Here’s an astonishingly ignorant op-ed from Rep. Stephen Lynch, proposing that the FDA take OxyContin off the market for its “addiction” properties. It’s important in that Lynch is the ranking minority member on the House committee for regulatory affairs.

I’m not sure where Lynch got his statistic that 56% of OxyCointon addicts were legally prescribed the drug (he doesn’t attribute it), but my guess is that he’s improperly equating “addiction” with “phyical dependence.” As we’ve noted here before, there’s an important distinction between the two. The former amounts to a pursuit of euphoria that can be destructive. The latter means a patient needs the stuff not for any high or euphoria, but simply to lead a normal life, in the same way that a diabetic needs insulin. There’s nothing inherently undesirable about physical dependence. Nothing, that is, until meddlesome Congressmen decide to take the drug away from people who’ve come to depend on it.

About a dozen studies have shown that when adminstered and taken properly, opioid therapy rarely if ever leads to addiction.

In a time when some 50 million people suffer from chronic pain — most of it untreated or undertreated — the idea of taking the leading opioid pain medication off the market is particularly heartless and cruel.

Typically, Lynch directs his ire at the company that manufactures OxyContin and — gasp! — turns a profit on the drug. Nice work, Congressman. Let your loathing of Big Pharma and evil “profit” cause tens of millions of people to needlessly suffer.

If Lynch’s proposal aggravates you as much as it ought to, you might take a look at the information here, and act accordingly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 19th, 2005 at 1:07 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.