Big Pharma has been putting lives in danger for decades and the greed needs to end. More regulations need to be put on Opioids in order to prevent lives from being lost. The Opioid crisis also referred to as the Opioid epidemic refers to a crisis in America caused by opioids.

Opioids are a highly addictive class of drugs that include prescription pain relievers, heroin, and synthetic opioid fentanyl. These drugs have caused major issues nationwide. People have misused these drugs and have grown an addiction for them, and are responsible for 400,000 deaths in the last twenty years. The Opioid Crisis started in the early 1990s as a direct correlation of doctors prescribing opioids as legal painkillers for chronic pain.

In 2018, 128 Americans died per day from overdosing on opioids. The government and even the President himself are pushing for tighter regulations on prescription painkillers; better access to prevention, treatment, and recovery services. Restrictions on Opioids must be regulated nationwide in the United States to help prevent a problem that started more than thirty years ago.

Fast forward today as of Feb. 25, Johnson & Johnson, McKessan, AmerisourceBergen, and Cardinal Health finalized a $26 billion opioid settlement to resolve their own liabilities in over 3,000 opioid crisis-related lawsuits nationwide; this is distributing $26 billion or nearly every state in the nation. No more lives can be lost due to opioid addiction with 400,000 lives ended too soon at the hands of these unregulated drugs.

Regulations on opioids nationwide are long overdue and it shouldn’t need to take hundreds of thousands of deaths to realize this. Opioids have been looked at in a different light during the COVID 19 pandemic. In the pandemic, Thomas Stopka stated that “For opioid users, the pandemic created an added risk by disrupting supply chains for illicit drugs.”

Opioids from new sources increase a person’s risk of overdose because the drugs could be cut with more powerful substances like fentanyl, a drug that’s up to 1000 times more powerful than morphine.

The bottom line is this: how many deaths is it going to take to realize this is a major problem in our country? A million, a billion? We need to stop this problem and help citizens with tighter regulations on opioids to limit the number of future potential deaths. As the future of this country, we students need to stand up to organizations like big pharma and call them out for their wrongdoings. If the previous generation would’ve taken responsibility sooner, hundreds of thousands of lives could’ve been saved.

Stand up and call attention to the wrongdoings of greedy drug companies.