Customer Reviews

Pain Killer: A "Wonder" Drug's Trail of Addiction and Death

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1 star:		(3)

 

 

Pain Killer is an interesting book in that it describes the circumstances surrounding the rise in Oxycontin abuse, particularly among America's rural poor, but it tends to be a bit one-sided and heavy handed in casting Purdue and its employees as heartless villians in this story. There can be no doubt that Oxy abuse has led to heartbreak for addicts and their families all across this country. And Purdue probably did emphasize too much its use for the treatment of moderate pain that would be just as well treated by other drugs with less potential for abuse.

But at the same time, this book practically ignores the countless numbers of patients whose intractable suffering has been eased by proper use of Oxycontin. Their stories are not told, their voices are silent, their suffering is unacknowledged. As much sympathy as I have for the addicts in this book, I would venture to say that the large majority of them never had to get involved with snorting or shooting up Oxy. But chronic pain suffers and those in the end stages of terminal diseases don't have the option of saying no to pain. I'd bet if you talked to them, Purdue and its employees are heroes, not villians. I would have liked to have heard some of their stories.

My other dissatisfaction with this book is that basically it is little better than an Atlantic or Harper's magazine article padded out to book length (with a larger font and lots of white space to increase the page count). There is a lot of repetitive info in here, and many times, the chronology of events gets a bit confusing. Sometimes, I had the feeling I was just re-reading the same 40 or so pages over and over. At some points, I just skimmed.

The story of Oxycontin and its abuse is definitely a cautionary tale, but I would have liked to have had both sides of the story.

I have read and heard so many negative things about Oxycontin that I can't keep silent about this any longer! I am a chronic pain patient who was on Oxycontin for many years. I also participated in one of their early drug trials for chronic pain, so I have personally contributed input to Purdue about how this medicine affected my body and mind. It was truly a lifesaver for me at the time, as it allowed me to return to work on a full-time basis. (When I say full-time, I REALLY mean FULL-TIME! I had two full-time 40 hr./week jobs plus I designed a bi-monthly magazine on a free-lance basis. I have several inoperable conditions which cause me to suffer constant, intractable pain on a daily basis.

I tried all natural alternatives such as chiropractic, acupuncture, massage, meditation, herbal diets and others for several years before finally applying to Purdue's clinical trial for chronic back pain, in which Oxycontin was being used for pain relief. By the time I started the trial I could hardly sit in my office chair for more than 15 minutes. I had tried other medications new to the market at the time including Trazadone, which put my heart into severe arrhythmia for days after taking only one dose. Other drugs had intolerable side effects; Oxycontin did not. Instead, I received a steady dosage of pain relief medication which did not make me 'high', sleepy nor nauseated. I was overjoyed to have my quality of life returned to me!

After being in the 3-year clinical trial for a year and a half, I was told that the trial was being suddenly halted due to the bad press that Oxycontin was receiving. The company which handled the clinical trial for Purdue did not want to be involved so they just dropped all participants, leaving us with only a few pills on hand and no referral to a pain management doctor, as they had initially promised. I was fortunate to find a doctor at the 11th hour who would accept me as a pain patient.

Without getting into all the details of 'life afterwards', it should suffice for me to mention that Oxycontin can be a worthwhile and helpful drug in the hands of a chronic pain patient. A person in pain does NOT get 'high' from opiates. Instead, the medicine is used up by the pain receptors in the brain and never reaches the 'pleasure centers'. Pain patients feel ONLY RELIEF FROM PAIN.

I sincerely wish this bad press would stop as it is doing a great injustice to the chronic pain patient. If a person wants to get 'high', they can take Oxycontin or they can take a slew of other drugs OR they can simply turn to alcohol, which is not only legal but is also widely available! I can guarantee that more young people are killed by the effects of alcohol than by Oxycontin. And yes, they can still sniff glue or smoke pot or take any number of synthetic substances such as Ecstasy and get their buzz that way. Oxycontin and Purdue are not the villains here; instead, we need to look to ourselves for responsibility and sometimes to the parents for their lack of responsibility. And ultimately, the person taking the drug is the one who has the REAL responsibility -- not only to themselves, but to everyone around them who might be affected one day by their bad decisions.

