Racial Pill-filing
source: http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/01/01/painkillers.race.ap/index.html
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- Scott_Bromley
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Even for the severe pain of kidney stones, minorities were prescribed narcotics such as oxycodone and morphine less frequently than whites.
One expert said the apparent color bar may reveal some doctors' suspicions that minority patients could be drug abusers lying about pain to get narcotics. But the irony, she said, is that blacks are the least likely group to abuse prescription drugs.
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wiggleroomlarvae
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The point of this is that our overly broad expectations fail in the light of new evidence. In this case we learn that it's not necessarily ethnic minorities in the U.S. that abuse prescription medication, it's the people with severe mental health problems (if we take chemical dependency to be a physical category of the mind).
The assumed logic of the article makes no sense unless we accept judgmental attitudes towards both minorities and drug abusers.
Minorities are an ethnic category, drug usage is a (failing) coping strategy. These were not taken to be highly correlated with this particular activity.
Pharmaddicts are just as bad off as other groups: heroin users, cocaine addicts, gambling addicts, and sex addicts and alcoholics. Because the avenues to acquire the drug follow predictable patterns of overprescription, overmedication, and gradual desensitization to particular brands of drugs, one now can see that the externalities of the drug industry run far and wide. Particular industry variables (i.e. profit of new drugs, R&D funding, market promotion, foreign capital investment etc.) tend to predict and explain the rise of particularly nasty new addictions people form, rather than the personal decision making process of the abuser. Generally the abuser rationalizes their use of the drug in order to avoid the very real interpersonal consequences of overuse. Therefore we need to focus more closely on the avenues by which drug companies develop and profit from drugs, their effects on the total population, and less on the relative few who are hit hard by them.
As more products enter the market, expect the price to lower and speed of new drugs entering to increase while quality of existing medication lowers. Patient abuse of drugs is uncommon, but common more amongst people suffering from depression, mania, schitzophrenia, and a whole host of other attributable illnesses overdiagnosed in the wake of post-1980's mental health deregulation.
Therefore we've got a real problem on our hands.
Any takers?
- 5 years ago
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wiggleroomlarvae
