According to the CDC, between 1999 and 2017 over 218,000 Americans died due to overdoses from prescription opioids–more than 3 times the number of Americans killed in Vietnam. Today on Leonard Lopate at Large, join Leonard for a conversation with Jonathan H. Marks about why this troubling practice needs to stop. 

A current Massachusetts court case alleges that Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the multi-billion dollar company that makes Oxycontin, continued to “turbocharge” sales of the drug while downplaying its extreme danger–for more than a decade after pleading guilty in 2007 to misleading regulators, doctors, and patients about the drug’s risk of addiction and potential for abuse.

And yet in 2017, when the National Institutes of Health held meetings to combat the crisis, they turned to…Purdue executives for advice. This would be darkly comic if so many lives were not at stake—and the practice was not so common.

Building on the ideas in his popular TED talk “In Praise of Conflict,” Jonathan H. Marks examines the widespread practice of public-private partnerships in “The Perils of Partnership: Industry Influence, Institutional Integrity, and Public Health.”

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