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Purdue Pharma, the company that makes OxyContin, the powerful prescription painkiller that experts say helped touch off an opioid epidemic, will plead guilty to three federal criminal charges as part of a settlement of more than $8 billion, Justice Department officials announced Wednesday. The company will plead guilty to three counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and violating federal anti-kickback laws, the officials said. The resolution will be detailed in a bankruptcy court filing in federal court. Ed Bisch, who lost his 18-year-old son to an OxyContin overdose nearly 20 years ago, said he wants to see people...

'You take rehab.com—our website traffic is up 382 percent in the past 30 days with people looking for treatment for either substance abuse or mental health.' This is a “pandemic within a pandemic,” according to addiction expert Tim Ryan, who’s watched the coronavirus outbreak exacerbate the preexistent opioid and mental health crises with devastating effect. Ryan, the star of A&E’s 2017 “Dope Man” special, is the founder of “A Man In Recovery Foundation,” which partners with Rehab.com. A former heroin addict, his mission is to assist others struggling with substance abuse.In a Friday interview, Ryan explained how the stresses of...

HUNTINGTON, W.Va. (AP) — First lady Melania Trump visited West Virginia on Monday to learn how a city at the center of the nation’s opioid epidemic is grappling with the crisis. She met with federal, state and local officials in Huntington and heard how the area’s police, schools and health care centers are trying to fight the opioid scourge. “I am here to give you my support,” Trump told participants in the roundtable discussion. West Virginia has the country’s highest fatal opioid overdose rate and has struggled, like many other states, to confront the many aspects of the problem. Huntington...

“We’ve got to get deeper than just these superficial fixes, as important as they are..." “We don’t have a healthcare system in the United States, we have a sickness care system in the United States. We just wait ’til somebody gets sick and then we talk about who’s going to pay for the treatment and how they’re going to be treated. What we need to talk about why so many Americans have unnecessary chronic illnesses, so many more compared to other countries. And that gets back not just into Big Pharma, not just health insurance companies, it has to do...

Despite the U.S. declaring an “Open Door Policy” in support of China’s sovereignty, U.S. Marines on May 31, 1900 invaded China to help defeat the Boxer Rebellion. With imperial Great Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Japan, and Russia trying to carve China into colonies, Secretary of State John Hay in the fall of 1899 declared the United States would honor an “Open Door Policy” that respected Chinese territorial and administrative integrity and allowed equal trading privileges for all nations. Nineteenth-century imperialists had forced China’s ruling Qing Dynasty to accept foreign dominance over much of China’s economic affairs. Two Opium Wars with...

One of the biggest drivers of America’s opioid epidemic is Medicaid, and ObamaCare’s expansion of the program has only made matters worse, claims a new report from the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, drug overdoses were the leading cause of accidental death in the United States in 2016, accounting for almost 64,000 deaths. Adjusting for age, the rate of drug-overdose deaths more than tripled between 1999 and 2016. Abuse of opioids such as oxycodone is one of the primary reasons for this increase.How does Medicaid play into this? For its...

ROCK HILL, S.C. - A Rock Hill woman walked up to meet her mail carrier thinking the yoga mat she ordered from Walmart had arrived. Instead, the postal worker handed her a heavy box, and a bag of pills, that had spilled from it. In all, there were more than 20,000 oxycodone pills, worth roughly $400,000. The woman who received the package lives in a neighborhood off Ebinport Road. She didn't want to go on camera, but told Channel 9 there were so many pills, they were spilling from the packaging. She immediately called police. York County drug agents gave...

"In the midst of a nationwide opioid epidemic that has reached crisis proportions, Mr. Kapoor and his company stand accused of bribing doctors to overprescribe a potent opioid and committing fraud on insurance companies solely for profit," said Acting United States Attorney William D. Weinreb of Massachusetts. Prosecutors allege the company paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to doctors in exchange for prescribing a spray called Subsys that contained the powerful and addictive synthetic opioid fentanyl. Three top prescribers have already been convicted of taking bribes from Insys. NBC News reported extensively on the company this summer. In her first...

The number of new HIV/AIDS cases is on the rise in Russia, with less than half of the 900,000 HIV-positive people receiving treatment. The movement denying the deadly disease’s very existence is gathering pace too. Although the number of newly-diagnosed and AIDS-related deaths continue shrinking worldwide, the opposite is happening in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, with Russia accounting for almost two thirds of new contractions in the region. "For quite a long while, for five years, not nearly enough attention has been paid to the HIV/AIDS issue. There has not been enough funding,” director of the Federal HIV Research...