The protest against a prescription painkiller that triggered a wave of addiction in the usa oxycontin. Its a synthetic opiate with an effect similar to heroin which has been prescribed to millions of americans. That. The protestors were calling out greed for profit in the past 5 years alone almost 200000 people have died from overdoses related to prescription opioids. Patients can become addicted to painkillers like oxycontin in just one month when swallowed the pills active ingredient is released gradually but when chewed crushed inhaled injected or abused they can cause respiratory arrest. Sed. On again i. Managed to. Have gang. Oxycontin was the drug that helped the sackler brothers arthur mordor mar and raymond expand their company produce pharma and to a pharmaceutical empire. The cyclers are often thought of as art patrons like here in new Yorks Metropolitan Museum they made generous donations to promote culture worldwide from montreal to copenhagen paris berlin and london. Their Company Purdue Pharma made over 35000000000. 00 in sales with the painkiller oxycontin alone by the end of the 1990 s. The drug had become a household name due to aggressive marketing and false claims regarding the risk of addiction. 20 years on 1900000 americans are opioid addicks and more deaths are caused by overdose than by road accidents the epidemic is also due to authorities shortcomings. West virginia has the state with the highest of Drug Overdose rate in the us this is the epicenter of the Opioid Crisis and. It was a good chips at any drug really cold whatsoever so for. The good but uncommon. On average throughout the course of a year in one of 8 cases for cases there are several addresses in town that weve been to over and over the hospital remember me personally it was a look around the same guy same house 11 cops. Cars with gas in a Grocery Store faster. The strongest people go on the draw for lying are a strong warning and root on the order of their food tonight to pick up one to. Pass out. Without a public bathrooms for both playgrounds weve had an intersections of traffic. Still in traffic lanes people just all of the song was going on for a pass out on the wilbur car and i hit my kids in child seats in the back of the car. Been very poorly kept homes middle class homes were mansion its straight up everywhere i didnt care if youre a businessman a schoolteacher a lawyer. They said hey theres doctors but pharmacies out there were going to shut those down but nothing was done for them to get more to use the people who are addicted or still addicted so the drug dealers they moved in here we are. From the outset rural West Virginia was a major target for the oxy cotton campaign. The many minors there not only suffered frequent accidents but also chronic joint pain making them find targets for marketing the painkiller too. In a region impoverished by the mining crisis there was also a lack of medical care this made West Virginia particularly attractive for the painkiller industry pills were welcomed in this area where few therapeutic alternatives are available. At the same time the euphoric effect of oxy cotton helped numb the rampant depression among the many unemployed the Prescription Drug became known as hillbilly heroin. And numerous people have become unemployed through addiction like former nurse Jennifer Walker she is one of the victims of the producer Marketing Campaign her addiction led her to a life of crime and she ended up in jail she was released 6 months ago and is currently undergoing withdrawal therapy. I knew my i was involved in everything in school i was every t. Ball game i was my next really you know its like i had 2 labs i started once with archer and they started prescribing me i think yes i did a piece where i stored it sail and im not trying to justify that for any reason whatsoever but you know here theres not a lot of jobs there are scarce there for you and for in between so you have to do what you have to do in order to provide for your. The very 1st time i once was oxer thats out of my life sorry and they were at least out for pretty much no take nothing no questions asked so was i went back and well theyre much help and theres good news was they were coerced and the more you know month or 2 later on help would be worse and making me more. And it was like and all my prescriptions were down the talkers werent even there nurses was handing them out. Everythings already printed before you get there and then i had to search on my 2nd one and he continued to write me pain pills so that was an excuse i mean every month for years. Little small town pharmacy for the basic i paid cash for my minutes therefore there was nothing to run for ever how they do it in a pharmacy you never in your insurance see what youve got or they know your finances day and night and a lot of its not quick. And he knew what i was doing im in. About 5 point fields is what im 3 different counts i was brimming over im around 8 else hours in my class. But since the doctors cut way back right para one as for them being in me and it felt like 13. 00 to make a batch of me. I have lost a lot of my friends and a birthday packet me this year and give you the number 5060 and you never get used to it. He was a really close friend. To have bringing you more so. If they had got for me they would read it from somewhere else if i had packed it gave it to me it would be out wrong but its still reckless in life so. I want to blame it on. Our own journal realizing you know what this person selling their shit what how are they getting these bills. Water theyve been used pills to make them so if they. Were her and ourselves were going to prison for it our lives are being taken our freedoms we are taking and then right learning. Oxycontin was sold over the counter of larrys drive in pharmacy in madison like fast food 10000000 times in 11 years in a town with under 3000 inhabitants. In the past few years u. S. Law enforcement has closed hundreds of the