The state of Massachusetts has filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma LP, the company that developed the semisynthetic opioid OxyContin in 1995 and aggressively marketed it while downplaying the risk of addiction. It’s part of a growing backlash to Purdue, a pharmaceutical giant the New Yorker characterized as an …
On Tuesday, the National Institutes of Health revealed its new plan to tackle the opioid crisis, which it dubbed the Helping to End Addiction Long-term, or HEAL, initiative. Among the ideas presented are research programs devoted to better understanding chronic pain, developing new non-opioid painkillers and addiction…
Walmart has announced that the company will roll out new restrictions on opioid prescriptions this summer at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, and will require e-prescriptions for opioids by the year 2020. The move comes as the opioid epidemic continues to kill more and more Americans every year.
Amidst the worsening opioid crisis—which killed more than 42,000 Americans in 2016 and even shortened US life expectancy—the federal head of public health has come out with a plea to the public: Learn how to use naloxone, the nasal spray that can reverse an opioid overdose, and carry around as much of it as you can.
Who you are is the result of a complicated interplay between your environment, your genes, and probably a few other factors science has yet to uncover. Genetics influence somewhere around half of a person’s “vulnerability to addiction,” according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Now, as opioid addiction has…
Purdue Pharmaceuticals, one of the companies which has made billions of dollars selling massive amounts of opioids across the country even as addiction rates and overdose deaths skyrocketed, has announced it will no longer be directly marketing the painkillers to U.S. doctors.
As doctors and scientists struggle to turn the tide of the opioid crisis, which killed more than 63,000 Americans in 2016, there are others looking further ahead, trying to create a world where addiction can’t take hold in the first place. One such approach, created by a team of scientists in the U.K., is a nasal…
The scale of the opioid crisis gripping the United States is hard to fathom. Since 2000, lethal overdoses from opioid use have tripled, and the problem is so widespread Centers for Disease Control researchers have concluded it is dragging down the national life expectancy. Though President Donald Trump has declared…
The United States has an opioid problem. Heroin overdose deaths rates have tripped since 2010 according to one report—and overall opioid overdose death rates have tripled since 2000. It’s not going away.
On Wednesday, Senator Claire McCaskill released a report on the findings of a congressional investigation into the practices of pharmaceutical company Insys Therapeutics. The jaw-dropping allegations detail the process in which agents systematically convinced insurers to pay for a highly-addictive opioid cancer pain…
From 2000 to 2015, more than 188,000 phone calls were made to US Poison Control Centers on behalf of children who were exposed to prescription opioids, according to new research. That’s an average of 32 calls a day, or one call every 45 minutes.
Chronic pain is one of the hardest ailments to treat. You can keep medicating it forever, but over time people build up a tolerance for painkillers. Many people struggle with chronic pain for years. But today, researchers announced they may have found one way to get rid of at least some types of chronic pain forever.
