Transcript
Rachel Stewart: Hi everyone, in today's episode we will discuss drug use and a bit of sex. Very interesting, but just a heads up!
Sound of phone ringing
Chris and Rachel (on the phone) -
Rachel: Hello?
Chris: Hey Rachel, it's Chris. Can you hear me?
Rachel: Yes, loud and clear.
Chris: Ok, cool. So you know that I'm doing some reporting on the opioid crisis in the US.
Rachel: Yeah.
Chris: So there's one of my sources who tells me, 'Look here in the US, we are starting to get a grip on this, but pharmaceutical companies are doing the same in other parts of the world.
Rachel: Really?
Chris: Yeah…
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Rachel: A few months ago our producer Chris Caurla said he had found some interesting leads in a story he was covering. Codeine, oxycodone, heroin - they're all derived from the morphine molecule found in the opium plant. And today we know that indulging in its power can have life-shattering consequences. But about 30 years ago the pharmaceutical industry in the United States started selling the idea that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Purdue Advertisement: They don't wear out, they go on working, they do not have serious medical side effects.
Rachel: These marketing campaigns played a huge role in fuelling an opioid crisis that has killed more than half a million Americans – that's more than have died in all the wars the US has fought since World War 2. But that's not the end of the story. Right now, another opioid crisis is playing out on the other side of the world.
Activist (shouting): Somebody from this year, at the age of 8 years or 9 years, he's taking, he's taking tramadol and gum, as you can see. Which is alarming. And it's a time bomb! You understand? It's a time bomb.
Rachel: The US opioid crisis has been pretty extensively reported. I've seen like 3 Netflix documentaries on it. But this other case seems to be flying under the radar. So is it a really big deal?
Chris and Rachel (on the phone) -
Chris: Yes, it is. I mean, it's a different situation, but it's a big deal. Opioids in this part of the world, they're also causing worker exploitation, there's addiction among kids, and they're used by terrorist groups, and soldiers…
Rachel: And it's also not the beginning of the story. Following the trail of this new crisis will lead us right back to the very place our story took hold in the first place. A place you might not have expected… I’m Rachel Stewart and this is Don’t Drink the Milk - the show that makes you stop and look twice at the things around you, uncovering unexpected connections between countries and cultures, the past and the present.
Music
Phone ringing
Different voices: "развален телефон", "Chinese whispers", "telefono senza fili", "telephone", "kulaktan kulağa", "Stille Post", "испорченный телефон", "téléphone arabe", "głuchy telefon", "Russian scandal", "Don't drink the milk"
Dial tone, sound of hanging up phone
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Rachel: While Chris was telling me this, my gut reaction was: how do these kinds of drugs end up being created in the first place? Like, was it intentional? Did these people know what they were letting loose on the world? Before we follow the most recent twists in this torrid tale, it's probably useful to know how we got here.
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Rachel: People all around the world have been using the bright red poppy flower to unleash euphoria and dull pain for thousands of years. But this plant's chemical powers come at a heavy price: all-consuming addiction. Opium has been cultivated, traded and banned, wars were fought over it, and its medicinal properties have been put under the microscope again and again until...
Lab sounds
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Rachel: Just after the turn of the 19th century, German chemist Friedrich Sertürner successfully isolated the active ingredient in opium. He named it morphine, after Morpheus the god of dreams.
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Rachel: By the end of the 19th century there was another breakthrough, also in Germany. This pharmaceutical company Bayer - you might know them as Bayer - they developed a new synthetic drug from morphine that was up to 10 times as potent. But, according to them, it was way less addictive. The drug in question?
Advertisement: From the makers of Aspirin. Introducing… HEROIN. For non-addictive relief from the coughs, since 1898. Now available in the United States and Canada.
Rachel: Yep, heroin was lauded as safe and effective pain relief medication, sold over the counter and even encouraged as a cough suppressant. Ironically, it was also used to treat morphine addiction. But in the end, this was just a stronger drug that would also lead to crippling dependency. Regulation eventually kicked in and by 1924 the drug was totally outlawed in the US. However, there were plenty more opioids being developed around the world. For a long time they were seen as effective but dangerous, until an important cultural shift totally changed the playing field…
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Rachel: A lot of countries had been influenced by this Christian idea of pain and suffering being a natural part of life, even glorified. Mother Teresa wouldn't touch pain killers - she believed that suffering made you closer to God. But by the 1970s, attitudes to pain were changing.
