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Opioid Litigation Daily Media Report - 2/11/18

Purdue Pharma

OxyContin maker will stop promoting opioids to doctors (UPDATE 1)
Feb 10, 2018 | Associated Press
By Marley Jay & Matt Perrone

The maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin said it will stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors, bowing to a key demand of lawsuits that blame the company for helping trigger the current drug abuse epidemic.
Purdue Pharma to Stop Promoting OxyContin to U.S. Doctors
Feb 10, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal
By Jeanne Whalen

Privately held drug company Purdue Pharma LP said it would stop promoting OxyContin and other opioids to doctors, 22 years after the painkiller linked to widespread addiction hit the U.S. market.
OxyContin maker Purdue to stop promoting opioids in light of epidemic
Feb 10, 2018 | NBC News
By Phil McCausland and Tracy Connor

Purdue Pharma, the company best known for selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin, announced on Saturday that they would stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors. The move comes amid a series of state and municipal lawsuits that blame the company for contributing to the opioid epidemic.
OxyContin maker says it will no longer market opioid to doctors
Feb 11, 2018 | FOX News
By Amy Lieu

In a surprise reversal, the maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin said Saturday that it will stop promoting opioid drugs to doctors.
Pain Pill Giant Purdue to Stop Promotion of Opioids to Doctors
Feb 9, 2018 | Bloomberg
By Jared S. Hopkins

Pain-pill giant Purdue Pharma LP will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors, a retreat after years of criticism that the company’s aggressive sales efforts helped lay the foundation of the U.S. addiction crisis.
OxyContin maker stops promoting opioids, cuts sales staff
Feb 10, 2018 | Reuters
By Jim Finkle & Nate Raymond

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP said on Saturday that it has cut its sales force in half and will stop promoting opioids to physicians, following widespread criticism of the ways that drugmakers market addictive painkillers.
Capping years of criticism, Purdue Pharma will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors
Feb 10, 2018 | Los Angeles Times
By Ben Poston & Harriet Ryan

The manufacturer of the powerful painkiller OxyContin announced this week that it will stop promoting its opioid drug to doctors after years of criticism and mounting lawsuits.
End of an era: Purdue to stop marketing opioids to doctors
Feb 10, 2018 | STAT News
By Lev Facher & David Armstrong

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin, said it would no longer actively market opioid products — a major about-face for a company increasingly viewed as a principal culprit in the country’s addiction and overdose crisis.
OxyContin maker will stop marketing opioid products to doctors amid scrutiny
Feb 10, 2018 | The Hill
By Max Greenwood

The maker of the painkiller OxyContin will stop actively marketing its opioid products to doctors.
Purdue to end opioid promotion to doctors
Feb 10, 2018 | Stamford Advocate
By Paul Schott

Purdue Pharma, the maker of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, will no longer market its opioids to doctors, a major change for a company frequently accused of deceptively promoting its drugs.
Report: OxyContin Maker to Stop Marketing Opioid Products to Physicians
Feb 10, 2018 | Newsmax
By Solange Reyner

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, said on Saturday it will stop marketing opioid drugs to physicians following a slew of lawsuits against the company over the opioid epidemic, The Hill reports.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals Says It Will Stop the Aggressive Opioid Marketing That Made It Billions
Feb 10, 2018 | Gizmodo
By Tom McKay

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, one of the companies which has made billions of dollars selling massive amounts of opioids across the country even as addiction rates and overdose deaths skyrocketed, has announced it will no longer be directly marketing the painkillers to U.S. doctors.
Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma will stop promoting opioids to physicians
Feb 11, 2018 | WWLP (MA)
By Taylor DiChello

This announcement is coming after widespread criticism of the ways drug-makers market addictive painkillers.
OxyContin Maker Cuts Half Of Sales Staff, Stops Promoting Painkillers To Doctors
Feb 10, 2018 | Daily Caller
By Steve Birr

The pharmaceutical giant behind the painkiller OxyContin is “restructuring,” announcing Friday they will stop promoting their opioid-based drug to doctors.
OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP to stop promoting opioids to physicians: report
Feb 10, 2018 | Salon
By Nicole Karlis

Purdue Pharma LP, an opioid maker that has been at the center of several lawsuits following America’s opioid crisis, said it will discontinue promoting opioids to prescribers, according to a report in Reuters.
Oxycontin Maker Purdue Pharma To Stop Agressive Marketing Of Opioids
Feb 11, 2018 | Tech Times
By Allan Adamson

Figures from the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that one in four people who received prescriptions to opioid drugs such as Oxycontin struggle with addiction.

