Coleridge is supposed to have been using opium while writing Kubla Khan. But tho were not synthetic which are the subject of the lawsuit. Those were marketed to the medical community as safe, hiding the risk of addiction that the industry knew was present. The litigation will mirror the tobacco cases.
@plakata: Synthetic or not the Physicians should have known that given the highly addictive base of Opium that opiods by nature would be addictive as well. Provided that Physicians are not just handing out prescriptions to opiods all willynilly like they used to, then why does the litigation fall on the manufacturer? The average Joe trusts their Doctors and Pharmacists to know the drugs that they are prescribing, that the Doctors and Pharmacists would blindly trust big pharma to tell the truth when it would impact their bottom line is idiotic. This type of litigation only drives the prices of all other medications up, so that their bottom line will not be affected by settlement payments.
4951