Big Pharma is not in business to treat diseases. It is a thing of wonder why humanity, especially the patients, are averse to taking this truism to heart and accept it as fact.
Pharmaceutical companies are in the game for profit – large profits, not for you to get well. Antonio Iozzo crashes his superbike while travelling at breakneck speed and breaks every bone that matters in his frame, including shattering the crucial T7 vertebra.
He leaves hospital, taking with him OxyNorm pills, which make his excruciating back pain bearable. Unbeknown to him, and the doctors who prescribed the medication, this drug – for that’s what it is – is highly addictive.
Soon he is no longer able to live without Oxy and goes through two years of hell trying to wean himself off the drug, an on-and-off pendulum of trying to quit.
It is not easy.
This struggle is at the heart of the book. Addiction wrecks lives, and not just those of the pill poppers. Slaying The Dragon, A South African billionaire’s battle to conquer opioid addiction details how the loved ones of the writer are weaved into the doldrums of a life of pills, especially his wife Nicole.
An internet junkie, Iozzo learns how patients in the USA were left dependent on OxyContin, as it is known in those parts of the world. ‘My research told me that OxyContin was introduced to US consumers in 1996 by a pharmaceutical company called Purdue Pharma, owned by the extremely wealthy Sackler family.’
Typical of such leeches who prey on the vulnerable, the Sackler family could smell money from a mile away.
‘By 1978, the Sackler family was reaping record profits, having sold 2.3 billion Valium pills. That’s a lot of pills. Again, just like they would do with Oxy, Purdue Pharma would claim that the benzo tranquiliser was non-addictive. And the gullible public believed them.’
Non-addictive, my foot! Just how addictive these pills are screams at you out of the pages of this book. Iozzo is totally hooked. How his wife did not suffer psychiatric episodes herself is an even bigger mystery.
‘Within just five years of its release in the US, annual sales of Oxy hit the billion-dollar mark. By 2020, Purdue Pharma had raked in over $35 billion in revenue.’
The likes of Izzo are lucky to survive and tell their story: ‘Since it appeared on the market, Oxy overdoses have killed at least 400 000 addicts, significantly contributing to the US opioid crisis that’s claimed more than a million lives since 1999.’
Iozzo confesses: ‘Obviously, when I was prescribed it under the label of OxyNorm, I was unaware of its dark legacy and of the fact that it was a highly addictive drug.’
He was hellbent on finding relief for his pain, he adds further. But Big Pharma had other ideas, just as they’ve done all along. Reel him in!
This was supposed, no doubt, to be a book about how an accident-prone young man who started breaking bones from childhood in his BMX, graduating into a petrolhead that totals a Lambo at speed and skis like the devil, recovers from a bike accident. ‘I just love doing risky things.’
But it morphs into a book about battling addiction to painkillers.
When he kicks the Oxy habit, he takes what he is assured is a lesser evil, Suboxone: ‘When you take Suboxone, you put the pill under your tongue. It starts dissolving and taking effect almost immediately.’
Though it offers relief from pain and the harmful dependence on Oxy, Suboxone is no better. It is just as addictive.
I’ve never read many books on addiction but if Slaying The Dragon is the gold standard, which I assume it is, then I want no part of drugs; it is hell.
Throughout all this, there’s a silver lining: growing his billion Rand business empire, a portfolio ranging from insurance, construction, property to running a high-end eatery.
It takes guts to slay the dragon, which Iozzo boasts oodles of.