Big Pharma Donation To The Met Prompts Protesters To Throw Pill Bottles, Hold Die-In

Photographer Nan Goldin and nearly 100 other demonstrators staged a protest over the weekend against a Big Pharma donor’s contribution to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by dumping mock pill bottles into the moat at the Temple of Dendur.

The 2,000-year-old temple is located in the museum’s Sackler wing, which was named for brothers Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler. The family owns Purdue Pharmaceuticals, which makes and aggressively markets its prescription painkiller OxyContin. The drug’s active ingredient, oxycodone, is among the most common painkillers in prescription opioid deaths.

Protesters shouted “shame on the Sacklers” as they tossed the pill bottles, which were labeled: “Prescribed to you by the Sackler Family,” The Guardian reported. Demonstrators also demanded that the family fund drug treatment for addicts.

“In the name of the dead, Sackler family, Purdue Pharma. Hear our demands. Use your profits. Save our lives,” said Goldin per ARTNews.

At the end of the demonstration, the protesters lay on the ground and staged an opioid overdose “die in.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/big-pharma-donation-met-prompts-080809569.html

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Good for them. It’s time people start noticing this shit and pushing back.

As much as I’d love to get on the Big Pharma hating bandwagon, it’s the doctors that are prescribing these drugs. It’s the doctors who are throwing opiates at people when better drug options are available. It’s the doctors that are taking pharma kick backs. It’s the doctors that are mismanaging patient addiction to opiates.

We talk about these drugs as if they are evil and the companies that make them are evil. These drugs have mitigated a lot of suffering for a lot of people so I have difficult vilifying pharma itself.

I agree in terms of being a corporation they have some issues to work out in terms of their profiteering, etc, but I don’t see that as something that couldn’t be resolved. In the meantime, drug abuse issues firmly rests on doctors’ shoulders IMHO.

It goes beyond just the doctors up to the pharmaceutical companies, the LA times and others have done some in depth reporting on how they knew that mass shipments of their drugs were going to end up on the streets but they kept sending them anyways.

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Okay that’s shady as fuck. I’ll look it up.

Yeah, here is just one of many such stories.

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This article credits doctors for this drug abuse as well.

Of course, and correctly. All that the pharma companies did was to ship 20 million hits of Oxy to a town of three thousand people, and collect their money.

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Big Pharma has been funding medical schools and pushing drugs on doctors for decades. They are every bit as responsible as doctors.

But why did they do that? It sounds like it was ordered because…

Doctors subsequently prescribed opioids in droves, leading to a proliferation of pills…”

I know they push drugs because it’s their products. That’s fairly typical for a business but doctors are thsconduits between drug companies and patients. I feel the responsibility lies on them.

YOu mean there may be TWO unethical factors involved? * gasp *

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They have been funding medical schools. That means they influence the curriculum, and future doctors are taught from day 1 that pharma solves everything. I’m not sure you get how utterly heinous that is.

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That is the thinking behind the way the pharma delivery system is set up, with the doctors as gatekeepers. That’s an old school assumption, that the doctors are uncorruptible and they will do the government’s job for it.

It’s been known for at least five decades that the assumption is seriously flawed for more than one reason. And here is another example, not surprising unless one insists on believing that the discredited assumption is a valid one.

Is that the “first do no harm” assumption?

In the LA Times expose the pharma companies had teams to detect and look for suspicious volumes going out and even after they knew the pills were going to end up on the blackmarket they continued to ship truckloads of them.

But it’s being allowed. Where are the checks and balances?

I understand pharma pimping it’s peofuct as hard as possible. That makes business sense. What I don’t understand is why they’re being allowed to push this shit in the education system and why doctors aren’t protecting their patients.

$$$

body is invalid

Canada’s not immune:

We’ve had an issue with opiates here as well and our government cracked down on DOCTORS handing out these drugs like candy. Now that they are being watched, they’ve smartened the fuck up.