Dame Cicely Saunders: You need to give your drugs regularly, you need to give them balanced to the patient, there's no standard dose, and you need to be alert to the whole person.
Rachel: That was Cicely Saunders, an English nurse who did a lot of work on medical ethics and palliative care. Pain was now considered dehumanizing - and something that should be avoided at all costs. But this was still mostly focusing on end-of-life care - pain relief to preserve the dignity of terminal patients. In these cases, concerns about addiction are secondary because, well, the patient probably won't live long enough to deal with that. What we then see emerging in places like the US went one step further. And this is the point in the story where Chris first started digging.
Andrew Kolodny: Many people become doctors because they truly want to help patients. And when you're hearing from your hospitals, from professional societies, from pain specialists eminent in the field of pain medicine, even state medical boards that regulate doctors, if you're hearing from everyone that you should prescribe more opioids, you start to believe them.
Chris: That’s Andrew Kolodny, Medical Director for the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative. He was among the first doctors to sound the alarm in the US once he noticed how many patients were coming in with addictions to prescription opioids.
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Chris: Prescriptions of a brand that was pushing a new message: that doctors should be prescribing way more pain relief drugs. Not just for terminal or even very ill patients, but basically for everyone.
Andrew: The campaign that they launched disguised drug company marketing to increase sales as advocacy to ease suffering, advocacy to treat pain better.
Chris: Advocacy to treat pain, basically the idea that pain is the enemy. That's really what changed here.
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Chris: Opioids were recommended way more aggressively, like for a simple back pain. Maybe you've heard of the company most responsible for this push:
TV news montage: Purdue Pharma, Purdue Pharma, Purdue Pharma
Chris: And maybe you've heard of the family behind Purdue Pharma: the Sacklers. They made their fortune by creating aggressive marketing campaigns for medicines. Then they bought a pharmaceutical company - Purdue - and in the nineties, they put to work those same strategies to promote a new opioid they'd developed: OxyContin. This was by no means the first opioid marketed as less addictive.
Sound of record rewinding
Heroin advertisement again: Heroin - for non-addictive relief from the coughs, since 1898.
Sound of record rewinding
Chris: But this time, Purdue argued, they had cracked the code.
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Oxycontin ad: I got my life back now, now I can enjoy every day. Since I have been on this new pain medication I have not missed one day of work. It was the first time I had felt normal.
Chris: OxyContin's pills had a special coating that forced the opioid in the pill, called Oxycodone (that's where "Oxy" comes from) to be released continuously (that's the "Contin" bit). In other words, whoever took the pill would not feel its effects all at once, but over several hours. This, they claimed, made their drug much less addictive.
Sound of TV turning on
Purdue ad: Some patients may be afraid of taking opioids because they are perceived as too strong, or addictive. But that's far from actual fact.
Andrew: The truth is, it never really made much sense. These are drugs that produce effects almost identical to heroin. How could you prescribe heroin-like drugs for weeks and months and years and nobody would get addicted? That really shouldn't have made sense to anyone. But unfortunately, nobody was saying 'the Emperor has no clothes on'.
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Chris: Purdue gave doctors free samples of OxyContin, invited them to resorts for all-expenses-paid conferences on the “undertreatment of pain", it financed research, conducted flawed studies, co-authored newspaper articles… all to add legitimacy to these claims: pain is the enemy, opioids are underused, and fears of addiction are exaggerated.
Andrew: If the messages had just come to doctors from the attractive sales reps who visit us in our offices, we would have been less gullible. But it wasn't just the attractive sales reps telling us these messages. We heard it from the professional societies that specialize in caring for pain. We heard it from government entities. We heard it from pain specialists, eminent in the field of pain medicine that we need to be prescribing more.
Chris: Are we still seeing the same or have things changed ever since?
Andrew: In the United States, prescribing has started to come down. We're still massively over-prescribing, but the trends in recent years have been in the correct direction. But in many parts of the world, the prescribing is now going up for the same reason it went up in the United States, because that same multifaceted campaign, that same playbook is being used here at the United Nations.
Chris: This brings us back to the other crisis we mentioned before.
Music changes
Sound of opening map
Chris: If I just look at this map from the World Health Organization…
Chris doing research: So we have Togo, Nigeria…
Chris: It's pretty clear that opioids are a problem pretty much everywhere.
