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Death Rates Rising When Opioids Pushed On Doctors

There are some things that shouldn’t have advertisements. Some products shouldn’t be marketed to be sold. These include products that are necessary or could have health risks.

That’s why it is crazy that the United States allows there to be advertisements for pharmaceutical drugs.

Drug companies actually push to sell opioids to different physicians.

The makers of drugs have been pushing aggressive sale tactics since the 1990s. This apparently led to the opioid crisis that we have today. It had turned into an epidemic that is deadly.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that prescription opioids led to more than 17,000 opioid deaths in 2017 alone. That is a whopping 35 percent of all opioid deaths that year.

Studies have proven that high marketing of opioids to doctors has contributed to this. This is because it leads to a higher prescribing rate.

Pharmaceutical firms actually spent $39.7 million from 2013 to 2015. They spent this just on marketing for opioids. The total of that included money spent on traveling, meal costs, speaking, and consulting. This was all to about 67,500 physicians in the U.S.

Some doctors do seem to make a lot of money from pharmaceutical companies. Most doctors get their payment in smaller ways. Ways that are less obvious and are more like rewards and perks.

It seemed that most doctors didn’t receive a large payout. Instead, the median was around $15. But they were still receiving smaller expenses. This still leads to higher rates of opioid prescription. These higher prescription rates lead to more deaths.

There should definitely be more restrictions on marketing for the opioid industry. It can’t keep going on like this. For many people, their first opioid is a prescription. Then it just leads to the darker stuff.

 

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