Sackler Brothers and Oxycontin

By Bryan Silver

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

After moderate success at manufacturing over the counter type remedies, the Sackler brothers used their backgrounds in medicine to “tweak” a drug that had been around since 1917. The result was OxyContin, a so-called extended release formula of oxycodone thanks to a plastic coating around the pill.

Prior to the FDA’s approval of OxyContin in 1995, opioid painkillers were primarily used to treat cancer patients—situations where the relief they brought was worth the risk of addiction. But relying on marketing tactics taught to them by their late brother (see sidebar), Raymond and Mortimer Sackler proclaimed new OxyContin as safe for a multitude of applications—basically treating common aches and pains that were just beyond the benefit of aspirin and NSAIDs. In hindsight, we now know this to be quite a stretch. OxyContin was far from addiction-free and on the street the protective coating could be bypassed by crushing the pills for an even more potent effect. And due mostly in part to Purdue’s aggressive marketing prescriptions to the painkiller were plentiful and soon the drug made its way to the black market.

To Advertise or Not to Advertise? That Is the Question.

It might not come as a shock to hear that most pharmaceutical companies spend a significant amount on advertising their medications. Watch a few hours of nightly television and you’ll quickly lose count of how many commercials are promoting medications or describing ailments you may not have known even existed.

In our next blog, we will focus on advertising in the Pharmaceutical industry and the implications of such.