Chris doing research: …Philippines, Thailand.
Chris: Prescriptions are rising quickly across Europe.
Chris doing research: …changes in Opioid-related admissions to hospitals – England, France, Switzerland…
Chris: While trafficking is a problem in South Asia, the Middle East, and especially… North and West Africa. In its latest report, the WHO calls this crisis in Africa "a second opioid epidemic". The most abused opioid here is called…
Chris doing research: Tramadol, tramadol, tramadol.
Chris: Tramadol.
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Chris: Like other opioids, tramadol was invented as a painkiller. But unlike other opioids, in high doses tramadol provides an energy boost. This explains why it's apparently fuelling worker exploitation —
Chris doing research: This article they call it the poor man's cocaine.
Chris: And even conflicts —
Chris doing research: And here's the BBC saying, "Tramadol found among Boko Haram fighters".
Chris: But studies and numbers on this problem, in this part of the world, are hard to come by. I needed to talk to someone on the ground…
Sounds of phone call with Samson Adeleke -
Samson Adeleke: Hello!
Chris: Hello. How's it going?
Samson: I'm good, and you?
Chris: I'm good. Nice to meet you…
Chris: This is Samson Adeleke, a colleague from Nigeria. We got in touch to see how bad the situation is there.
Samson: As a Nigerian who have lived and worked as a journalist in Ghana, Kenya and have traveled across different African countries, there is not a single capital in Africa where people are not using tramadol on a daily basis.
Chris: I don't have official numbers on all the capitals in Africa, but there's no denying that tramadol use is through the roof in the place Samson has traveled to - Kano state, which is a regional hub in Nigeria. And many of the users there… are kids.
Samson: While filming, I observed many children searching through garbage. They were under the influence of tramadol, because-
Chis: So you could tell?
Samson: Exactly, looking from their eyeballs, I could tell that these guys were under the influence of tramadol.
Chis: And what are they doing with the items they are finding? Why are they searching through garbage?
Samson: They are searching the garbage to resell the items, make the money, then use the money to buy more tramadol, and continue the following day.
Music note
Chris: Local activist Abubakar Maitumaki, told Samson how bad the situation is getting.
Music
Abubakar Maitumaki: We need change. It's not good for your health, it's not good for your future, it's not good for your life entirely, you know? Somebody from this year, at the age of 8 years to 9 years he's taking, he's taking tramadol and gum as you can see. And it's a time bomb, you understand? It's a time bomb!
Chris: Abubakar speaks with anger and passion for his cause. He's doing the best he can, but the situation is awful.
Abubakar: We are not happy, we are not happy, we are not happy. There is a lot of them that need rehab, and we have the rehab, and it's expensive! You understand? So we cannot be able to take them to rehab, which, most of them will end up in crime. That's why we have issues of banditry, we have issues of kidnapping, we have issues of killing! Last two months somebody that takes tramadol, he killed his father.
Chris: Samson also talked with people who rely on tramadol to do their job - usually, manual labor where they need to push through the pain…
Naziru [speaking in Hausa]: You have also seen the work we do in the market which is also strenuous, and day after day we are getting weaker. To continue, you have to use a supplement. That is why some people use tramadol.
Chris: Naziru loads trucks for a living. It's back-breaking work that he says he couldn't do without tramadol. And he's not alone.
Samson: During my interview with Naziru, he informed me that out of the 15 people who work with him, 10 use tramadol.
Music note
Chris: I decided to also reach out to someone who has seen the crisis unfold from a different perspective.
Sound of setting up camera, setting up interview
Chris: Wale Olawale is a pharmacist.
Wale Olawale: Over the years, it has become just easier to access tramadol even without the prescription, because a couple of things. Regulators are not doing their job.
Chris: Why?
Wale: I don't know. Maybe they're understaffed. Maybe it's corruption. It could be a bunch of things, but regulators are not doing their jobs. That is a given. But another reason is tramadol has just flooded the market so much and in Nigeria, quite frankly, a lot of medications are sold without prescriptions. So tramadol is one of those drugs that can be sold in some pharmacies without prescriptions.
Chris: So people can walk in and buy it without having a prescription?
Wale: In some pharmacies, yes.
Chris: And were they coming only for pain or also for other reasons?
