Purdue Pharma vows to make cripplingly addictive drugs more affordable for working class

Humor by Prateek Joshi
Sept. 1, 2020, 4:54 p.m.

Expressing regret about the rising costs of prescription drugs in a press conference on Wednesday, the large pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma vowed to make its cripplingly addictive products more affordable for the working class.

“Average Americans are struggling to keep up with the rising costs of prescription drugs, especially the ones that give you a wild high and result in a damaging lifelong dependency,” expressed the remorseful CEO Craig Landau, who announced that the price of Purdue’s flagship painkiller OxyContin will be cut in half.

“For far too long, low-income families have not had equal access to our meds that keep you hooked for life and in constant danger of overdosing,” continued Landau. “What’s even worse — many of these folks are uninsured, and thus lack basic access to a morally compromised doctor who we pressure to suspiciously overprescribe these pills for the sole purpose of turning a larger profit.”

At the conference, Landau lamented that, because even most-insured Americans don’t have coverage that includes hardcore opioids, Purdue Pharma will soon provide OxyContin free of charge through Medicare and Medicaid.

Editor’s Note: This article is purely satirical and fictitious. All attributions in this article are not genuine, and this story should be read in the context of pure entertainment only. 

Contact Prateek Joshi at pjoshi2 ‘at’ stanford.edu.

Prateek, a former editor-in-chief of Brown University’s satirical newspaper (The Brown Noser), signed with the Stanford Daily’s satire section in free agency. He also had one glorious month-long stint contributing headlines to The Onion, none of which were published. Feel free to send him article suggestions and harsh criticism at pjoshi2 ‘at’ stanford.edu. His favorite hobby is getting an M.S. in Civil and Environmental Engineering (Class of 2021), focusing on sustainable energy systems. When he’s not satirizing, he’s fervently searching for whoever had the nerve to claim the “pjoshi1” email username.

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