Purdue Pharma: Masters at Pill Marketing

*The following is an excerpt from an article “The Medicating of America,” by Bryan Silver, published in Living Safer Magazine and The Legal Examiner.

Purdue Pharma: Masters at Pill Marketing

 

It was in 1952 that psychiatrist-by-trade brothers Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler purchased a small pharmaceutical company called Purdue, Frederick and Co. While his brothers ran the enterprise, Arthur involved himself in other pursuits: namely a stint with New York advertising firm William Douglas McAdams. While most have never heard of the firm, you probably know the results of their work—Arthur was instrumental in marketing new uses for Valium (Diazepam) that made it the first drug to ever achieve $100 million in revenue and put Arthur in the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame (posthumously inducted in 1997). Arthur was also one of the first marketers to create relationships directly with doctors in hopes of selling in product, a practice that is now the backbone of the drug marketing industry.

 

Even though Arthur passed away in 1987, he had taught his brothers well—they continued to hone their drug marketing skills in the 90s. With the onset of their latest product OxyContin, the Sacklers starting amassing large databases that contained doctor profiles and their prescribing habits. Long before the terms data mining and big data entered the vernacular, Purdue Pharma was poring over the numbers and plying their skills to put OxyContin into the hands of any doctor they thought might prescribe it.

 

In short order, the Purdue Pharma sales staff grew to over 300. Then in 1996, Purdue contracted with Abbott Laboratories to help in selling the drug through their sales reps. Abbott devoted another 300 people to the cause, urging them to do whatever it took to convince doctors. Internal documents have recently surfaced, showing that the Director of Sales, Jerry Eichhorn, urged sales staff to downplay the issues with addiction and make other claims that had no scientific basis. He frequently referred to the mission at hand as a “crusade,” and often signed memos as “The King of Pain.” Ultimately, with Abbott’s help, OxyContin went from $49 million in sales to $1.6 billion in 2002 when the partnership ended. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of misbranding OxyContin in an effort to mislead doctors and consumers, resulting in $635 million in fines. In 2015, Purdue settled a long-running legal battle with Kentucky to the tune of $24 million—accused of “misrepresenting the highly addictive nature of OxyContin and encouraging doctors not trained in pain management to over prescribe the drug to patients,” the company admitted no wrongdoing.

 

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