People have to have a path to redemption. Stallman apologized and admitted he was wrong. Why is it not acceptable to make a mistake with words? Isn't it impractical to expect everyone to never say something they regret? These are words we're talking about. It's not like Stallman raped a child.
Kicking him out of FSF and MIT seems quite excessive for somebody saying something and then apologizing for it. Whether they are Stallman, a student, or anyone really.
Do the people involved at FSF and MIT hold themselves to the same standard they're holding Stallman to? We'll surely find out because humans tend to say a lot of stupid shit over the course of their lifetime.
Constructing a situation in which Marvin Minsky somehow was blameless for his relationship with a known pedophile and child sex trafficker and situations directly resulting from that relationship, then projecting the reactions of other people through that situation, is not merely a mistake with words. Coupled with his at-best-real-gross chinstroking about minors, consent, and statutory rape in the past, it demonstrates a pattern. And it's a pattern that, obviously, made enough people uncomfortable as to want to not associate with him--as is their right.
MIT doesn't have to give Richard Stallman a do-nothing job. The FSF doesn't have to give Richard Stallman a (nearly) do-nothing job. Everybody makes mistakes, sure. You make up for those mistakes by doing good and doing right and if Stallman wants redemption, literally nobody is stopping him from going after it. They're just not bankrolling it. There's a difference here.
Yes. Yes, it is. Are we talking about the same story? We’re talking about something Richard Stallman said. That is his offense and the reason for him being kicked out of FSF and MIT.
Since you dodged the whole point of my comment by reiterating that Stallman said something offensive, I’ll restate my point clearly as a question: In your opinion, can someone be forgiven for saying something wrong? and how do they seek that forgiveness other than apologizing and admitting they were wrong?
I’m sure like everyone you’ve said horrible shit over your lifetime, whether in public or private, whether strangers or family. If we brought out those people hurt by your words over your lifetime, wouldn’t you want to be forgiven? Don’t hold other people to a different standard than you hold yourself.
Being the kind of person who would do what he did, having a history of being That Guy in shitty and gross ways ("tender embraces" cards, opining about "natalism" on emacs-devel, pedophile apologia over a couple decades) is why this became the straw that broke the camel's back. Saying is a reflection of being, and that is what is so often elided by a certain crowd getting all hot under the T-shirt right now.
Particularly for figures with significant platforms, the way to redemption is through demonstrating that one has learned and improved, not merely quickly saying "I'm sorry!" and moving on. Perhaps a good way to start would be for RMS to spend time working with an organization dedicated to helping survivors of sexual assault, learning from that experience, and using his broad platform to discuss what he learns with people who, as this thread amply demonstrates, could sorely use the perspective.
My shit does stink, yes. Never felt a need to cape up for pedophiles, but I've certainly said and believed some real unfortunate shit. I used to be a shitty little "libertarian" when I was younger who, through saying things, did hurt people. Had the modern MRA/GamerGate funnel existed when I was young I'd probably have fallen into it. As it is, I've spent most of my adult life being coached out of and in many ways deprogramming myself out of being a selfish reactionary, and working (deeds, not words) to make up for being shitty.
I'm not a particularly good person--but I'm working on it in a conscious way. He can, too.
I will admit I am not involved in FSF and am realizing I am missing a lot of context here regarding Stallmans apparent history of these types of comments.
Research on drug addiction points to socioeconomic and cultural factors predicting addiction, not consuming the drug.
See the work of Johann Hari. People become addicts because they’re unhappy with their lives and their environment, not because opioids are inherently addictive. Which shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has experienced addiction.
> People become addicts because they’re unhappy with their lives and their environment,
You know what's one thing that makes people very unhappy with their lives? Severe chronic pain. Aside from the pain, it also removes a great deal of agency and self-efficacy from their lives. They can't control the pain, the medical system is basically out of their control, and now there's a societal hysteria about opiates.
Beyond that, what you're describing it the difference between addiction and dependency. Any flesh and blood human will become dependent on opiates after a few weeks. It's why doctors have you taper off opiates and other meds that cause dependency.
Although even that distinction seems to be going by the wayside in the current hysteria.
> You know what's one thing that makes people very unhappy with their lives? Severe chronic pain.
That's my point. Having taken an opiate actually has little to do with whether they form an addiction. So we shouldn't be focused on restricting supply to treat and prevent addiction.
