Fred Schulte, Kaiser Health News
Two many years in the past, Purdue Pharma produced 1000’s of brochures and movies that urged sufferers with persistent ache to ask their physicians for opioids resembling OxyContin, arguing that considerations over dependancy and different risks from the medication had been overblown, firm data reveal.
Kaiser Health News earlier this yr posted a cache of Purdue advertising and marketing paperwork that present how the pharmaceutical firm sought to spice up gross sales of the prescription painkiller, beginning within the mid-1990s.
Purdue turned the data over to the Florida legal professional basic’s workplace in 2002 throughout its investigation of the corporate. Additional Purdue paperwork from the Florida investigation element how the corporate focused sufferers and allayed dependancy worries.
“Fear should not stand in the way of relief of your pain,” a pivotal advertising and marketing brochure stated.
Purdue stated it handed out 1000’s of copies of the brochure, which emphasised client energy in treating ache, in addition to a videotape. “The single most important thing for you to remember is that you are the authority on your pain. Nobody else feels it for you so nobody else can describe how much it hurts, or when it feels better,” the pamphlet states.
More than 1,500 pending civil lawsuits, filed largely by state and native governments, allege that misleading advertising and marketing claims helped gasoline a nationwide epidemic of opioid dependancy and 1000’s of overdose deaths.
This week, the New York legal professional basic’s workplace filed one other go well with that accuses Purdue of working a “public nuisance” in it gross sales ways and advertising and marketing of opioids. Like many others, the go well with calls for compensation for dependancy therapy prices and different issues. Purdue and different drugmakers have denied all allegations.
President Donald Trump stated Thursday he desires the federal authorities to sue drugmakers in response to the dependancy epidemic.
The Purdue brochure from the late 1990s spurred current criticism from drug security specialists. Dr. G. Caleb Alexander, a doctor on the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, stated the gross sales pitch was “simply not true” and referred to as it “a smoking gun.”
“We have learned the hard way that many patients develop opioid [addiction] when using these medicines as prescribed,” he stated.
Alexander stated different drugmakers additionally appealed to sufferers hoping to affect their medical doctors — a tactic that was comparatively new within the late 1990s. But Alexander stated he was “shocked” to listen to that Purdue did so with OxyContin, given the dangers posed by long-term use of the morphine-like narcotic.
“These drugs [opioids] are in a class of their own when it comes to the harms that they have caused,” Alexander stated.
The inner Purdue paperwork, courting from 1996 to 2002, present that the corporate started advertising and marketing OxyContin to medical doctors in late 1995 for treating average to extreme most cancers ache. With modest sales of $49.four million in 1996, Purdue posted a lack of $452,000 on the drug. In 1997, gross sales reached $146.5 million for a pretax revenue of $16.5 million, the corporate data present.
In 1998, as Purdue hawked OxyContin for circumstances resembling arthritis and again ache, it determined to “increase communications” with sufferers, firm data present.
The aim: “convince patients and their families to actively pursue effective pain treatment. The importance of the patient assessing their own pain and communicating the status to the health care giver will be stressed.”
Purdue’s six-page pamphlet for sufferers, offered to the Florida legal professional basic, was titled “OxyContin: A Guide to Your New Pain Medicine.” “Your health care team is there to help, but they need your help, too,” the pamphlet says. It says OxyContin is for treating “pain like yours that is moderate to severe and lasting for more than a few days.”
To sufferers or relations nervous about dependancy, Purdue’s pamphlet stated: “Drug addiction means using a drug to get ‘high’ rather than to relieve pain. You are taking opioid pain medication for medical purposes. The medical purposes are clear and the effects are beneficial, not harmful.”
Asked to remark this week, Purdue spokesman Robert Josephson stated the corporate “discontinued the use of this piece many years ago.”
Dr. Michael Barnett, a doctor and assistant professor on the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, stated that a few of Purdue’s early advertising and marketing claims might have appeared affordable to many medical doctors 20 years in the past.
But he faulted the medical career for not demanding scientific proof that opioids had been the truth is protected and prudent for widespread use.
“I think a lot of physicians are coming to the realization that a lot of what we were taught about pain management was pure conjecture,” he stated. “I feel foolish for believing it.”
In hindsight, he stated, Purdue’s gross sales ways appear “almost a satire of an unscrupulous corporation that really has no interest in understanding the implications and complications of people using their drugs.”
Dr. Art Van Zee, a doctor in southwestern Virginia who was among the many first to acknowledge the ravages of OxyContin misuse, stated that some individuals who turned addicted had been drug abusers.
But he added: “There clearly are people that I’ve taken care of who took it as directed orally and became opioid-addicted.”
Purdue additionally paid a New York City manufacturing firm to shoot a videotape referred to as “From One Pain Patient to Another,” that includes testimonials by seven sufferers from the Raleigh, N.C., space beneath the care of ache physician Alan Spanos. Filming came about on the sufferers’ properties, locations of labor and different space places on July 17, 1997, in keeping with the paperwork.
Purdue didn’t pay the sufferers, although Spanos acquired $three,400 as a “physician spokesman” on that video and one other, the corporate data state. Contacted not too long ago by cellphone, Spanos wouldn’t remark. In the paperwork, Purdue stated that the sufferers “participated willingly, wishing to speak out regarding the importance to them of being able to receive effective therapy for their chronic pain.”
Between January 1998 and June 2001, Purdue distributed 16,000 copies of the video to medical doctors, who confirmed them to chose sufferers.
The video didn’t point out OxyContin instantly, however the Food and Drug Administration did balk at a declare within the video that fewer than 1 % of individuals taking opioids turned addicted. The FDA stated that declare was not substantiated, in keeping with a December 2003 General Accountability Office audit.
Purdue destroyed remaining copies of the video in July 2001, together with four,434 Spanish-language variations, in keeping with the corporate data.
By then, annual OxyContin gross sales had topped $1 billion as Purdue pushed to “attach an emotional aspect to non-cancer pain so physicians treat it more seriously and aggressively,” in keeping with the corporate’s advertising and marketing stories.
Asked in regards to the video, Purdue spokesman Josephson stated the drugmaker has not made that declare — concerning 1 % dependancy — “in more than 15 years.”
Purdue submitted the advertising and marketing data to the Florida legal professional basic’s workplace throughout its investigation of the corporate. The state settled the case in 2002 when Purdue agreed to pay $2 million to assist arrange an digital prescription-tracking program.
Florida officers released the data to 2 Florida newspapers in 2003 after Purdue misplaced a courtroom battle to maintain them confidential. KHN posted a few of these paperwork earlier this yr for readers to evaluation on its web site.
KHN’s protection of prescription drug improvement, prices and pricing is supported partially by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.
Kaiser Health News (KHN) is a nationwide well being coverage information service. It is an editorially impartial program of the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation which isn’t affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.
