Fanning the Flames of the Opioid Epidemic
The Opioid epidemic has been a growing problem in America claiming nearly 500,000 lives and with increasing overdoses, each year Big Pharma and more specifically the Sackler family have come under fire. In an article written by Sean O’ Hagan, he discusses how the Sackler family built their fortune on the profits made from Purdue Pharma due to its aggressive marketing of OxyContin. This opioid had been prescribed by many doctors in extremely high doses creating an opioid dependency among many of those individuals who have prescribed it (Sean O’Hagan, 2022). While doctors are pushing intense opioid prescriptions the addictive aspect of opioids is fanning the flames of the opioid epidemic. In the study, Opioid-induced rewards, locomotion, and dopamine activation: A proposed model for control by mesopontine and rostromedial tegmental neurons (Steidl et al,2017), an investigation had been conducted to look at how opioid drugs recrui...