Origins of an Epidemic: Purdue Pharma Knew Its Opioids Were Widely Abused
Source: New York Times
Purdue Pharma, the company that planted the seeds of the opioid epidemic through its aggressive marketing of OxyContin, has long claimed it was unaware of the powerful opioid painkillers growing abuse until years after it went on the market.
But a copy of a confidential Justice Department report shows that federal prosecutors investigating the company found that Purdue Pharma knew about significant abuse of OxyContin in the first years after the drugs introduction in 1996 and concealed that information.
Company officials had received reports that the pills were being crushed and snorted; stolen from pharmacies; and that some doctors were being charged with selling prescriptions, according to dozens of previously undisclosed documents that offer a detailed look inside Purdue Pharma. But the drug maker continued in the face of this knowledge to market OxyContin as less prone to abuse and addiction than other prescription opioids, prosecutors wrote in 2006.
Based on their findings after a four-year investigation, the prosecutors recommended that three top Purdue Pharma executives be indicted on felony charges, including conspiracy to defraud the United States, that could have sent the men to prison if convicted.
Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/health/purdue-opioids-oxycontin.html
Bradshaw3
(7,522 posts)There would be a lot of CEOs, business owners, politicians, doctors and others in jail for what they have done in profiting off this crisis. But we don't so nothing will come of it. Greed trumps everything in the America of today.
duforsure
(11,885 posts)And profited from their backing this for approval , and had stock in their company. A hint, Republicans.
not fooled
(5,801 posts)Now they dress in business suits and are several steps removed from the person actually suffering and dying, but these are the same types of people who in earlier epochs attacked and killed others and raped and pillaged.
They just don't have to do the deeds in person anymore.
meow2u3
(24,764 posts)Why aren't those executives cooling their heels behind bars for drug pushing?
turbinetree
(24,703 posts)An addiction specialist said that the Sacklers firm, Purdue Pharma, bears the lions share of the blame for the opioid crisis.Illustration by Ben Wiseman
The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a gift from the Egyptian government. The space, which opened in 1978 and is known as the Sackler Wing, is also itself a monument, to one of Americas great philanthropic dynasties. The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other universities. The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten medical research. The art scholar Thomas Lawton once likened the eldest brother, Arthur, to a modern Medici. Before Arthurs death, in 1987, he advised his children, Leave the world a better place than when you entered it.
Mortimer died in 2010, and Raymond died earlier this year. The brothers bequeathed to their heirs a laudable tradition of benevolence, and an immense fortune with which to indulge it. Arthurs daughter Elizabeth is on the board of the Brooklyn Museum, where she endowed the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Raymonds sons, Richard and Jonathan, established a professorship at Yale Cancer Center. My father raised Jon and me to believe that philanthropy is an important part of how we should fill our lives, Richard has said. Marissa Sackler, the thirty-six-year-old daughter of Mortimer and his third wife, Theresa Rowling, founded Beespace, a nonprofit incubator that supports organizations like the Malala Fund. Sackler recently told W that she finds the word philanthropy old-fashioned. She considers herself a social entrepreneur.
When the Met was originally built, in 1880, one of its trustees, the lawyer Joseph Choate, gave a speech to Gilded Age industrialists who had gathered to celebrate its dedication, and, in a bid for their support, offered the sly observation that what philanthropy really buys is immortality: Think of it, ye millionaires of many markets, what glory may yet be yours, if you only listen to our advice, to convert pork into porcelain, grain and produce into priceless pottery, the rude ores of commerce into sculptured marble. Through such transubstantiation, many fortunes have passed into enduring civic institutions. Over time, the origins of a clans largesse are largely forgotten, and we recall only the philanthropic legacy, prompted by the name on the building. According to Forbes, the Sacklers are now one of Americas richest families, with a collective net worth of thirteen billion dollarsmore than the Rockefellers or the Mellons. The bulk of the Sacklers fortune has been accumulated only in recent decades, yet the source of their wealth is to most people as obscure as that of the robber barons. While the Sacklers are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharmaa privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin. Upon its release, in 1995, OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.
But OxyContin is a controversial drug. Its sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioidsas synthetic drugs derived from opium are knownexcept for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs. Few drugs are as dangerous as the opioids, David Kessler, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, told me.
Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. Sales representatives marketed OxyContin as a product to start with and to stay with. Millions of patients found the drug to be a vital salve for excruciating pain. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.
Since 1999, two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers. The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/30/the-family-that-built-an-empire-of-pain
TheFrenchRazor
(2,116 posts)ProfessorGAC
(65,044 posts). . .to those chronic pain sufferers who actually NEED these medications.
Let's keep the hysteria up and make it harder and harder for the people who actually need it to get them!
Geez, now i have to drive 20 miles each way, once a month, to pick up my wife's scrip because there are no refills. Need a completely new one, every month. Then this month, with her doc on vacation, the head guy wrote it out, but for only the 2 weeks her doc is out. So, we have to do the extra 40 miles twice this month.
Not sure how that is helping to address the opioid abuse problem, though.
mpcamb
(2,871 posts)I wish someone would follow that up.
Like all investigations, follow the money.