The Opioid Crisis: The Purdue Pharmaceutical Industry

The opioid crisis of the 1990s has been arguably the most notable public health incident the world has ever faced. Between 1990 and 2010, “the mortality rate increased from 3.67 per 100,000 to 12.46 per 1000 in the span of 16 years” (Sim). Drug addiction has primarily been one of the top killers of people for decades, and Americans can confidently say that Purdue Pharma was one of the central roots of this issue. Purdue Pharma reached its peak as a pharmaceutical company first founded by John Purdue Gray, but was later sold to Raymond Sackler in 1952. This led to the company being owned by the Sackler family and their descendants (Chakradhar and Ross). The drug was first introduced to only be prescribed to cancer patients with high levels of

Patients are in large amounts of pain and want medications to numb or get rid of it. Doctors were told to prescribe OxyContin and to inform patients to take it multiple times a day for the best results. This then left the patient hooked. Studies have repeatedly shown that once patients are taken off the medication, they miss the feeling of euphoria when they were on the pill. The feeling of no pain. The drug was made to only mask the pain, so when the twelve hour release capsule wears off, they feel as bad as they did before. When they try to take the medication again, they don’t feel the same feeling that they once did because the body has gotten so used to the drug, so they decide to increase the dosage, and repeat the same process. This leads to an addiction that is very hard to get rid of. But, patients and doctors weren’t educated on how strong the drug really was because of Purdue. “Purdue’s sales representatives were trained to assure doctors that fewer than one per cent of patients who took the drug became addicted” (OxyContin). Doctors were told repeatedly that pain should be treated as the 5th vital sign, and convinced doctors that they needed to alleviate pain at all costs. Reports show that Sackler, the owner and chief of Purdue, said that it was his plan all along to direct staff to misinform doctors of the intensity of OxyContin to keep the sales high and not let them drop. In an email sent by Michael Freidman, chief of marketing for the company, he wrote, “We do not want to position oxycontin in a way that will discourage physicians from using oxycontin for chronic non-malignant pain” (Chakradhar and Ross). Medical staff from Purdue’s company were highly trained to visit conventions and meetings across the US to market OxyContin as a moderate pain drug so companies would invest in the drug, bringing profit to