Purdue Pharma

Purdue Pharma L.P., known from 1892 to 2019 as the Purdue Frederick Company, was an American privately held pharmaceutical company founded by John Purdue Gray. It was sold to Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler in 1952, and then owned principally by the Sackler family and their descendants. The company manufactured pain medicines such as hydromorphone, fentanyl, codeine, hydrocodone and oxycodone, also known by its brand name, OxyContin. The Sacklers developed aggressive marketing tactics persuading doctors to prescribe OxyContin in particular. Doctors were enticed with free trips to pain-management seminars (which were effectively all-expenses-paid vacations) and paid speaking engagements. Sales of their drugs soared, as did the number of people dying from overdoses. As well as this, levels of heroin consumption increased significantly following Purdue's aggressive marketing campaign, and it is generally accepted that OxyContin played a large role in causing this. It did this either through people needing a stronger opioid to match a growing tolerance for OxyContin, and turning to street heroin, or through people losing their prescriptions and turning to heroin as an alternative. Perhaps the biggest contributor, however, was Purdue changing the OxyContin formula into an abuse-deterrent formulation (ADF) in 2009. Typical OxyContin abuse around the time included crushing up and snorting the pill, or injecting it. This made the high much more intense and euphoric, and made it come on much quicker. The change made the drug much trickier to abuse in this fashion, and as a result, many turned to an even more intense, relatively readily available alternative: heroin. A series of lawsuits followed. In 2007, Purdue paid out one of the largest fines ever levied against a pharmaceutical firm for misleading the public about how addictive the drug OxyContin was compared to other pain medications. In response to the lawsuits, the company shifted its...