HOW Do the important public health crises change the economic and political landscape? This was the question addressed at the end of January for a study by economists Carolina Arteaga and Victoria Barone (Republican support and economic difficulties: the lasting effects of the opioid epidemicUniversity of Toronto) in the context of the most devastating health crisis in the history of the United States, the opioid epidemic.
Since 2016, more than 700,000 people have died from a remaining relationship with the addiction to these opium -derived medications, manufactured by large pharmaceutical fellow and legally prescribed. This crisis was in 1996 with the marketing of Oxycontin by Purdue Pharma and an aggressive marketing campaign that led to the broad use of this analgesic.
To carry out their study, the two economists examined declassified documents of multiple demands against Purdue Pharma, which resulted in record fines and the banking of the company in 2019. They combined this information with public prescriptions and medium prescriptions. Legislative and local elections since 1982.
The difficulty in such a study lies in going beyond mere correlation to establish a true cause and effect relationship between the use of opioids and local economic and political reality. The areas where residents are more likely to use analgesics, and then abuse the subject, often share certain conditions. These are typically places where it is more difficult to renew an oxycontin recipe, pushing some people to illegal drugs such as heroin or fentanyl. They are also areas where economic conditions are more challenging, and where people are more likely to work on jobs that expose them to chronic pain. In more general terms, this tends to be careless communities, with limited access to treatment and detoxification centers.
Misleading campaign
To overcome the thesis difficulties, the authors made a particularly intelligent use of Purdue Pharma’s marketing strategy. In fact, the company’s internal documents clearly highlight the misleading campaign made by this group when Oxycontin was launched in 1996.
He has 44.76% of this article to read. The rest is only for subscribers.
]
