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Tufts's opium legacy

The Tufts Observer recounts the university's long history of taking opium-linked money, from donations from a member of the Cabot family to the building named after the couple who gave us OxyContin.

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Colin Quinn was doing Weekend Update and was reading a story about a new airport being named after a man who was famous for hijacking planes, he said “What’s next, The Unabomber on a postage stamp?”

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MIT gives out an innovation award every year named after Jerome Lemelson, the country's first patent troll.

Lemelson spent his time filling out patent applications and drawing sketches of stuff that never worked, and he sent them to the patent office. Years later, when real inventors actually built machines that did work, Lemelson sued them and got rich.

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80 percent of people who use heroin first misused a prescription opioid.

The problem with this statistic is that it doesn't separate 1) patients prescribed opioids who developed a tolerance and fell into an addiction cycle though bona fide use of a painkiller drug, from 2) people recreationally popping pills.

The fact that a fifth of teenagers today have experimented with tobacco makes me suspect that recreation and life-choices are the biggest gateway to abuse.

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A tale of three brothers -

Arthur M. Sackler, for whom the school is named (and many other places - including the museum at Harvard and the wing at the Smithsonian), died a decade before the drug was introduced. Soon after his death, his family broke ties with the company.

Arthur's brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, and their descendants are directly connected to the misinformation and over prescription of Oxycontin. Though, some say that the aggressive marketing that Arthur developed and used on Valium is what made the distribution of Oxycontin so successful.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/feb/13/meet-the-sacklers-the-fa...

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Stop with the subtle facts! You're interrupting my outrage!

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