The Company That Fueled It All

By Bryan Silver

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

One Company Fueled America’s Opioid Epidemic

To better understand the potential for abuse in the pharmaceutical industry, it might help to look at the havoc a real-life situation has wrought on the world around us. While many know about the current opioid epidemic that is affecting our nation, most are unaware of the domino-like progression of events that brought about this blight—not to mention how much of it was orchestrated by a single pharmaceutical company for the benefit of a single family.

While it would be a stretch to suggest that anyone purposely brought about such a rampant level of drug abuse on purpose, there’s far too much evidence that has been presented through an ongoing parade of lawsuits over the past decade to ignore, and it all points to a pharmaceutical manufacturer guided by greed and acting with an unchecked level of recklessness and misconduct.

The story begins a little more than 20 years ago, when Stamford, Conn.’s Purdue Pharma first released OxyContin. At the time that it was introduced, OxyContin was heralded as a new class of opiate—one that utilized a time-release coating to avoid issues of abuse that had been previously experienced with long-term pain patients and opiate use. Purdue Pharma was quick to tout their new flagship drug as self-proclaimed “pioneers in the area of pain management” (before OxyContin, Purdue had been marketing healthcare products such as Senekot laxatives and Betadine antiseptic).

A privately held company, Purdue Pharma is headed by members of the Sackler family—a clan that’s currently number 19 on Forbes Magazine’s list of America’s Richest Families, right after the Busch family of Anheuser-Busch. It’s important to note that the bulk of their fortune was not inherited, but built squarely on the foundation of sales from one of the most popularly prescribed painkillers of the 21st century.