Drug Dealer, MD Quotes

“Doctors and health care institutions are complicit in the medicalization of poverty that encourages the creation of professional patients.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“The enormous pressures on doctors today to prescribe pills, perform procedures, and please patients, all within a disjointed medical bureaucracy and all with an eye on the bottom line, has contributed to the current prescription drug epidemic.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“For increasing numbers of people, especially young people, prescription drugs are the first exposure to addictive substances and the first stepping-stone to future addictive use.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“Stimulants, which are also considered to be highly addictive, are in schedule II. They are most often used in the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“More than 200 million prescriptions for opioid painkillers continue to be written by US doctors every year.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“Heroin possession and distribution is illegal in the United States, but heroin is readily available on the black market, sold as white or brownish powder mixed with powdered milk, starch, sugars, or quinine.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“Doctors more interested in money than in the well-being of their patients took advantage of the rising demand for opioid painkillers in the 1990s and 2000s as a way to get rich quick.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“encounter with the drug dealer pretending to be a doctor was the moment he realized he had become a drug addict pretending to be a patient.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“Today, more than 250,000 Americans receive methadone maintenance therapy, also known as opioid agonist therapy, opioid replacement therapy, and opioid maintenance therapy.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“The Internet as a Source of Drugs of Abuse,” the web page for such a site may be physically located in Uzbekistan, the business address in Mexico City, money generated from purchases deposited in a bank in the Cayman Islands, the drugs themselves shipped from India, while the owner of the site is living in Florida.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“only 4 percent of persons misusing or addicted to prescription drugs reports getting them from a drug dealer or a stranger.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“According to the July 2014 Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, US prescribers wrote 82.5 opioid painkiller prescriptions and 37.6 benzodiazepine prescriptions per 100 persons”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“By 2010, for the first time in history, unintentional drug poisonings represented the leading cause of injury death in the United States, exceeding deaths due to motor vehicle accidents.7”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop

“Prescribers wrote enough opioid painkiller prescriptions in 2012 to medicate every American adult around the clock for a month.”
― Anna Lembke, Drug Dealer, MD: How Doctors Were Duped, Patients Got Hooked, and Why It's So Hard to Stop