Tag: The Sackler Family

Secret Opioid Memo

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A confidential government document containing evidence so critical it had the potential to change the course of an American tragedy was kept in the dark for more than a decade. The document, known as a “prosecution memo,” details how government lawyers believed that Purdue Pharma, the maker of the powerful opioid, OxyContin, knew early on that the drug was fueling a rise in abuse and addiction. They also gathered evidence indicating that the company’s executives had misled the public and Congress.

Bottles of Opiate Prescriptions

There has been a recent wave of lawsuits against opioid makers and members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma. Opioid abuse has ravaged America over the past two decades. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), from 1999 to 2017 more than 700,000 Americans have died from a drug overdose. Approximately 68% of the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved an opioid. In 2017, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and illegal opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl) was 6 times higher than in 1999. On average, 130 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose.

The confidential Justice Department “prosecution memo” represents a missed opportunity that might have changed the course of the opioid epidemic. It also suggests that Purdue Pharma and members of the Sackler family knew far earlier than they admitted that OxyContin was being abused. The memo had the potential to change the course of the opioid crisis but was kept from circulation for more than a decade. The report states that Purdue Pharma executives were implicated in the crisis.

The Department of Justice chose not to pursue felony charges against those executives, paving the way for a settlement that ended a four-year investigation. The settlement did not produce any vital changes to industry behavior regarding the prescribing of narcotic painkillers. Secrecy surrounding the memo is emblematic of a legal process that favors the suppression of corporate information. If disclosed, this information could benefit the public’s health and safety. It is truly extraordinary to see after all these years that the opioid industry is finally being held to account.

Analysis of the DEA database obtained by the Washington Post reveals that a relatively small number of pharmacies—15 percent—distributed roughly half of prescription opioids nationwide from 2006 to 2012. It seems the DEA wasn’t paying attention to its own data, instead relying on drug companies and pharmacies to police themselves. In one engaging multimedia story, the Post took a close look at a southwestern Virginia area that was flooded with 74 million opioid pills over seven years—enough for 106 pills per resident every year. Journalists from over 30 states have now published over 90 separate articles based on the previously undisclosed DEA data.

It’s unbelievable that millions of oxycodone and hydrocodone pills flooded poor communities in Appalachia as pharmaceutical companies and the DEA failed to heed signs of large-scale inappropriate prescribing. Yet there is a certain liberation in being able to point to specific data, which might help assign responsibility for what may be U.S. health care’s most fateful systemic failure in recent history.

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It is bad enough that many doctors and pharmacies were little more than “pill mills” supplying untreated addicts with their drug of choice rather than treating legitimate pain patients. It is quite another to know that nearly 35 billion opioids — about half of all distributed pills — were handled by just 15 percent of the nation’s pharmacies between 2006 and 2012. A single drugstore in tiny Albany, Kentucky purchased nearly 6.8 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills during that period, equivalent to 96 a year for all 10,000 or so men, women and children in surrounding Clinton County. This was the most on a per capita, per county basis in the United States.

There is always a tension between discretion and disclosure—between keeping the public informed about the workings of large medical treatment systems and permitting specialists who operate them to handle delicate matters in private. Nowhere is that tension more relevant than in health care, where medical expertise, proprietary information and patient privacy are all at a premium. Like all good things, however, those may be taken to an extreme or turned into excuses for unwarranted concealment.

Any ordinary person who learned that a single pharmacy in small-town Kentucky was handling millions of potentially addictive pills over a seven-year period might have sounded an alarm, even if government bureaucracy, industry leaders, and doctors did not. Unfortunately, no ordinary person could know—until now.

For more information, click here: OxyKills.com

Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation Recovery Advocacy Update

Startling data recently made public show the details of how pharmaceutical companies saturated the country with opioids. In the seven years from 2006 to 2012, America’s biggest drug companies shipped 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills in the United States. The result? Opioid-related deaths soared in communities where the pills flowed most. These new revelations come from the Washington Post, which spent a year in court to gain access to a DEA database that tracks the path of every single pain pill sold in the United States.

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The database reveals what each company knew about the number of pills it was shipping and dispensing and precisely when they were aware of those volumes, year-by-year, town-by-town. The data will be valuable to the attorneys litigating cases to hold manufacturers accountable, including a huge multi-district case in Ohio, where thousands of documents were filed last Friday. The data show that opioid manufacturers and distributors knowingly flooded the market as the overdose crisis raged and red flags were everywhere.

The Post has also published the data at county and state levels in order to help the public understand the impact of years of prescription pill shipments has had on their communities. Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation says to expect many reports from local journalists using the data to explain the causes and impact of the opioid crisis in their communities. The Post did its own local deep-dive, taking a close look this weekend at two Ohio counties that soon will be at the center of the bug multi-district litigation. Barring a settlement, the two counties are scheduled to go to trial in October as the first case among the consolidated lawsuits brought by about 2,000 cities, counties, Native American tribes and other plaintiffs.

Meanwhile, the CDC posted preliminary data suggesting that the number of Americans who died from drug overdoses finally fell 5% in 2018 after years of significant increases. This new data, while still preliminary, covers all of 2018, so it is firmer. And it is a rare positive sign. But it’s only one year and no cause for celebration or complacency—especially with continued funding for opioid crisis grants are uncertain and the decline in deaths anything but uniform across the states. For example, 18 states still saw increases in 2018. Policymakers must be reminded that we’re still very much in the midst of the nation’s worst-ever addiction crisis—one from which it will take years to recover. Federal funding remains essential, as advocate Ryan Hampton points out in his latest piece making the case for the CARE Act, a Congressional bill that would invest $100 billion over the next 10 years.

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If you missed the premiere of  “The First Day,” a powerful, one-hour documentary that shows the evolved talk of former NBA-player-turned-recovery advocate Chris Herren, you can catch it again July 30 at 10:00 p.m. Eastern on ESPN. It is also now available for sale as a download. Herren has spoken to more than a million young people, and the film follows him on a dozen or so speaking engagements up and down the East Coast.

Delta Air Lines announced that naloxone, the medication used to treat (reverse) an opioid overdose, will be available in all emergency medical kits on flights beginning this Fall.

Delta’s decision comes after a passenger tweeted that a man died aboard a Delta flight last weekend from an opioid overdose. It’s unfathomable why naloxone isn’t already on all flights for all airlines. Last year, Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation joined the Association of Flight Attendants in urging the FAA to require it. No one should have to die before airlines take this common-sense step.

Oklahoma’s lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson went to the judge, who will decide later this summer whether to hold the drugmaker accountable for the state’s opioid epidemic. Oklahoma is seeking more than $17.5 billion to abate the costs of opioid addiction. Purdue Pharma and Teva Pharmaceutical settled their part of the Oklahoma case. But they and other drugmakers and distributors face some 2,000 similar lawsuits by states and local municipalities.

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Purdue Pharma, a pharmaceutical company owned by the Sackler family, invented the so-called non-addictive drug OxyContin. The company was found to have falsified the addiction rate at less than 1% when in fact it was over 10%. Raymond Sackler had a personal net worth of $13 billion in 2016. He passed away on July 17, 2017. The Louvre in Paris has removed the Sackler family name from its walls, becoming the first major museum to erase its public association with the philanthropist family linked with the opioid crisis in the United States.

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Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has written and spoken extensively about the importance of prevention in addressing the opioid crisis. NIDA studies have shown that teens who misuse prescription opioids are more likely to initiate heroin use. You can visit NIDA’s site by clicking here.