How Big Pharma bribed docs to overprescribe opioids

Analysis from UCSF’s “Opioid Industry Documents” repository.

I have complex chronic pain, and I’ve seen a lot of specialists. One of them prescribed long-term opioids for me. I dodged a bullet there, I think. Here’s a little story about how hard it is to know whether to trust your doctor when you have a pain condition.

One day, I was in a neurologist’s office here in Burbank, waiting for a nerve timing study. I picked up the neurology journal on the waiting-room table and thumbed through it. The lead study was an article about how opioid addiction risks had been overstated and doctors didn’t have to worry about it. It cited the infamous “Jick letter,” a five-sentence letter to the editor at the NEJM, which pharma companies turned into the foundation of a tower of junk addiction science that collapsed and led to 800,000 fatal overdoses, and counting.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2017/06/nejm-letter-opioids/528840/

I knew that this was a bad sign, so I turned to the journal’s colophon and learned that it was not a journal at all. It was an advertorial from a pharma giant — one with a profitable line in opioids — that was disguised as a peer-reviewed journal. It looked like a journal, but it wasn’t. It was targeted at doctors —…