DrugBuyers.Com: New Pain Drugs in Pipeline

This is just an update for those who didn't catch it earlier:

A non-abusable form of OxyContin is 10-12 years away, says Purdue Pharma. Three years ago, when OxyContin came onto the market, they said they'd have this in three years. Well, a press release from this summer pushed the date back a decade or so. Oh, well. I would think that they have an incentive to do this, because they have already lost their patent on OxyContin and generics are eating into their profits. A non-abusable form might be patentable. But for some reason they haven't been able to get the naloxone or naltrexone in there. Does anyone know how OxyContin's time release system works? If it's so easy to destroy, it must not be very complicated. I don't know why they don't try something like Avinza, a non-abusable form of morphine. It's made of these nano-beads that contain morphine. An outer coating surrounds these beads and swells up in the presence of water. It acts as a matrix that lets morphine out at a certain rate. Oxycodone is very similar to morphine, molecularly. Would the technology patent be too expensive to lease from whoever makes Avinza?

The second item is that Purdue is undaunted by the deaths of those abusing OxyContin and have just received FDA approval for a time-released version of Dilaudid, with pills containing up to 32mg. Now at first blush this is pretty funny, because junkies dream of Dilaudid and could care less about oxycodone, so this would be a step up for the street drug market. BUT, snorting Dilaudid isn't as much fun as oxycodone, perhaps because of absorption issues in the nose. I dunno. At any rate, you can reach a euphoric ceiling with Dilaudid, though snorting more of it can still kill you. Injecting it would be a lot more enticing to abusers, because the effects of Dilaudid just mop the floor with the effects of oxycodone. But it's apparently very hard to get OxyContin into a solution that you can inject, despite misinformed articles about OxyContin abuse. So you'd predict the same from this new time-released Dilaudid. So whaddya think, is this better or worse for patients who need these things? Do you think this new pill will replace OxyContin? Do you think it's going to be abused as much?