> Any flesh and blood human will become dependent on opiates after a few weeks.
Yes, if by dependency you're referring to withdrawal symptoms or tolerance. Opioid addiction however varies wildly depending on the demographic, despite all having consumed opioids. It's not the act of taking opioids that predicts whether someone becomes addicted. Research points to addiction not being caused by the drugs themselves. This isn't surprising when you consider that humans get addicted to such a wide variety of totally unrelated chemical combinations. When you think about it, isn't it a little suspicious that almost any chemical that can be consumed is potentially addictive? That strongly suggests that addiction is not about the drugs really, and research is finally corroborating this.
Having said that, now think about the fact that all food is drugs (chemicals that affect and manipulate your biology) and it becomes apparent that addiction is a much much bigger issue than one might assume when only thinking about things like Oxy and booze as drugs. If one qualifies harmful diet as drug addiction it turns out the majority of our society is suffering from addiction. But there's very little research going on in this area, despite diet probably being the most prevalent and harmful form of drug addiction. You can't unsee it. The similarity between someone talking about their struggles with poor diet ("but that cheeseburger/cheetos/soda/etc. is all I have, can't I have just one thing to look forward to?") and someone talking about alcoholism or smoking is almost indistinguishable.
I don’t think hysteria is an accurate term here as the danger and massive negative impact of opiates is very real. It is not imagined.
I like the word hysteria but am careful in its use because historically it has been used to discount and ignore very real problems with large chunks of the population [0].
I think to help patients and to help people suffering from addition and at risk for addiction it’s important to understand the problem. If people dismiss the problem as imaginary or happening to “them” and not “us” it is much more difficult to not have tons of people die.
I'm sure that's a factor, but it seems unlikely to me it's the only one. All else being equal, going through a repetitive cycle of pain/craving and relief throughout recovery seems likely to encourage addiction as well. Which of course isn't to say that everyone who experiences that will become addicted, or that those who do won't skew toward those who are facing other difficulties in life, but from what I've read it does have an effect. And it fits my common sense, not that one should rely on that in absence of real evidence.
My point is limiting access to opioids isn't effective at treating addiction. Yet that's how our society has chosen to respond to drug addiction across the board, from opioids to alcohol.
The war on drugs doesn't work. And we've had 50 years now to see that. It's sad that the extent of our national conversation about the opioid epidemic is a soap opera about the Sackler family. There will be no front page articles on HN about actually treating addiction.
Well, yes for opiates I believe that's largely true. But I will say that as somebody going through chronic pain and anxiety for the first time, I can definitely see how my meds for those respective conditions could lead to a dependency despite an otherwise good social/support network and job.
This is very true. One needs to consider both physical addiction and psychological addiction.
If you give 100 people high doses of Oxycotin for a month, all 100 will exhibit withdrawal symptoms when the drug is stopped. However, 80 of those will probably suffer through it and not crave the drug after that, 17 will willingly continue to use the drug to avoid the withdrawal symptoms and 3 will (if possible) escalate the dose to the point they care about nothing else.
That's the psychological part of it.
And yes, I made those numbers up, but you get the point.
I am curious if there actually are any laws relevant to this situation. As far as I can tell, this is exactly like Walmart or BigBoxCo pushing their own brands. It's not illegal and, generally, it's not even a bad thing for the consumer (in the short term).
It really feels like most of the people taking issue with this are doing so because of their personal sentiments rather than legality.
Walmart has an interesting approach. They let whichever supplier has the best sales in a category design the shelving layouts for ALL suppliers in that category. If you abuse your rights you lose your category captain status. That means if Pepsi has the best sales they decide where Coke goes on the shelf. Pretty clever.
At one point when coffee wasn’t a big section, the category captain of coffee actually helped bring in competitors to increase the overall size of the shelf space and thus attract more passing customers.
It's a similar problem to why we have antitrust laws.
If this was you or I, there wouldn't be a problem. If you are the only / pretty much the only store used then it (to me) would clearly be a problem for consumers. You'd be using your monopoly in one area (marketplace) to benefit you elsewhere (selling USB cables) rather than competing on a level playing field.
In between it becomes trickier. At what point are they too big? How dominant would they need to be?
I think there are differences to physical stores partly due to scale. If a shelf has 10 different variations of basically the same thing that's the equivalent of all products being on the front of the search results. If there are hundreds, then the ranking becomes vital.
