This past week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved use of the painkiller OxyContin for children ages 11 to 16, in what is certainly one of the surest signs that the FDA is little more than a rubber stamp for the pharmaceutical industry now. The approval of OxyContin for children flies directly in the face of previous statements from groups like the National Institute on Drug Abuse that OxyContin is addictive.
The timing of the FDA’s approval happens to coincide with a national decline of teen drug use. According to NPR, reported use of OxyContin has been slowly climbing among teens since the early 2000s.
Opioids, like OxyContin, were responsible for nearly 17,000 deaths in the United States in 2011, according to the Daily Beast.
The FDA is useless, it’s time to get rid of it.
