Portside

Opioid overdose claims 175 Americans each day, but powerful pharmaceutical companies continue to promote their sales.

The ongoing and increasing revolving door phenomenon clearly suggests excess coziness between industry and government, now to the extent that industry and government leaders of health care are becoming interchangeable. true health care reform would cut the ties between government and corporate leaders.

Not only do patents push higher prices onto consumers, they burden the research world with the increased costs of paying for the intellectual property needed to do further research . . . If anything, the neoliberal approach to academic research is a return to the privately funded, pre-tenure origins of the university system when numerous schools were simply research labs and promotional arms for private industry

“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”