I have lukewarm feelings on the issue, but the difference to me is that BigBoxCo isn't selling counterfeit products in their stores, which means their brands have to compete on price/quality with the rest of the store, even if they are "pushed". With Amazon, the presence of counterfeit items, especially due to shared inventory, etc. means that even if I wanted another brand, I can't guarantee that I will even get a genuine item. This gives Amazon brands a huge advantage they wouldn't have at a big box store.
I think it's downvotes because Amazon is not a store, it's a marketplace. And it's well different than BigBox because there is way less capital outlay for both property and goods.
I think their point is simply that "it's their store" - and to be brutally honest, I agree.
Two not-entirely-random examples of similar behaviour:
Supermarkets place their own brand merchandise where they feel it'll sell best. Undeniably good business, and certainly no reason for concern.
Perhaps more questionably, but bare with me - Google place AMP content, which is to say content they have made their product by merit of some ToS/caching slight of hand, front and center. Is it exactly the same as what Amazon are doing? Well, no. Is it placing content they want consumed above other content irrespective of merit or consumer benefit? Probably.
Similarly Amazon are doing what businesses do and promoting their most profitable products, straddling both the above examples. Whether it's best for the customers is open to debate, but it doesn't change that it's entirety their prerogative.
Yeah, the search vs shop tension is the big question.
The difference being that Google are ostensibly a search engine, who are looking to monetize and leverage their ubiquity - Amazon are a book store grown to titanic proportions looking to maximize profits.
The same, but different.
I fully support Amazon's divergent empire being broken up into sperate companies, but for the moment Amazon.com - the online marketplace - is still an internet shopfront.
That just sends the message that the rich can get rich by ruining the lives of however many thousands of people and will just seek new ways to get rich by ruining the lives of however many thousands of people.
that is, the important thing is directing resources at preventing and treating opioid addictions and ODs, and if there's any justice the entire Sackler family fortune would be used to do so. Fortunately, these two goals are not in conflict, the Sackler's have a net worth upwards of $13 billion, which would be quite helpful resources to direct at preventing and treating opioid addiction and health effects.
13 billion won't be nearly enough. The damage to people, to families, and to communities has been extensive. And it's a big problem in most counties across all 50 states.
But also the Sacklers are only like 8% of the problem. All the rest of the opioids, (92%), came from other companies. So, theoretically, if we confiscated all of the wealth of all of the owners and stockholders in all of these companies we'd get the money we need to at least ameliorate some of the carnage. Because we'd have at least 90% more than we'd have by just confiscating the Sackler wealth alone.
All that's just theory though. I don't even know if it's possible to hold ownership responsible? Because wouldn't that put people who buy stock in whatever company at risk if the company was doing something sufficiently untoward?
Purdue never prescribed opioids to anyone. They only sold them to hospitals and doctors, after the FDA let them do it. Not sure what message punishing them is supposed to send?
But I get it. Someone dies and it’s the drug dealers fault, and punishing them will make everyone feel better. Except it doesn’t do anything about the actual problem (opioid addiction).
It feels to me like the elation here is because the Sacklers are rich and people really don’t like that, rather than any sort of victory in combating opiate addiction.
Please remember that Purdue were the ones who marketed Oxycontin on the premise of one dose for 12-hour pain relief.
When they learned doctors were prescribing it for eight hours, they tried to "re-train" them to use the "proper" (read: their) dosing recommendation, because there were cheaper drugs with six of eight hour doses.
Sure, the doctors made the prescriptions, but you, and I, and everyone who thinks honestly about it for two and a half seconds realizes that no matter what the recommendation is, enough people who are in bad enough pain to be prescribed oxy will take it when they need it, recommendation be damned, that to have issued that recommendation in the first place was an act of bad faith.
They marketed the drug on a lie in order to get doctors to prescribe it, which fueled — if not created — an epidemic, which has killed tens of thousands of people. Their hands are not clean, here.
We should be. We should also be going after the distributors who were shipping millions of pills a year to small towns with a population of 6000. This is not an either/or situation, there is plenty of blame to go around.
> that recommendation in the first place was an act of bad faith.
This seems a bit of a stretch to me.
The doctors prescribed it, even given readily available research, the FDA approved it, knowing full well this was a risk. Those are the guilty parties here. Purdue filled their role just fine, they just happened to be making an opiate and so they're getting chased for it now because China is dumping fentanyl. Pretty ridiculous really.