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Wale: Sometimes you don't know. Sometimes you don't know. Pain can be the excuse. The non-medical use of tramadol has been on the rise. So three points. One is a lot of young people take it to just get high because of the high effect they get from it. A second is as a way to get by for people who do hard labor. Another one that, you know, I heard of recently or I've seen recently is, people taking it as sexual enhancement, especially men, taking it for delayed ejaculation.
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Jessica Otte: The whole use of this as a sexual stimulant or whatever… I came across this paper, it was titled, "With tramadol I ride like a jaguar".
Chris: This is Jessica Otte. She is a pain and palliative care expert. Who probably didn't expect to go down this particular rabbit hole.
Jessica: It said when they measured the time to ejaculation, it was 1.24 minutes longer in the tramadol group than placebo, so it did work! It gave people an extra minute. But then when you looked at the side effects… sleepiness, pruritus which is itchiness, erectile dysfunction, nausea, headache, dry mouth, dizziness, vomiting, and constipation. So you would get an extra minute, but you would, you know, vomit or be sleepy or… And it just seemed like probably not a–
Chris: That minute….
Jessica: That minute! Is it really worth it?
Chris: Hahaha, that's the question!
Chris: I reached out to Jessica because I just wanted to know what's so special about this drug that's got a hold on so many people's lives. She is part of Therapeutics Initiative, an independent organization that researches the effectiveness of medications, like tramadol.26 There are studies out there saying that tramadol is a safe and effective pain relief medicine. But Jessica – and actually, all the experts I talked with – they don't buy it.
Jessica: There's this myth that's still perpetuated that tramadol - it's not an opiate. People reach for that as a safer alternative. I believe that's the perception.
Chris: She says this "myth" is reinforced by two misconceptions: The first is that tramadol is a strong painkiller, like stronger than standard painkillers, which are known as NSAIDs.
[Rachel: Quick note here, NSAIDs is the official medical term. It stands for nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Basically ibuprofen, paracetamol, advil… those are all NSAIDs.]
Chris: So how does tramadol compare to these painkillers?
Jessica: If you just take the big picture, probably NSAIDs are equally, if not more effective, for certain types of pain, which is kind of shocking.
Chris: And the second misconception that Jessica told me about is that tramadol is less addictive than other opioids.
Jessica: There's nothing so far that says it's less habit forming, less addicting. And then in our systematic review of other opioids versus tramadol, there was really no difference in efficacy and no difference in safety.
Chris: So her conclusion is: Tramadol isn't necessarily stronger than an Advil but can be as addictive as morphine and other opioids.30 Actually kinda the opposite of what that myth said. So where did this more positive spin come from?
Jessica: The less generous interpretation is that this is probably intentional on the part of the manufacturers to have marketed it as a safer alternative to opioids, and not acknowledge outright that it is an opioid.
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Chris: The manufacturers… Well, for as much as a third of the global supply of tramadol, the manufacturer is Grünenthal - the same company that first developed it. A company that brings us back to Germany.
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Rachel: When Chris first mentions Grünenthal, it rings a bell. That's because this is not the first scandal to taint the family-owned German pharmaceutical company. Grünenthal was founded right after World War II. Like many companies in post-war Germany, Grünenthal ended up with plenty of Nazis on their books. Take Heinrich Mückter, for example, a chemist who went from conducting horrific medical experiments on victims in concentration camps to leading Grünenthal's drug research. There he oversaw the development of new drugs - including thalidomide.
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Rachel: We've actually mentioned this one before - back in the episode about homeopathy in season 1. Here's a quick recap: In the 1950s, Grünenthal started manufacturing thalidomide. It was sold as an over-the-counter sleeping pill, under the brand name Contergan. It was touted as a wonder cure for morning sickness and completely safe for pregnant women. But soon, reports of severely deformed newborns were being linked back to the drug. Even as the evidence mounted, Grünenthal tried to keep thalidomide on the shelves. It would eventually be linked to more than 10,000 birth deformities and as many as 90,000 miscarriages. Victims say the compensation that has been paid out is insufficient. And it also took Grünenthal more than 50 years to make a public apology.
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Rachel: Today the company makes a lot of pain relief medication - including some opioids, like tramadol. We reached out to Grünenthal and they told us that last year products containing tramadol made up about 9% of their revenue.
