Pharmaceutical Companies 2nd Speaker Opp

Pharmaceutical companies are primarily responsible for the opioid crisis
Opposition
Intro: Every day, more than 130 people in the United States die after overdosing on opioids. The
misuse of and addiction to opioids—including prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic
opioids such as fentanyl—is a serious national crisis that affects public health as well as social
and economic welfare. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the total
"economic burden" of prescription opioid misuse alone in the United States is $78.5 billion a
year, including the costs of healthcare, lost productivity, addiction treatment, and criminal justice
involvement.
Roadmap: My roadmap for this debate will be to first refute my opponents points, and then
strengthen our own points.
Refutations: Opponents - Purdue Pharma is primarily responsible for the opioid crisis
Us - Purdue Pharma was responsible only for starting the opioid epidemic, not bolstering or
continuing it. Purdue started marketing oxycontin in a very wrong way, misleading people
making use of oxycontin widespread and common. The doctors and other medical staff are the
ones primarily responsible as they were the ones who gave an extraneous amount of pills to their
patients that was irrelevant to the time frame in which it was to be consumed. This led to people
taking more than necessary alongside the myth that these opioids were less addictive than other
narcotic painkillers. Eventually people started becoming addicted at which point there is little
hope for becoming unaddicted. Physicians and doctors just followed the pharmaceutical
companies blindly without ever questioning them. I will build more upon this later in my case.
Opponents - Us -
Strengthening Contentions: Our first point was that people are responsible for starting and
continuing the opioid crisis and our second point was that the healthcare system is another
leading cause of the crisis. As my first speaker stated earlier, some doctors overprescribe opioids
to patients because “we are used to prescribing in multiples of 30; 30 days for a month's supply
of a once a day medication, 90 days for a mail-order prescription” says Ronald Hirsch a
physician at the National Center for Biotechnology Information. This leads to the patients
overdosing on opioids, which in turn leads to addiction. Purdue Pharma was responsible for
marketing opioids as safe, and low potential for addiction, but doctors didn’t question what they
were told by these pharmaceutical companies and on continuing medical education courses about
prescription opioids, in part because of a lack of experience, says Stephen Bernard, a
palliative-care specialist at the University of North Carolina. “Physicians don’t get a lot of good
training in pain management,” he says. The structure of the health-care system in the United
States also contributed to the overprescription of opioids. Because many doctors are in private
practice, they can benefit financially by increasing the volume of patients that they see, as well as
Pharmaceutical companies are primarily responsible for the opioid crisis
Opposition
by ensuring patient satisfaction, which can incentivize the overprescription of pain medication.
Prescription opioids are also cheap in the short term. Patients’ health-insurance plans often
covered pain medication but not pain-management approaches such as physical therapy. “The
incentives were there for people to prescribe more and more, particularly when they had already
been convinced it was the right thing to do.
Our third point was the economy was the fuel of the epidemic. For the last two decades, U.S.
communities stricken by automotive plant closures have been hurting. And death rates among
working-age adults have been rising. In an extensive analysis of deaths that occurred between
1999 and 2016, researchers found that in the five years after an automotive plant shut down,
counties within commuting distance of the shuttered factory experienced a far sharper rise in
fatalities related to opioids than did counties in which major automotive factories remained open
says the Los Angeles Times. Another study done by the University of Pennsylvania measured
how a sudden and profound shock — the closure of an automobile manufacturing plant —
affected the health of the surrounding area. So they combed through statistics on opioid deaths in
112 counties that either had an automotive factory or were within commuting distance of one. In
all, they identified 30 “commuting zones” that surrounded automotive production plants and
relied heavily on manufacturing jobs for employment. All were in the nation’s industrial
Midwest or the Deep South. Then the researchers compared the 10 commuting zones that had
experienced a factory closure in the automotive sector with the 20 zones that had no such
closures. As expected, opioid fatalities rose in all of the counties over the study period. After all,
few such areas have been spared the scourge of opioid addiction. But when the researchers
looked at the five years following each plant closure, they found a powerful link to opioid deaths.
According to the study, in the 29 counties affected by closures, there were 20.6 opioid deaths per
100,000 people each year. That increase was 85% higher than the rates at which opioid deaths
grew in the 83 counties without closures. As we can see, the shock of a plant closure has helped
to precipitate the overdose of opioids.

Pharmaceutical Companies 2nd Speaker Opp

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Pharmaceutical companies are primarily responsible for the opioid crisis

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