I do not agree with him, but I think you're making a much more salient point indirectly.
Public policy that can be readily manipulated by bad actors (as the drug industry is certainly full of) should not be used as the final say for anything. Systems need to be able to tolerate: corruption, false information, and true but misleading information. Our regulatory systems in general seem to struggle with any of the above. If "health authorities" (to avoid naming any particular organization) can only effectively screen out good actors inadvertently engaged in bad behavior, then they're effectively useless - because bad actors do exist, and they're vastly more dangerous than the former.
It's not just the WHO. The same arguments apply equally to e.g. the FDA who played a similar role in this by rubber stamping the drugs. And similarly it also doesn't just end at the FDA as there are numerous smaller level regulatory agencies and operators involved on the medical side. Even non-regulatory agencies, such as the American Medical Association also showed themselves to be somewhat useless by decisions such as choosing to play into lobbying for consideration of pain as a vital sign.
The same is even true of things such as the FAA and the aviation industry where there were analogous issues. All of this is emphasizing that these organizations, which can be quite the burden on 'good players', are ultimately ineffective at restraining bad players which (I suppose depending on your philosophical view) should be their primary purview.
The FDA does quite a bit to keep both good and bad actors in check. They are not perfect, but for example they regularly track down outbreaks of food born illnesses in ways the producers simply can’t. https://www.fda.gov/safety/recalls-market-withdrawals-safety...
Making wide sweeping statements based on very specific issues simply demonstrates ignorance of how these organizations actually interact with the systems they regulate.
PS: As to FDA ‘rubber stamping’ the drug, using opioids for treatment of end of life cancer pain is perfectly reasonable. OxyContin is just one of a huge list of similar drugs that have been in use long before this outbreak. It’s not the chemical that’s the problem is the other actions by the company.
Oxycontin wasn't just rubber stamped for end of life cancer treatment. You're referring to when the FDA decided to further expand Purdue's drug rights enabling it to be used on 11-16 year olds. Purdue, when seeking this approval, were already facing criminal charges for their marketing of oxycontin. And the FDA's decision in expanding treatment to kids was primarily driven by them asking Purdue to carry out studies evaluating the safety and effectiveness of oxycontin on kids, because they seem like trustworthy guys. Lo, and behold, Purdue's carried out some "studies" and told the FDA it's just awesome. And the FDA said, "Oh okay, cool." [1]
And this story repeats over and over since our entire regulatory system is, when it comes to the big and influential players from Purdue to Boeing, mostly just glorified self regulation. And that leads to a worst of both worlds scenario. We get the lack of oversight inherent in self regulation, yet it's paired with an undue faith in our regulatory systems as many people don't understand the actual regulatory processes, or lack thereof.
To be clear doctors could and had already been prescribing OxyContin and other opioids to 11 year olds. The studies where about guidelines for use not ability to prescribe. In this very specific case, the system was working correctly.
Opioids are addictive and become less effective over time. Opioids can also be a valuable tool for relief of severe pain over a short to moderate period. The actual issue is not the drug in this case it’s a drug company pushing for more scales.
PS: I have seen a friend become addicted while in cancer treatment. But, I have also been prescribed opioids after major surgery. So yes they are clearly extremely dangerous, but they can treat levels of pain that are difficult to describe.
I think you underestimate the size of the problem.
But again, the Sackler's are only 8% of the problem. So if you go after them, and the owners and stockholders of the companies that provided the other 92% of opioids, and the doctors who wrote the prescriptions in bad faith, you probably come up with an amount of money that could make a dent.
The resources from the lawsuits are designated to go toward preventing and treatment of opioid addiction. The purpose of the lawsuits, I think, is not to punish manufacturers but to fund needed health programs.
And if they had continued access to those pills they wouldn't be hitting the black market, getting fentanyl, and dying. Eventually, with support and help, they could start to wean off directly or with methadone or suboxone. But no, we can't have that. Instead our government and society prefers to let people die and then pretends like dismantling one company and taking their money is going to help. It's not going to help a single addict.
They're not zero, but single digit percent times single digit percent is generally considered a small percent. The math works out to 0.32-0.72% total, taking either the low end of both ranges or the high end of both. I think anyone should agree that in an absolute mathematical sense, 0.3-0.7% is a "low percent."
In this specific context? Sure, it's subjective and reasonable people can disagree.
