Editor’s Note: Points welcomes another new guest blogger to the ranks today. Kimberly Sue is an M.D.-Ph.D. candidate in medical anthropology at Harvard, doing ethnographic fieldwork with opiate-addicted women. Below, Kim details some very recent developments in the ways pharma companies invoke societal values around drugs in order to manage their market share, and discusses how the outcomes are likely to affect people in treatment.
Pharmaceutical companies and opiates have a complicated, intertwined history. Analgesia was and continues to be a big business as well as an ongoing medical conundrum. Opiates, as we know, are wildly popular analgesics. Yet when did opiates specifically indicated for treating addiction become such a big business, a lucrative niche market inciting pharmaceutical companies to aggressive industry maneuvers? As Penn professors John Kimberly and Thomas McLellan wrote in a 2006 article on the substance abuse treatment industry, “Pharmaceutical companies that, not long ago, refused to allow the use of even their discarded medications for clinical research in addiction now invest hundreds of millions of dollars in the marketing and sales of approved addiction medications.”
Does this say something about the changing cultural attitudes towards addiction—that pharmaceutical companies are no longer afraid of being branded as making drugs for drug addicts—or does it simply speak to the enormous profits to be had?