Let's put the blame where it belongs and STOP punishing the chronic pain patients, who are only trying to have some quality of life. Thank you for listening - now won't you please help us by spreading the word that we deserve to have our dignity restored and the quality of life returned to us - even if that means we have to take Oxycontin in order to be able to live?

Thank you.......KO

Myself being an abuser of OxyContin back in 2001, which eventually led to heroin addiction due to many pharmacy burglaries and stick-ups, the drug started to get a bad rap, and doctors took people off of it and the cost became insane, up to $0.75 a mg. I can honestly say that about 95% of the addicts I have encountered during my addiction started w/ OxyContin, then moved on to much cheaper, and more readily available, heroin. On the other hand, I understand that it is a wonder drug for people in end-stage cancer, and other very painful conditions, and I don't think it should be taken off the market. However, when my friends and I raided my parents medicine cabinet (my dad was prescribed 40mg of OxyContin for laparscopic surgery on his knee, which is the equivalent of EIGHT Percocets.) When I read this book, I was shocked to see how much money Purdue Pharma put into marketing this drug. Offering free cruises and cash incentives to MD's who wrote a lot of prescriptions, and touting it as a 'wonder drug' for moderate to severe pain patients. The only difference between it and Percocets is that Percocets have to be taken every 4 hours or so, Oxycontin every 12. Also, there are no additives to OxyContin other than the wax filler, the pills are pure Oxycodone, no Acetaminophen or Aspirin (which is good for people with allergies or sensitive stomachs, or chronic pain patients who are prescribed to take 3-4 Percocets every 4-6 hours, eventually the high volume of APAP is going to wreak havok on your liver.) But as you do in every profession, shady doctors over-prescribed the drug (I had a friend who broke her tailbone, a doctor prescribed her 240 40mg Oxys. The normal amount would be 60. She was not addicted beforehand, but she quickly became addicted) Doctors also prescribed for sexual favors, a certain doctor was about to be indicted recently, and he fled to the Dominican Republic, leaving his wife and children behind. Real nice guy. Luckily, I got clean May 10th of 2003, and have been clean since. Anyway, back to the book. it was a somewhat confusing read. Meier jumped around from the girl Lindsay's story of OC addiction in Western VA, to how PP marketed the drug to doctors, and to other stuff. Some of it was so repetitive, the book could have been condensed to 1/3 of the size. When reading this book, I recommend trying to finish it within a few days, if you leave it lying around for a while, you'll forget what's going on, because you just get bombarded with information and study facts and numbers. All in all, it's an OK book, but my mother and I would never have read it had I not gotten addicted to them.

Chronic pain sufferers will find no useful information in this book. As a chronic pain patient successfully being treated in a medically supervised Pain Management program that includes the use of the prescription medication OxyContin, one thought kept running through my mind as I read Barry Meier's book, "Pain Killer"...something's missing?! There is by no means any lack of endless, often chronologically confusing, FDA,DEA,medical examiner or lab research reports. There's even a story inter-twined throughout all these mind-numbing statistics about a teenager and her family, whose lives are forever altered by the daughter's downward spiral into drug abuse, crime and eventual unwanted pregnancy.
What is sadly lacking in this combination of shock journalism and re-printed office memos, is the obvious lack of interviews with successfully treated chronic pain patients; a total and complete lack of understanding and empathy on the part of the author towards people, like myself, who suffer with pain everyday; whose only wish is to live a relatively pain-free existance...to be a good wife and mother.

... The author gives an interminable account of the pitiful, repetitious behavior of a spoiled rich teenager who experiments with a plethora of drugs before deciding that OxyContin is her preferred method of self-destruction. Where this uninteresting young woman goes and what she does and whom she buys drugs from is described in sophomoric soap opera prose. The author then somehow decides her plight is really the fault of the company that makes OxyContin and specifically its founder who died nearly a decade before the pain medicine was introduced....

