
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um pharmacies like wanted to stop selling it and it also just
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caused all the crime because when people couldn't receive it there's just
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like a lot of crime people would steal it from other people's
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like street um like they would get it from the streets,
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pharmacies would get broken into
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and um
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I think today that the U. S. Government isn't doing enough to solve this issue
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and um
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they do have methadone clinics but basically with those arms like it helps
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you wean off an opioid because it's like nearly like impossible to get off
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one because it's so addictive so they try to help you wean off it
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by giving you like other smaller doses and like eventually you'll get off it
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but it's still just like a huge issue
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and um
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there's also in the US FDA there's a very negative connotation that comes with like
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being an addict and people see it as like
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a really negative thing and people see them as
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like a criminal if you're like a drug addict but in reality it's more of like a disease
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and that like you need to overcome. So I feel like the U. S.
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Needs to do a better job of like changing their attitude
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about that and people that are still going to like methadone clinics
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um
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I still have like hard find like a hard time finding
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a job because they're still technically like on the drug.
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So
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I think it's just important to acknowledge that
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the perspective on drug actions change. Like it's not necessarily like
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criminals
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always using the drugs. That makes sense.
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Really bad, but it's just a draft draft draft. Thank you.