Drugs

Massachusetts AG Implicates Sacklers in Opium Epidemic

Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healy has written a 274-page memo detailing the role that the Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma played in the nation’s opioid epidemic. Healy alleges that the Sacklers knew that OxyContin was causing overdoses but continued to push its sales as deaths mounted.

Boston public radio station WBUR says Healy detailed a chain of command implicating eight family members and nine Purdue board members or executives in the opioid epidemic. The memo, the station says, spells out Healy’s allegations that the Sacklers flooded the state with sales representatives, influenced state legislation, and financially backed medical facilities and universities so they could push Purdue opioids.

In a statement to WBUR, Purdue said that Healy was trying to “vilify a single manufacturer whose medicines represent less than 2% of opioid pain prescriptions rather than doing the hard work of trying to solve a complex public health crisis.” The company also said that Healy’s complaint “distorts critical facts and cynically conflates prescription opioid medications with illegal heroin and fentanyl, which are the leading cause of overdose deaths in Massachusetts.”

WBUR reports that in 2007 Purdue Pharma and three of its top executives were criminally charged in Virginia federal court with intentionally deceiving doctors about OxyContin. The company’s then-president, lawyer, and chief medical officer pleaded guilty to a felony and Purdue Pharma paid $600 million in fines for misleading the public about the drug’s addictive properties. While individual members of the Sackler family were not charged, the report says, as board members they admitted the company encouraged doctors to overprescribe OxyContin.

In 2007, a company news release said that during the past six years the company had implemented changes to internal training, compliance, and monitoring systems “that seek to assure that similar events do not occur again.”

But Healy alleges that Purdue Pharma and the Sacklers never stopped the deception, leading to hundreds of overdose deaths. She says the company sent even more sales representatives to meet with Massachusetts doctors, nurses, and pharmacists to pressure them to prescribe even more OxyContin.

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Gupta Raises Concerns About Overton’s Independence, Ideology

Overton Confirmation Remains Uncertain After Senate Hearing

FDA Classifies Boston Scientific Imager II Catheter Recall as Class I

FDA Approves Gazyva for Childhood-Onset Idiopathic Nephrotic Syndrome