Tl;dr: About 80% of heroin users started on prescription opioids. This sounds bad, but actually the conversion rate from opioid on-label use to abuse is pretty low and the conversion from pill abuse to heroin is even lower.
* Rate of conversion from on-label opioid prescription to addiction ("opioid use disorder") is lowish; this metastudy[1] claims 8-12% on average, but the 95% CI is anywhere from 3-17% and I'm not sure what they're measuring the percentage of (i.e., long-term prescriptions might both be more represented in the data and have higher conversion rates) — I doubt 8-12% of people who get 3 days of vicodin for their wisdom teeth extraction develop an opiate use disorder. They also point out that some studies showed misuse rates below 1% and "significant variability remains in this literature." We should expect these rates to fall as tighter prescription quantities from the last several years impact "leftover" pill rates.
* The rate of conversion from prescription opioid addiction to heroin is low; 4-6% per the government.[2]
* Overall opioid-involved overdose annual deaths in the US rose from 8000 in 1999 to 47600 in 2017; of those, the prescription-involved number rose by 13600 deaths (+300%), from 3400. Conversely, the non-prescription-involved deaths rose from by 26000 deaths (+465%), from 4600.[3](Figs 3-4) 26000/39600 = ~66%. (The population has also grown about 17% over that period, but that doesn't change the calculus too much.)
* Therefore: the overall growth pattern in opioid deaths in the last two decades is largely accounted for by heroin and other non-Rx use, which are a tiny population with a very high (and rising) death rate. The rising death rate is mostly due to the surge in black market sale of fentanyl as "heroin."[3] (esp. figures 4-5 and associated text) (Perhaps as a result of DEA and other restriction on the supply of the relatively safer, but less dense, heroin, and restriction on supply of the vastly safer prescription opioids.)
* Notably, the number of non-fentanyl-involved prescription opioid-involved deaths has actually been in decline since 2011![3] (fig. 4.), despite a rising population. Let me echo that since it's really important: prescription opioid-involved overdose, ex fentanyl, both in number and per capita rate, HAS BEEN IN DECLINE SINCE 2011! Why doesn't any news story on opioids in the US headline with that? The primary reason the overall prescription opiate-involved death rate hasn't tracked that decline is rising co-(ab)use with illicit fentanyl, and its relatively higher death rate.
If we could wave a magic wand and wipe (illicit) fentanyl off the earth, our annual opioid death rate would fall by something like half.
That magic wand is allowing doctors to prescribe safe opiates to addicts, providing safe places they can use, and providing support and means to quit. It's not magic. Many places around the world are doing it. Eliminate the black market and you eliminate those deaths. Our government and society are simply not interested in eliminating those deaths. Places like Portugal, Switzerland, Vancouver bc have been waving that magic wand for decades.
Sure, that's one harm reduction technique that works as long as doctors (and Governments) are willing to prescribe the amount of opioids that addicts want. I touched on the same technique in an earlier, longer form version of the same comment (in response to a slightly different thread the other day):
Given we don't have a magic wand, what can we do? Obviously we can't stop fentanyl
from entering our borders or being synthesized illicitly here. We can (and have)
leaned on illicit fentanyl-producing countries like China and Mexico to make those
businesses less lucrative. We can do harm reduction things for the vulnerable
population — which is mostly heroin users. We could legalize heroin with a
prescription for existing addicts?
Harm reduction stuff: Provide free/cheap testing for fentanyl adulteration? Make
naloxone available without prescription, on the shelf, for cheap or free, and
encourage businesses and residents to keep some around, even if they aren't users and
don't know any users? Maybe provide monitored, safe injection sites where addicts
overdosing can be assisted immediately if needed but are not arrested or forced into
any overbearing programs. Maybe even supply quality- and quantity-controlled heroin
to these addicts for use on-site to reduce likelihood of overdose and even allow
people to taper off if they want to.
It's still nearly equally magical to wishing fentanyl away in that effecting such a policy is incredibly difficult politically (US, anyway).
Pick any level of government. This doesn't really have populist mandate even in Blue states and you can be damn sure Republican Governors are going to reject any "give drugs to addicts" proposal on their desk, if it even makes it through state legislatures. Meanwhile, Congress is stalled with a Democrat-controlled house and a Republican Senate that won't pass any laws. I don't see Trump taking ... positive executive action on this, either.
