The NIH Head Refuses To Call Out Pharma for the Opioid Crisis

ByShaun Snapp

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Executive Summary

  • The framing from Dr. Francis on the topic of opioids is telling regarding how the NIH defends pharmaceutical companies no matter how bad their behavior.

Introduction

While reviewing an interview given by the head of the NIH, Dr. Fancis Collins, I found some curious statements by Dr. Collins regarding the opioid epidemic.

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Dr. Francis Collins On Covid

Before I get to the quotes from Dr. Collins on the opioid epidemic, this is an interview with NIH head Dr. Fancis Collins. In this video, Jimmy Dore observes the things that Dr. Collins does not focus on.

This video demonstrates how the only things that US health authorities are interested in talking about are face masks, lockdowns, and vaccines. Dr. Fancis Collins is head of the National Institutes of Health, which might have its name changed to the National Institutes of Pharmaceuticals. Jimmy Dore observes that the head of the NIH addresses none of the items discussed in this article in this interview. In this case, the cable network performing the interview, CNN is also a significant recipient of pharmaceutical advertising. Therefore, when viewers see this segment, they are unaware of the NIH and CNN’s pharmaceutical, and financial connections. 

The Interview with NPR

Here is a quote from Dr. Collins in an interview with NPR. It tells about the deceptive way in which Dr. Collins discusses topics related to health.

On top of that, the other main reason for seeing a drop in life expectancy — other than obesity and COVID — is the opioid crisis. We at NIH are working as fast and as hard as we can to address that by trying to both identify better ways to prevent and treat drug addiction, but also to come up with treatments for chronic pain that are not addictive, because those 25 million people who suffer from chronic pain every day deserve something better than a drug that is going to be harmful.

The opioid epidemic is a failure of the health system to control corruption and was extensively promoted by the Sacklers and Purdue Pharmaceutical, which actively pushed opioids targeting doctors with financial needs to addict enormous numbers of US citizens to opioids. This is explained in the following quotation.

Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product “to start with and to stay with.” Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

But OxyContin is a controversial drug. Its sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioids—as synthetic drugs derived from opium are known—except for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs. “Few drugs are as dangerous as the opioids,” David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told me.

Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, at Brandeis University, has worked with hundreds of patients addicted to opioids. He told me that, though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribing—a shift carefully engineered by Purdue. “If you look at the prescribing trends for all the different opioids, it’s in 1996 that prescribing really takes off,” Kolodny said. “It’s not a coincidence. That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks.” When I asked Kolodny how much of the blame Purdue bears for the current public-health crisis, he responded, “The lion’s share.” – The New Yorker

There is much more to this topic. You can read about the terrible things that Purdue Pharma did in the article Purdue Pharma Created the Opioid Epidemic. But Purdue Pharma marketed Oxyco