Pain Killer Quotes

“The opioid crisis has become woven into the fabric of everyday American life. In hospitals, newborns, separated from the narcotics coursing through the bloodstream of their addicted mothers, enter the world writhing in the pain of opioid withdrawal. On the streets, police officers carry a new piece of standard equipment, a nasal spray containing medicine that could save the life of a person in the midst of an overdose.”
― Barry Meier, Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic

“Arthur Sackler was a complex person of extraordinary will and determination, lionized by his friends and admirers as a Renaissance man with a passion for science and an entrepreneurial vision that allowed him to pursue multiple careers simultaneously.”
― Barry Meier, Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic

“Even insurers who had helped stoke the opioid boom by refusing to pay for other kinds of pain treatment began to have second thoughts, though these were likely attributable to financial concerns rather than worries about patient welfare. It turns out that the opioid-driven approach to pain was costing them far more than they imagined, in terms of both patient care and addiction treatment.”
― Barry Meier, Pain Killer

“Bodies were piling up too fast in some places for medical examiners and coroners to keep up. Morgues were filled to capacity, and corpses had to be stored for days in rented refrigerated tractor-trailers until space became available. Many of the dead were not autopsied. It is standard procedure in a drug-overdose case to conduct an autopsy. But even if medical examiners had had time to autopsy every victim, some stopped themselves from doing so. Professional groups that accredit medical examiners set a limit on the number of autopsies that a doctor can competently perform in a year, and examiners in areas with large numbers of overdose deaths would have exceeded that number and risked losing their accreditation. As a result, when overdose victims were discovered near hypodermic needles or pill bottles, they went straight to their graves, unexamined.”
― Barry Meier, Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic