The tragedy of the opioid epidemic provides a textbook example of what happens when a country allows unfettered access to 76 billion legally prescribed narcotic pain pills over seven years. The drugs in question are Oxycodone and Hydrocodone.
To put this tragedy into a local context, let’s focus on how Utah fits into this picture. Of the aforementioned 76 billion pills, Utah received 696,125,020. Not surprisingly, the four largest counties along the Wasatch Front received the largest number of pills. In fact, one Salt Lake pharmacy dispensed more than 6.3 million pills. That’s slightly under 1 million pills per year over the seven-year period.
The most surprising revelation about the Utah data was how this epidemic has ravaged our rural counties.
Consider this. Carbon County pharmacies received 15,094,160 pills during this period, with a population of only 20,000. That’s 105 pills, per person, per year. And one Price pharmacy alone distributed over four million pills. Kane and Emery counties followed at 64 pills, per person, per year.
These numbers are staggering. And one has to ask what local officials were doing during this time? Where were the politicians, the physicians and the pharmacies? Did everyone simply turn a blind eye because the cash registers were ringing?
While the many causes of the opioid epidemic are complex, corporate greed screams the loudest — greed represented by billions-upon-billions of dollars in corporate profits for Big Pharma, middle men who distribute the pills, physicians who overzealously prescribe and sadly, yes, even the corner pharmacy in your neighborhood and in mine.
The results: over 100,000 dead and counting, countless thousands of cases of individuals who survived drug overdoses and the incalculable human and financial costs to address all of this with more still to come.
Criticizing capitalism is not something to be taken lightly. Since the birth of our nation, capitalism has been deeply ingrained in American culture. We live in a free market society where capitalism is king. Though both of our major political parties decry government regulation, it is fair to say that conservative Republicans complain the most and the loudest. Nothing should stand in the way of corporate profits, least of all government regulations.
Through conservative lenses, government is the problem not the solution. We’ve been hearing that since the days of President Reagan. But when massive corporate profits cause great harm to the American public while enriching the wealthy elite, something is seriously wrong.
The opioid crisis serves as the perfect poster child for what can happen when unregulated or underregulated capitalism is left to its own devices. And it’s not simply the opioid crisis. Is global warming worsening because of inadequate regulation of the fossil fuel industry? Could the severe economic recession from a decade ago have been prevented if financial institutions had been better regulated? I believe so.
In this instance, pharmaceutical company lobbyists and Congress should shoulder much of the responsibility for what has happened. Why? Because collectively they have hamstrung government agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration from enforcing common sense regulations on the pharmaceutical industry. One of the lessons we should take from the opioid crisis is that unregulated capitalism can be deadly, and in this case, it has become a stone-cold killer.
Like most people, I am a capitalist, albeit a reluctant one. What I strongly believe is that if capitalism is going to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot be allowed to operate without reasonable and appropriate regulation. Yes, I mean government regulation complete with the necessary enforcement resources.
Corporate profits must be made secondary to consumer safety and protection. Left to their own devices, mega corporations will continue to do what they’ve always done — ring the cash register and the consequences be damned.
The source material for this commentary comes from a dataset belonging to the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was obtained by the Washington Post as a result of a law suit. It is available to the public through The Post.
Michael Norman
Michael Norman is a professor emeritus from the Weber State University Department of Criminal Justice. He is also the author of five Utah murder mysteries, the most recent being “Slow Burn.”