Chris: We should also note that Grünenthal acknowledges tramadol's risk of addiction on their website31. But in other cases, the company seems to be less forthcoming.
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Chris: I've found many papers funded by Grünenthal that come to positive conclusions about tramadol. So I asked experts in the field to help me make sense of this contradiction. I reached out to 10 established pharmacologists and anesthesiologists to have a look at these papers, including Jessica Otte, the doctor you heard from earlier, and others like Matthias Behrends and Joel Lexchin. Here's what they wrote me:
[Read by Rachel]
"a garbage article from the manufacturer"
“cherry-picking articles that support the story they want to tell"
"probably ghost-written by Grünenthal"
"none of these studies should be relied upon"
Chris: The company has also directly lobbied international regulators, like the United Nations. And it has either created or funded pain advocacy groups and initiatives that push that familiar message - that pain is the ultimate enemy and that opioids like tramadol are the cure. Experts I talked with, like Wale and Andrew, also noticed these efforts.
Wale: A lot of the tramadol marketing that is pushed by Grunenthal, primarily, they highlight the benefits of tramadol and downplay its problems.
Andrew: What we've seen is that opioid manufacturers and the pain organizations that they're giving money to, are promoting the idea that opioid consumption in the United States and Germany and Canada is adequate, and that other parts of the world need to be consuming as much opioids as in these other countries.
Rachel: Grünenthal told us that their payments are not meant to influence institutions to market their products. They say they are committed to publishing information about the collaboration with stakeholders to show that their interactions are ethical and transparent. They also say their products are developed, commercialized and distributed in line with the highest ethical and scientific standards. And, they strive to ensure that patients who need opioid-based pain relief are not denied access.
Rachel: We'll be back in just a moment.
[Trailer for Cautionary Tales]
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Chris: I figured if a drug is being so heavily abused somewhere, surely some regulations would be put in place. And Wale, the pharmacist, confirms that Nigeria does actually restrict tramadol use.
Wale: So tramadol is scheduled in Nigeria nationally.
Chris: By the way, "scheduling" is drug policy jargon for controlling or restricting.
Wale: What happens is tramadol is not scheduled in Cameroon, for example. It's not scheduled in Togo, Niger, countries surrounding Nigeria, and a lot of tramadol gets smuggled into Nigeria through these countries.
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Chris: One country alone cannot stop tramadol from flooding its streets, it needs the cooperation of its neighbors. And from further afield, where the drugs are actually made.
Shadrach Haruna: Tramadol has really taken us by storm.
Chris: This is Shadrach Haruna, secretary of the agency responsible for tackling drug abuse in Nigeria.
Shadrach: In fact, the huge cache of tramadol coming from Asian countries and others has really overwhelmed us.
Chris: Tramadol coming from Asian countries, not Germany. In fact, Grünenthal told us that the company (quote) "does not distribute Tramadol in West Africa". This doesn't align with what other people on the ground told us. But, in any case, Haruna confirms that a lot of the tramadol sold on the streets in Nigeria is high-dose pills, above the legal limit, mostly made in India and other South Asian countries. So Grünenthal doesn't make these pills and is not making money on these sales. But several experts told me that the company's efforts to stop international regulations are making it harder to crack down on the illegal trade of any type of tramadol.
Shadrach: We don't manufacture tramadol in Nigeria! Those who are manufacturing and allowing them to be shipped into the country in high dosages should also be seen to be controlled.
Chris: This decision, however, on whether a drug is scheduled internationally, is not taken in the Nigerian capital, Abuja. But nearly 3,000 miles away in the Austrian capital, Vienna.
Sound of plane taking off, airport announcements
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Chris: So I have just arrived in Vienna with far too little sleep, far too many questions and just a little bit of optimism. Here it's nice and sunny. And I'm heading to the conference where I hope I'll find some answers, so let's see…
Sound of Chris ordering a Wiener Schnitzel
Mobile phone ringing
Rachel: Hey Chris!
Chris: Hey Rachel.
Rachel: How is it going in Vienna?
Chris: All good. It's been hectic…
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Chris: I wanted to understand, first of all, how the process works and so first I talked with Danilo Balotta and he's an expert in drug policy.
Danilo Balotta: This is the Commission on Narcotic Drugs. This is the yearly, big event. All delegations of member states meet for a week discussing resolutions, adopting political documents. So it's the topic moment of the year in drug policy.
