Rofecoxib

And not, not just in psychiatry.

I mean, Vioxx, for example, the painkiller, was another huge scandal, and it was a five billion dollar settlement.

But, uh, the drug companies had suffered some reputational damage.

Beyond that, they didn't have any real clues.

So we need a low level of neuroinflammation.

I think there was a Vioxx kind of a tragedy where on spec, they thought about neuroinflammation.

They gave Vioxx, this new anti-inflammatory drug, to a bunch of experimental subjects.

And they had to stop it because it was creating a higher risk of cardiovascular disease.

Because the thought was, you know, let's get rid of the inflammation.

Oh, wait, if it's happening here, then yeah, then it's happening with heart medications.

Vioxx, for example, or whatever.

It wasn't heart.

It was a headache medication, right? But it caused heart attacks.

Um, there's a guy, a lady called Brandy Vaughan, and she used to work for Merck.

And she found out that Vioxx, what she was selling, was absolutely horrific, dangerous, a- and deadly, and she went to town buying, um, um, advertising boards and going to lots of speaking events telling people about what Vioxx was doing.

And, um, they murdered her, and I was trying to look it up, um, on Google.

Couldn't find that [laughs] anywhere, and I couldn't remember her name, you know.

Naproxen, even, you know, we see Advil, things like that.

We used to have some called Vioxx, but it was just now not used anymore.

Some people need steroids if it's really, really bad, but steroids come with side effects.

Sometimes people use stronger immunosuppressants like methotrexate that blocks the immune system.

And I wanna walk you through the one story that should have changed everything, because it's the cleanest ex- example that I know of what suppression actually costs and what happens when a company decides the profit is worth the bodies.

The drug was called Vioxx.

The company was and still is, and should not be in business, a company called Merck, one of the biggest, most respected, by who I don't know, pharmaceutical companies in the world.

Vioxx came out in 1999, a new kind of anti-inflammatory marketed as easier on the stomach than the older options.

Doctors loved it.

About twenty million Americans took it.

One of their researchers wrote in an internal email that the possibility of cardiovascular events was, in her words, "of great concern." And in that same period, the company discussed designing its big safety study To leave high-risk patients out so the heart dangers wouldn't show up in the data.

Then in March of two thousand, the results came in anyway, and they were damning.

So now we've got an industry that is taking this stuff in 2013, producing it in another country, adding it to heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, making counterfeit pills, selling them on the open market as a painkiller drug.

OxyContin, Vioxx, you know, all these various things.

As trafficking patterns expanded, overdose deaths steadily increased.

The Center for Disease Control in the United States and Prevention established yearly fentanyl deaths at more than 70,000. over one year, it is estimated that 84% of opioid deaths involves a drug from the fentanyl family, 84% of deaths from opioids.