Pain Killer
Subtitle: A "Wonder" Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death
Publisher: Rodale Books; Rodale; Distributed to the book trade by St. Martin's Press
Published: October 17, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 336
ISBN-13: 9781579546380
Subjects: Politics / Current Events; standards; Oxycodone; Health Care Issues; poisoning; Medical; epidemiology; Pharmacology; Conspiracy & Scandal Investigations; Corporate & Business History - General; Health & Fitness / Safety; Drug Industry; Opioid-Related Disorders
First sentence: LATE ON A JANUARY night in 2000, the telephone rang in the bedroom of a country doctor named Art Van Zee.
Description: "Pain Killer takes readers on a journey of discovery that begins with the true story of Lindsay, a high-school cheerleader in Virginia who gets hooked on Oxys, and expands outward to explore the critical issues of legitimate pain management, prescription drug abuse, and how the misuse of science by the drug industry threatens the public good. With the fast-rising abuse of prescription drugs by young people ringing alarm bells within government, the how and why behind the OxyContin disaster is a gripping read not only for parents, but also for medical professionals, community leaders, business executives, and all those concerned with this crisis." "The dangers described in Pain Killer also reverberate far beyond the threat from a single drug at a particular moment in time. The focus of our government's war on drugs has clearly misled many of us into thinking that only illegal drugs smuggled from beyond our borders can be abused. As Meier tells the story, some of the most deadly substances are produced and sold legally right here at home."--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story, and business expos, Pain Killer is a hard-hitting look at how a powerful painkiller touted as the salvation for millions became the prescription for a national tragedy. At its birth the legal narcotic OxyContin was a pharmaceutical industry dream, a 'miracle' drug that heralded a sea change in medical care and opened the door to vast drug company riches. It quickly unleashed a public health disaster of epic scope, touching off a trail of addiction and death. As tales of deadly overdoses made front-page and network news, doctors, narcotics agents, regulators, and lawmakers raced in, scrambling to slow the damage. Behind it all stood one of America's wealthiest and most secretive families and a drug company whose hunger for profit and relentless promotion helped fuel this tragedy. Written by Barry Meier, whose special report in the New York Times triggered national interest in OxyContin, Pain Killer chronicles the rise of the multi-billion-dollar pain management industry and lays bare its excesses and abuses. Meier also shows how public officials, obsessed with the war on illegal drugs, also failed to monitor the misuse of legal but equally deadly narcotics like OxyContin and are ill-prepared to prevent future catastrophes.