Chris: He told me that the decisions taken here at the UN, are very important because they are generally followed by every country.
Danilo: So if a substance is scheduled in this room, then soon it will be scheduled at the national level.
Rachel: Ok and you said before the word "scheduling" basically means the same as restricting. But if a drug is scheduled at this level, does that mean it's basically banned completely?
Chris: Not really. It's not so much about banning as it is indeed about restricting. So what it means is really that they're trying to restrict their access, just depending on how dangerous or useful they are.
Rachel: Ok.
Chris: So it's almost like a tier system. Some drugs are very addictive and don't have any medical use, so they are placed on a strict schedule.
Danilo: That would be cocaine. These drugs that do not have medical use are very strict. But those that have medical use, they belong to some schedules that are less rigid.
Chris: On the other side, drugs like Valium or Xanax - yes, they are abused, but they aren't so addictive or dangerous, so the scheduling is less rigid. But tramadol – the most abused opioid in many countries38 – is not scheduled at all.
Rachel: Not at all?
Chris: Zero. I asked that to UN representatives and they told me that in 2018 the WHO recommended that regulators "continue to keep tramadol under surveillance". But in the last six years, no decision has been made.
Rachel: But why would they be so reluctant to schedule tramadol specifically?
Chris: That's for day 2 of the conference.
Chris: I meet with Jason White, he's the chair of the committee that makes those drug scheduling recommendations, so if anyone should know, that's him.
Jason White: So the principles are whether the drug has the potential to result in abuse, that it has the capacity to produce dependence, and the third aspect is whether it's likely to cause a public health problem of significance.
Chris: Tramadol seems to meet all these requirements, so why isn't it scheduled in at least one of the lower categories?
Jason: Tramadol is definitely a drug where it's a balance between the problems caused by the drug and the importance of the medical use. In many countries, there is a very strong reliance on use of tramadol for pain relief, such as in palliative care.
Chris: Some patients can't use common painkillers like ibuprofen or Advil due to their conditions, allergies, or other reasons. They need opioids.
Jason: Now, tramadol is not the best available opioid drug to use. Morphine is a better drug to use. But we're talking about situations where morphine can't be obtained, where tramadol might be the only viable alternative opioid drug.
Chris: In other words, better to have a less effective opioid than no opioid at all. But not everyone is convinced by this argument. Here's Andrew, the doctor who saw a different crisis playing out in the US…
Andrew: The idea that because morphine consumption is low in a particular country, that we should have tramadol flooded on the street and sold by street vendors so that people will have access to a pain reliever, that argument makes no sense. If you're concerned about inadequate access to morphine, you work on that problem, or you work to increase access to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. You don't leave tramadol, which is a public health problem.
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Chris: Tramadol can numb your pain, give you that extra energy to push you through another day at a job that's killing you, or maybe even give you that extra minute. But, like all the magic pills that came before, tramadol has a dark side. It can be as addictive as other opioids, and often less effective.
Jessica: There's nothing so far that says it's less habit-forming, less addicting.
Chris: The research sponsored by Grünenthal that says otherwise doesn't square with what experts told us… or with what we saw on the ground.
Abubakar: At the age of 8 years to 9 years, he's taking tramadol. And it's a time bomb!
Chris: Yet, tramadol is still not scheduled internationally. Regulators fear that those in need won't have access to any opioids. Or that people addicted will switch to an even more powerful drug. But others worry that these delicate considerations are being influenced by opioid producers.
Andrew: In their efforts to increase opioid prescribing globally, they're pushing messages about opioids that are false - the same messages that we heard in the United States that led to our opioid crisis.
Chris: And if history is any lesson, for profit companies can't always be trusted to separate marketing from medicine.
Shadrach: We need to control it to the extent that we don't have our youth destroyed.
Wale: A lot more people are going to get addicted and it is going to get to a point where the addiction problem is going to result in a lot of social issues. I think it's best to nip it in the bud right now, right now before it becomes too crazy.
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Rachel: This episode of Don't Drink the Milk was produced by Chris Caurla. (Columbia University has just snapped him up, so we're wishing you all the best Chris from your podcast pals!) Sam Baker is our eagle-eyed editor. Our team also includes Charli Shield, and Katharina Abel took care of fact-checking. See you in two weeks for the story of one familiar thing that's telling all your secrets…