Pharmaceutical Companies Need to Mitigate the Destruction They Cause

The pharmaceutical industry's marketing of prescription painkillers to doctors is a driving force behind the nation's current opioid addiction crisis. Given the role that the pharmaceutical industry has played in creating the crisis, they should play an equally large role in resolving it.
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The pharmaceutical industry's aggressive marketing of prescription painkillers to doctors is a driving force behind the nation's current opioid addiction crisis. For years many medical providers have over-prescribed these pills to patients, many of whom become addicted. Nowadays, when the cost of a pill addiction has become too high, people are turning to heroin as a cheaper alternative, fueling a parallel epidemic of hepatitis C and HIV infections spread through sharing injection drug equipment.

Given the role that the pharmaceutical industry has played in creating the crisis, they should play an equally large role in resolving it. This could be achieved by marketing less aggressively, funding organizations that educate doctors on best practices for prescribing, teaching the public how to avoid drug overdose, and offering naloxone at free or reduced prices to community organizations that work tirelessly to save lives from drug overdose.

"The lion's share of overdose prevention work with naloxone is happening through harm reduction programs," says Dan Bigg, Director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, a pioneer in naloxone distribution efforts. "All these efforts could very much benefit from affordability and accessibility [of naloxone] which, in most places, is severely limited despite evidence of significant cost-effectiveness and human kindness."

Maya Doe-Simkins, Co-Director of PrescribeToPrevent.org, recommends that companies producing opioid pain relievers and those manufacturing naloxone should establish joint grant-making programs that include funding and technical assistance for community-based naloxone distribution programs.

"Prescription medicines are not priced for widespread distribution. They are priced as single units of medicine for individual patients," she explains. "In the case of [naloxone], communities need a whole lot more than a single unit. Not only does expansion require some sort of some relief from current market prices, but the continued existence of current practice requires it."

The problem of not being able to afford the cost of naloxone is also felt within the law enforcement community. As law enforcement naloxone programs become more popular across the country, departments are struggling to find funds to purchase the medicine. Far from offering help, pharmaceutical companies have responded to the increase in demand by jacking up the price of naloxone.

Deputy Chief Cunningham of the Wilmington Police Department in North Carolina explains that part of the nearly two-year delay in the launch of his department's naloxone program has been funding. "The price of naloxone has more than doubled since we started looking to creating a program," he says. "I'm not singling out certain companies, but from a societal perspective we know that part of the increase in heroin use is driven by pharmaceutical opioid addiction. I think the pharmaceutical companies could be of great assistance to police departments whose budgets are tight if they offered a grants program.

There are some pharmaceutical companies that do offer grants to assist law enforcement and community groups with naloxone programs. Kaleo Pharmaceuticals, parent company for the Evzio auto-injector, is one of these. Just in North Carolina, they donated 200 Evzios to the Fayetteville Police Department, 200 to the Winston Salem Police Department, and 250 to the Wilmington Police Department.

"We're really grateful for the donation of naloxone kits by Kaleo Pharmaceuticals," says Captain Lars Paul of the Fayetteville Police Department in North Carolina. "We have a large department, so it would have been very difficult to fund the naloxone ourselves."

The donations are making a difference in helping to start programs that might otherwise not stand a chance, but overdose prevention advocates still urge caution.

"I worry a bit about grants programs or giveaways, as they are usually always so limited," says Dan Bigg. "I would prefer we work towards systemic solutions to the skyrocketing cost of saving lives -- potentially over-the-counter access and other means to flood the marketplace so the cost of manufacturing is related to selling price."

Whatever the final solution, whether systematic change in how naloxone is distributed, robust grant programs, or both, the current demand for naloxone far exceeds availability and rising prices are crippling the ability of many programs to effectively save lives. Something must change.

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