socalled pill mills pharmacists who fail to report suspicious prescriptions to authorities have lost their licenses doctors have had to pay heavy fines and been given jail sentences for over prescribing opioids. One major party responsible for convincing doctors to prescribe opiates not only to cancer and palliative patients or following major surgery was purdue the company sent this pseudoscientific video message to more than 150000 practices. Theres no question the best strongest pain medicines are the opioids but these are the same drugs that have a reputation for causing addiction and other terrible things. In fact the rate of addiction amongst pain patients who are treated by doctors is much less than one percent. They dont wear out they go on working they do not have serious medical side effects and so these drugs which i repeat their strongest buy in my location should be used much more than the. Marketing lies like that have made americans today feel outraged purdue and the Sackler Family. Who have lost. There was already a federal investigation of the pill manufacturer some 15 years ago. Back in 2007 the company its executive board and its owner the Sackler Family faced charges of misleading doctors and patients about the drugs. But their lawyers among member dr leon e. The former mayor of new york had good contacts to the department of justice. In a move to keep the name produced pharma the oxycontin manufacturer and the sac lawyers out of the picture produce frederick and 3 Board Members guilty to misbranding the drug. They were given a total of 634500000. 00 in fines but no prison sentence. It was a clever move by producer. Around this time carol canara began working as a Sales Representative for perdue. They basically were willing. That around the Company Per Day of. Their building the government through medicare. Through the department of. To the last thing and i dont think the producers necessarily stop their deceptive Marketing Tactics they were directing them did everything with. Serious if they were following what they need to do but underneath all that. It was still business as usual and then you come up with an. Addiction. Which is. Not based on any kind of scientific information. Pseudo addiction was a term produced pharma introduced after doctors had begun flagging more and more patients with addiction to produce said it was caused by too little oxycontin their advice to doctors was to increase the dosage. And i think now in retrospect looking at that whole idea your incentive to create added over time were going to become tolerant. To that to sing strength and theyre going to need a higher dose and strain so from the companys perspective youre creating a nice market for yourself. Prescription happy doctors were given an all expenses paid trips and invited to speakers receiving fees of up to 2000. 00 per session produce Innovative Marketing strategy relied on the doctors credibility. Ive had situations where ive had doctors in my territory say to me because they know what the deal is as far as getting. Compensated for so for speaking if you need any speakers id be interested so the way we were trained to handle that was to say to the doctor. That you know the speakers that they are the people that they were selecting for speakers were people who generally had more experience with our product. That was a polite legal way of saying you need to prescribe more the implication is if you prescribe more then i think maybe i can hook you up so these are some of the bone statements or what they call a sales incentives im looking at a quarter 125000. 00 thats just in one quarter in one territory over 7000. 00 prescriptions and just in my territory the greatest growth i had was in the 60 milligrams which would make sense because the whole thing of titrating the patient and training them because of pseudo addiction that type of thing would make would make sense that you know that people with patients would end up in that in those higher dosing. That produce aggressive Marketing Campaign went unnoticed by the press even the Drug Enforcement administration the da hardly took note. Time and again former d. A. Investigator jim geldof was thwarted by top officials in his investigation into Purdue Purdue new for your early on the drug was being abused by crushing it and then either injecting your story in the auction then actually the sale of their drug became its own economy so if you had an eating all right and bill was worth a 100. 00 to 120. 00 on the street. It was a fundamental we hadnt seen before the diversion was so massive dont know where youre really going to attack it has with the distributors and manufacturers thats why finally d. E. A. s initiated to distribute our initiative but whatever we did it was never good enough and we chris couldnt achieve counts and move on the case they were always want somebody else interviewed volume was and often even though with the volume was off the charts they want us to be specific as to what order was suspicious this was the one i really i couldnt believe i said to the chief counsel tourney they ship you know 5000000 pills to this particular pharmacy and you want me to tell you which one is the suspicious one i mean theyre all suspicious and. They did not want to take these cases and we saw more and more d. E. F. Tourneys moving into the area defending the Drug Companies we also saw a lot of d. N. A. Infest the gators moving in to work for Drug Industries attorneys that worked also not just with the a but the partner of just those that knew of a system or they knew the standards that were using so these are people that theyve worked where they knew any kind of weak points there might be in a lot of the regulations. The American Public will never know what really the pharmaceutical industry did to people didnt have to buy their oil and you know im just im sorry that case went the way it did and. There is currently an entire generation in the us growing up apart from