Maybe some harm reduction can be done at the municipal level, but that probably leaves some of the worst hit parts of the country (rural areas in Red states) without help.
Yeah we're going to continue to kill hundreds of thousands more people before this will even start to be discussed by politicians because our politicians are incredibly stupid and closed minded. But maybe if enough people die, things will change, possibly through voter referendums. I never thought legal marijuana would be a thing, yet it is (federal laws notwithstanding). Once people in states with referendums get tired of their friends and family dying by the thousands, maybe they'll act. Current politicians sure won't. But these primitive morons will eventually die themselves, hopefully sooner rather than later, and hopefully their replacements will be slightly less idiotic, more pragmatic, or perhaps even compassionate. Stranger things have happened. That's why we must continue to advocate for the only solution that has been proven to work despite the challenge of getting it implemented. One day we will look upon the drug war and its perpetrators the way we look at Nazis now. Or our children or grandchildren will. That I'm certain of. How far down the line, no one knows.
Sorry, that wasn't really the idea I was trying to express at all. The two points are "using opioids as prescribed by Dr" => "using the same opioids in a way that was not prescribed."
I know off-label is specific industry jargon and it doesn't mean the way I tried to use it; sorry for the confusion.
Totally agree that chronic pain is a hard problem and tolerance effects make opioids a non-ideal long term solution. That said, I am neither a Doctor nor a researcher in the pharma industry so I don't have a lot of helpful suggestions for anything better than opioids today.
Doesn’t show any convincing evidence of hacking into election systems, or what the result of the hack was. At best I can see that people suspect WikiLeaks is connected to Russian intelligence and that the Hillary email leak originated with them, but there’s little evidence to support that. Besides, that’s not hacking any computer systems related to the election.
Were any details on the mechanisms they used released? The article is paywalled for me, but any article I've read only states that it was "concluded". Like, what attack vector did they use, do all states use common voting machines?
EDIT: Was able to read it, and they don't even suggest any evidence. As usual, we have to take it on faith. Sorry, my faith cup has runneth out.
As usual, lots of downvotes, but no one is physically capable of posting an excerpt of actual substantial, detailed, purely fact-based evidence, but rather only narrative based conspiratorial stories and speculation built on top of some relatively minor facts, that relies heavily on the human mind's ability to invisibly fill in the gaps with "common sense" (aka heuristics) where actual factual information is missing.
>It concluded that while there was no evidence that any votes were changed in actual voting machines, “Russian cyberactors were in a position to delete or change voter data” in the Illinois voter database. The committee found no evidence that they did so.
Would you accept a Special Council investigation leading to indictments and sentences, or a joint investigation by the US intelligence community, as a good enough source?
Of course not. You need physical evidence of some kind or something that the public computer experts can verify themselves isn’t faked for political gain.
They've also been associated with places like Finland, Israel, France, and the UK. Capital controls are just a necessary enforcement mechanism for attempts to control the exchange rate of a currency.
Only if they sell the debt to a creditor (hospitals and doctors can’t garnish wages) sue you, win, and pursue the judgement. And then they can only take from your disposable income (after rent, food, other bills, etc.)
And you can wipe out all of it by filing bankruptcy.
Do you think doctors should be criminally prosecuted, along with the AMA? After all, they allow the prescription of OxyContin and physicians are the only ones who actually prescribe them. The FDA also regulates the sale of OxyContin.
If doctors prescribe harmful drugs without evaluating their efficacy and without questioning the marketing, aren’t they responsible ? They are ultimately the ones “pushing” OxyContin after all.
Should doctors not be allowed to prescribe OxyContin?
Very weird to me that the focus is on the people least responsible. Doctors, FDA, AMA all have to approve the prescription of OxyContin. The whole point of the FDA is to evaluate drugs using science instead of marketing.
If one accepts that Purdue is the party most responsible for the opioid crisis then one must consider doctors, the AMA, and the FDA all incompetent idiots, right?
OxyContin is a perfectly legitimate drug and it is reasonable for the FDA and AMA to sign off on its use. What isn't legitimate is doctors and pharmacists prescribing the drug over and over again when there was no reason to.
> If doctors prescribe harmful drugs without evaluating their efficacy
Doctors are highly trained specialists with limited time, and no, their job isn't to evaluate drug efficacy and safety. That's the FDA's job, and yes, to some extent the FDA failed here.