As a recovered alcoholic and drug addict, and now a substance abuse counselor in a methadone clinic, I have seen the ravages of opiate abuse firsthand. The old days of methadone clinics being exclusively for down-and-out heroin junkies are long gone. Now, the majority of clientele in methadone clinics is for narcotic pain medication dependency and/or addiction. I have always been interested in finding out the true story behind the rise of the now notorious OxyContin, and after reading Painkiller, I was not disappointed. It has an interesting approach in that it simultaneously tells the origin of OxyContin in a chronological fashion while describing the devastating effects OxyContin had on a high-school age cheerleader. It is easy to take the side of the primary individual from whose perspective the author builds his indictment against the manufacturer's of OxyContin, Purdue-Frederick. The individual is a doctor who practices in the poor areas of West Virginia coal country. However, the addict population in general has always been very creative and innovative in their attempts to find out the ways any drug, whether illegal or prescription, can produce the best highs. And, even though Purdue-Frederick did indeed have a very aggressive incentive campaign to lure physicians into switching all their eligible patients away from lighter, and more traditional narcotic pain medications, they cannot, in my opinion, be seen as the scapegoats the author tries desperately to make them out to be in the OxyContin crisis that developed. Pain management has always been an inexact science at best, and in this author's educated opinion, why should those who will always do their best to end-run around the proper use of this, and other legitimate medications, hold those hostage who use them for their intended purposes. Painkiller, whatever the reader feels personally about the debate concerning OxyContin, is still an excellent read, and details the origin of OxyContin, and the history, both negative and positive, of opiods and their use for pain management in the United States.

"Pain Killer" is a great read. It follows the downfall of a beautiful, affluent cheerleader who becomes totally consumed by OxyContin. Yet it's also an investigative book that shows how the company turns a blind eye to the devestating abuse. And it shows what's going on behind closed doors at the government agencies in charge. The book has it all: a muckraking probe as well as moving stories from doctors and counselors trying to do something about the drug that is ravaging their community. At the same time, I came away convinced of the importance of a drug like OxyContin--if it is properly controlled--for patients suffering from horrible chronic pain.

As one who lives in constant chronic pain, I can speak for how Oxycontin has SAVED my life. I agree with most of the reviews before me, but I do have to add a few things.
I absolutely find it completely UNFATHOMABLE that anyone will put a pill in their mouth and not question what it is. IF these folks are all so "ignerent" then the problem is with the educational system. Look, I went to high school back in 1976 and guess what? They TAUGHT me about drugs. I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn from this book, but it wasn't anything more than the rehash of big businebbss against the "ignerent" folk. I did have to ask myself,
Why isn't this book about "Paint Sniffing: How Dutch Boy refused to stop making paint to save our society" because basically the assumption here is that there was some kind of cover up... which is complete bull. There is no way that an educated person could EVER claim that ANY OPIOID wouldn't be addictive. It's preposterous for a doctor to claim otherwise... I'm only high school educated, and I knew it the day my doctor prescribed it. The fact that it takes a triplicate prescription to get it LEGALLY should be some indication!

This is a heartbreaking story about the promise of a wonder drug gone horribly wrong -- the promise of OxyContin for sufferers of chronic pain vs. the tendency of addicts to find the next big high. Meier has done an admirable job of reporting all the angles, and the human suffering behind the headlines. Pain is such a big issue in health care right now, but he manages to put a movingly human face to this enormous problem. It's a terrific read.

Now that I have read the book, I would like to place this new review about Painkiller. Like I said before, this book has caused a lot of talk in our town. Lindsay's story seems to be idealized. Readers tend to forget that she made the choice to do this. While I found my self feeling sorry for her and the family while reading, I must admit that I didn't feel that way when these events were actually taking place. I still can't understand why you would destroy your life for a pill.

Considering the facts given in the book, though it seems truthful, it does not consider the positive side to Oxycontin. Even though I've seen the terrible changes caused by the misuse of this drug, I can still see the benefits for those who need it. I firmly believe that Oxycontin merely needs stronger regulations to keep it in check.

The book tends to get repetitive, and includes things that seem irrelevant. I found myself skimming the important facts to find the rest of Lindsay's story, even though I already knew most of it, considering how well gossip travels in a small place such as this.