their parents because their parents are addicts custody hearings like this one happen daily and West Virginia as well as in most us states. This hearing concerns the fate of 3 children of an addict on withdrawal they have been living with foster families since his wife died of an overdose. Off. Actually some. More of. The scary part of that. Bothered. Despite hearing they dont. They simply of. Course. Part. Of. The normal my kids are experiencing is for kids not to be raised by their parents shocking thats not shocking and its very very difficult the 5 relatives for the children to be placed with its now fairly common for the grandparents the best fosters for drugs themselves i had a case here where the grandfather was selling drugs to his grandson so fairly common to see 3 generations on with Substance Abuse addiction in a family and the conditions of these children are raised ive had family members affected bot ive lost classmates people i went to hospital with last away from it so theres not anyone in our community can say theyve not lost because of it i decide its the new normal but it is it used to be that you know if you had a 20 or 30 year old pass away you know the entire community would mourn now we expect people to die at that age because we have the overdoses and you dont see long lines of support for they were as fake timbs theres a stigma associated with that as just another druggie who died. Och it myself switching out of the war early on a steel look back of things i missed we let a problem become an epidemic and we should feel. It was a problem hard to put it back in the bottle. To go after a doctor or a pharmacist it takes being able to show that they were going in so many medically unnecessary way takes a lot of resources that your local Law Enforcement source a prosecutor generally doesnt have. Requires the federal government to prosecute and even gain theres its difficult. The problem is gotten so big that i request our Law Enforcement everyones support system around our Prosecutors Office and you cant beat a problem as long as the demand say. This is hemline another town marked by the Opioid Crisis. Every thursday there are hearings at the local drug court. Its a reserve that were sure. You never know would be when you mean it could be over. In. This Court Strategy is not to punish addicts who have committed minor offenses but to reform them through rehabilitation. Once a week charged addicks must appear before the judge if they pass the drug test they remain free. Amber bias has been an opioid addict since she was 15 she and her School Friends even through socalled oxy power. Hes right. Well go to college next fall well in the spring let me bring you back because at the paper you know when you read. Relationships and recovery are very very bad so i will out but. Be careful all right back. Boyfriend jared was also an opioid addict for years he 1st went on the medication after back surgery following a car accident his addiction cost him everything including custody of his children just like amber. Its a life thing. Thats her no one is going to be clean like this its not. Transparent myself sick and then my. Mom stepped up and was the mom that i didnt mean she went to the courts and got the guardianship i was supposed to get a son guardianship to her but i was too high to get a court date and i wasnt even worry about them. Because. My daughter daily grew up knowing that i had to have it that next there was no get memphis make him breakfast or get them from playing or even me unhappy when wait so when she would even come and asked me mom if you took your medicine yet and if i hadnt shes like you know i want to hurry up and take it because then i can be a mom after that. I was sure you know i had been sick are they left or no bad old days telling her that i was sorry i mean id had enough you know i was sick of being sick all day. But all those bad memories are kind of like a positive motivator for me because i mean ill be damned ill not do them that way again. Because im better than an. Hour i had 16 months claim i thought i was in control and youre never in control of your addiction i thought i could go to work and be around some i that got ha and and you cant but thats a trigger and i end up backslide on. My daughter shes seen things she shouldnt saying that owed 4 times in a car and then i would be in my wifes mothers house but after every time that i didnt all i was thinking was going to get nods to me it didnt matter whether i lived ok theres probably been 20 people and just this past year that ive lost to o. D. s even get on Facebook Like every day in youll see the rest in peace some as name that you know resolve. Any and we both understand addiction because weve been there so we can both work our recovery together. Like it would be hard to get with someone thats not an addict because they dont understand the situation and what youve been through are wide snot so easy you just stop you know you can just stop it so that you got to work on the rest of your life its constant work but its worth it. Because the only alternative is to get that seizing and that says that the enemy. We were in cleveland for hearing so i go pull up to the federal courthouse and out in front 2 or 3 dozen women with side protesters saying make them pay hollering we wont forget we wont forget they were mothers that had lost a child. They said please. Please remember us when you go up stairs. For relatives one of the 3 leading attorneys preparing the largest ever Class Action Lawsuit against the pharmaceutical industry more than a 1000 towns and communities are suing the largest drug distributors the aim is to achieve long term compensation for damages these would be an estimated 500000000000. 00 a year for all of the u. S. Fines became a cost of doing business produce paid 600000000. 00 and they continue doing business it was a slap on the wrist it was business as usual so if theyre engaging in this conquered because its prof