Governor Tells Pharma To Step Up in Fight Against Opioid Crisis
Mass Gov. Charlie Baker, recently speaking at a Washington Post event, urged pharmaceutical companies to take a more active role in fighting the opioid crisis.
As reported by the Greenfield Reporter, Baker outlined a series of areas where he’d like to see the federal government and the pharmaceutical industry each get more “aggressive” in the fight against opioid addiction.
Baker stressed the role prevention and education play in efforts to reduce the rates of opioid addiction, overdoses and deaths. Post reporter Lenny Bernstein, who moderated the discussion with Baker, referred to Massachusetts as “one of the few places where good news is coming out” when it comes to opioids.
Asked what role he thinks pharmaceutical companies should play, Baker said, “I guess I’d start with, how about do no harm?”
“Stop promoting these medications with a far more tilted set of statements and promotional notions about the positive side of this stuff without talking at all or even downplaying the negative side,” he said.
Baker said he’d like to see the industry “get a lot more aggressive about the pricing and promoting” of tamper-proof drugs that are harder to misuse, describing them as “certain kinds of medications in this space that are far less easy to crush and break.”
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To read more about Governor Baker’s prescription for fighting the opioid crisis, please visit The Reporter.com.