Massachusetts sues Purdue over marketing of opioid
OxyContin Uproar
Dr. Richard Sackler, whose family started Purdue Pharma, had high hopes for the prescription opioid painkiller OxyContin, which it began selling in 1996. Addiction, overdoses and lots of criticism have caused Sackler to mislead prescribers and patients and divert blame for all the problems.
A lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts against Purdue claims that the company, the Sackler family, and company executives were guilty of this behavior while trying to flood the country with prescriptions for these addictive drugs. Sackler wrote in an email in February 2001, “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
According to the state’s complaint, Purdue has sold more than 70 million doses of opioids in Massachusetts for more than $500 million since 2007. The complaint alleges, “By their misconduct, the Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible, and the stigma they used as a weapon made the crisis worse.”
In addition, the complaint shows how Purdue aggressively sought close relationships with Tufts University’s Health Sciences Campus and Massachusetts General Hospital, two top-notch academic medical centers, to increase “prescribing by physicians, generate goodwill toward opioid painkillers among medical students and doctors in training and combat negative reports about opioid addiction.”
The court document says that Purdue had an agreement with Massachusetts General in which Purdue paid the hospital $3 million since 2009 and could propose “areas where education in the field of pain is needed” and “curriculum which might meet such needs.” The complaint also alleges that Tufts “made a Purdue employee an adjunct associate professor in 2011, Purdue-written materials were approved for teaching to Tufts students in 2014 and the company sent staff to Tufts as recently as 2017.” Purdue’s New England staff was lauded for “penetrating this account.”
The state originally sued Purdue, current and former executives and members of the Sackler family in June 2018. Six months later, it filed an amended complaint that was nearly 200 pages longer than the initial filing, with more allegations leveled against the individual defendants. The Massachusetts suit centers on the company’s actions since 2007, when Purdue and three current and former executives pleaded guilty in federal court to fraudulently marketing OxyContin, and the company agreed to pay $600 million in fines. The case is differentiated from a lawsuit being waged by STAT to garner sealed Purdue documents in Kentucky, including the only known deposition of Richard Sackler, about the company’s marketing practices in earlier years. Those practices have been blamed for fueling the present opioid addiction crisis.
Purdue’s lawyers call the Massachusetts amended complaint a “concerted effort by the Commonwealth to use confidential documents in an attempt to publicly embarrass Purdue and its officers, directors and employees.” They say the information used was “cherry-picked” to “bolster a series of inflammatory and misleading allegations against Purdue.”
According to the state of Massachusetts, “The opioid epidemic is not a mystery to the people who started it. The defendants knew what they were doing.”