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News on Purdue Pharma…

Dan Crawford | June 25, 2018 9:23 am

Healthcare

Law

(Dan here…From Esquire comes this note from the Boston Globe):

We begin with good news up here in the Commonwealth (God save it!), where Attorney General Maura Healey, who does not punch down, has opened hostilities against the pharmaceutical companies that have raked in the profits from the opioid crisis. From The Boston Globe:

She asserts that the privately held company and 16 of its key directors and executives actively obfuscated the truth about opioid use, downplaying the perils of addiction and overdoses with the aim of getting more people to take them at higher doses for longer periods of time in order to boost the business’s bottom line. “Purdue Pharma created the epidemic and profited from it through a web of illegal deceit,” the lawsuit alleges. While several other state attorneys general have taken similar legal action against Purdue, Healey’s action Tuesday opens a new front in the battle against the scourge of overdoses in Massachusetts. And the suit, filed in Suffolk Superior Court, hints the state could be seeking damages to the tune of billions of dollars.

“We found that Purdue misled doctors, patients, and the public about the real risks of their dangerous opioids, including OxyContin,” Healey said at a news conference, standing next to officials including Governor Charlie Baker as well as families who have lost loved ones to overdoses. “Their strategy was simple: The more drugs they sold, the more money they made — and the more people died,” Healey said. An investigation by Healey’s office found that since 2009, 671 people who filled prescriptions for Purdue opioids in Massachusetts subsequently died of an opioid-related overdose, the legal complaint says.

2 Comments

run75441 says:

June 25, 2018 at 5:36 pm

I wrote on the initial cause of Opioid use February of this year. Here is an article in the NEJM detailing a letter to the editor dated Jun1, 2017. A 1980 Letter on the Risk of Opioid Addiction The first paragraph states;

To the Editor:

The prescribing of strong opioids such as oxycodone has increased dramatically in the United States and Canada over the past two decades. From 1999 through 2015, more than 183,000 deaths from prescription opioids were reported in the United States, and millions of Americans are now addicted to opioids. The crisis arose in part because physicians were told that the risk of addiction was low when opioids were prescribed for chronic pain. A one-paragraph letter that was published in the Journal in 19803 was widely invoked in support of this claim, even though no evidence was provided by the correspondents (see Section 1 in the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org).

In conclusion, we found that a five-sentence letter published in the Journal in 1980 was heavily and uncritically cited as evidence that addiction was rare with long-term opioid therapy. We believe that this citation pattern contributed to the North American opioid crisis by helping to shape a narrative that allayed prescribers’ concerns about the risk of addiction associated with long-term opioid therapy.

In my February post I also cited that letter; The Risk of Opioid Addiction. The Letter in a 1980 issue of the NEJM:

Addiction Rare in Patients Treated with Narcotics

Recently, we examined our current files to determine the incidence of narcotic addiction in 39,946 hospitalized medical patients who were monitored consecutively. Although there were 11,882 patients who received at least one narcotic preparation, there were only four cases of reasonably well documented addiction in patients who had no history of addiction. The addiction was considered major in only one instance. The drugs implicated were meperidine in two patients, Percodan in one, and hydromorphone in one. We conclude that despite widespread use of narcotic drugs in hospitals, the development of addiction is rare in medical patients with no history of addiction. Jane Porter; Herschel Jick; MD Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, Boston University Medical Center, Waltham, MA.

The necessay links, citations, and supplemental information can also be found in that February 2018 post on Opioids.
EMichael says:

June 26, 2018 at 9:59 am

I believe that Charles Pierce is the best political writer in the US.