Tangled Incentives Push Drugmakers Away From an Opioid Solution
- Opioids continue to sell well, muddying drive for alternatives
- Newer painkillers expensive, cumbersome, or limited in scope
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For the drug industry, building a better pain pill is a problem.
Pharmaceutical companies have introduced new medicines to treat dependence, reverse overdoses, and deal with opioids’ side effects. But few effective and economically viable alternatives to addictive painkillers have emerged from the laboratory.