The marketing strategies of American pharmaceutical companies to sell painkillers based on opiates are at the heart of a controversy in the United States. The State of Ohio has filed a complaint against five labs including the giants Johnson & Johnson and Allergan and the Israeli Teva, specialist in generics, for “fraudulent practices” and “deceptive” marketing intended to sell more of these drugs. Mike De Wine, the Minister of Justice of this state located in the north of the United States, suspects these companies of having deliberately ignored the risks of addiction linked to taking opioid-based painkillers. This strategy of concealment would have encouraged consumers to resort more to these analgesics, causing serious health consequences for the population of this American state.
“These drug producers made believe (…) that the opiates were not addictive, that the addiction was easy to overcome wherever it could be treated by taking even more opiates”, assured in a press release echoed by AFP Mike DeWine, the Minister of Justice of this state in the north of the United States.
Opioid-based painkillers, a plague for the United States
In the United States, taking opioid painkillers is the cause of serious public health crisis : More than 15,000 people died of drug overdose in 2015 according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). For example, in the state of Ohio alone, 1,155 people died in 2015 from an overdose of Fentanyl, a highly addictive opioid pain reliever. A worrying record which has more than doubled in one year.
Fentanyl is a pain reliever considered 50 to 100 times more powerful than morphine and which is the subject of a worrying business in the United States. The almost “trivialization” of this analgesic is wreaking havoc in the United States. In some American states like New England he is responsible for more overdose deaths than heroin.
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