FDA Approves New, Hard-to-Abuse Hydrocodone Pill
http://www.wkrg.com/story/27441124/fda-approves-new-hard-to-abuse-hydrocodone-pill
From the article
WASHINGTON – Federal health regulators have approved the first hard-to-abuse version of the painkiller hydrocodone, offering an alternative to a similar medication that has been widely criticized for lacking such safeguards.
The Food and Drug Administration approved Purdue Pharma’s Hysingla ER, for patients with severe, round-the-clock pain that cannot be managed with other treatments. The once-a-day tablet is designed to resist attempts to crush it for snorting or injecting. Purdue Pharma’s new drug poses a direct commercial challenge to Zogenix’s much-debated drug Zohydro, a twice-a-day hydrocodone tablet approved by the FDA last year.
Doctors prescribe opioids for a range of ailments, from post-surgical pain to arthritis and migraines. Deaths linked to abuse of the medications have quadrupled since 1990 to nearly 17,000 annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Filed under: General Problems
Ah, this is one of those drugs that is coated in some kind of plastic that’s hard to digest. It’s a synthetic biopharmaceutical (which is different than a pharmaceutical). Patients complain of both ineffective and uneven results for pain management with biopharmaceuticals. I guess it’s hard for a drug to work if it’s hard to digest.
I don’t know why the anti-drug folks would be unhappy with this product — it comes with the “essential” abuse deterrent. You know, because it’s more important to treat potential addiction than to treat pain.
But did the abuse deterrents on Oxy work? It seems they did… at first.
As for Zohydro, Express Scripts — one of the biggest drug managers — didn’t include it in this year’s formulary. So it’s not like doctors would be prescribing that much of it anyway.