Purdue Pharma

OxyContin maker will stop promoting opioids to doctors (UPDATE 1)

Feb 10, 2018 | Associated Press

By Marley Jay & Matt Perrone

The maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin said it will stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors, bowing to a key demand of lawsuits that blame the company for helping trigger the current drug abuse epidemic.
OxyContin has long been the world’s top-selling opioid painkiller, bringing in billions in sales for privately-held Purdue, which also sells a newer and longer-lasting opioid drug called Hysingla.

The company announced its surprise reversal on Saturday. Purdue’s statement said it eliminated more than half its sales staff this week and will no longer send sales representatives to doctors’ offices to discuss opioid drugs. Its remaining sales staff of about 200 will focus on other medications.

The OxyContin pill, a time-release version of oxycodone, was hailed as a breakthrough treatment for chronic pain when it was approved in late 1995. It worked over 12 hours to maintain a steady level of oxycodone in patients suffering from a wide range of pain ailments. But some users quickly discovered they could get a heroin-like high by crushing the pills and snorting or injecting the entire dose at once. In 2010 Purdue reformulated OxyContin to make it harder to crush and stopped selling the original form of the drug.

Purdue eventually acknowledged that its promotions exaggerated the drug’s safety and minimized the risks of addiction. After federal investigations, the company and three executives pleaded guilty in 2007 and agreed to pay more than $600 million for misleading the public about the risks of OxyContin. But the drug continued to rack up blockbuster sales.

Dr. Andrew Kolodny, director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University and an advocate for stronger regulation of opioid drug companies, said Purdue’s decision is helpful, but it won’t make a major difference unless other opioid drug companies do the same.

“It is difficult to promote more cautious prescribing to the medical community because opioid manufacturers promote opioid use,” he said.

Allergan, which makes three opioid pain medications, said it has not actively marketed those drugs in years, and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, a unit of Johnson & Johnson, said it stopped marketing the medications in 2015. Both said opioid drugs make up a very small portion of their total revenue. Another drugmaker, Insys, said it was not able to comment immediately, while Teva Pharmaceutical Industries did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kolodny said that opioids are useful for cancer patients who are suffering from severe pain, and for people who only need a pain medication for a few days. But he said the companies have promoted them as a treatment for chronic pain, where they are more harmful and less helpful, because it’s more profitable.

“They are still doing this abroad,” Kolodny added. “They are following the same playbook that they used in the United States.”

Purdue Pharma only does business in the U.S. It is associated with two other companies, Mundipharma and Napp, that operate in other countries. It said those companies have separate leadership and operate according to local regulations.

Purdue and other opioid drugmakers and pharmaceutical distributors continue defending themselves against hundreds of local and state lawsuits seeking to hold the industry accountable for the drug overdose epidemic. The lawsuits say drugmakers misled doctors and patients about the risks of opioids by enlisting “front groups” and “key opinion leaders” who oversold the drugs’ benefits and encouraged overprescribing. State and local governments are seeking money and changes to how the industry operates, including an end to the use of outside groups to push their drugs.

Kolodny is serving as an expert advising the court in those lawsuits.

U.S. deaths linked to opioids have quadrupled since 2000 to roughly 42,000 in 2016, or about 115 lives lost per day. Although initially driven by prescription drugs, most opioid deaths now involve illicit drugs, including heroin and fentanyl.

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Purdue Pharma to Stop Promoting OxyContin to U.S. Doctors

Feb 10, 2018 | The Wall Street Journal

By Jeanne Whalen

Privately held drug company Purdue Pharma LP said it would stop promoting OxyContin and other opioids to doctors, 22 years after the painkiller linked to widespread addiction hit the U.S. market.
The company will continue selling the products, but Purdue’s sales force “will no longer be visiting offices to engage in discussions about opioid products,” the company said, confirming an earlier report by Bloomberg. Doctors and other prescribers who have questions about the drugs will have to contact Purdue’s medical affairs department, the company said.
Purdue is also cutting its U.S. sales force by more than 50%, to about 200 people. The remaining sales representatives will market non-opioid products, said the Stamford, Conn.-based company.
Many public-health officials have said Purdue’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin after the drug’s 1996 launch helped encourage lax prescribing and widespread addiction that for many people progressed to heroin and other illicit drugs. More than 300,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses since the late 1990s.
In 2007, Purdue and three of its executives pleaded guilty in federal court to criminal charges of misleading the public about the addictive qualities of OxyContin. Purdue and the executives agreed to pay $634.5 million in government penalties and costs to settle the civil litigation.
In its guilty plea, Purdue admitted the company’s sales tactics included false claims that OxyContin was less addictive, less subject to abuse and less likely to cause withdrawal symptoms than other pain medications. Within a few years of the drug’s launch, many communities around the country started reporting worrying rates of OxyContin-related abuse and overdose deaths.
Purdue has since said it has “learned from the past,” and that it supports programs to prevent prescription-drug abuse.
Purdue’s halting of its opioid marketing comes as the company faces growing legal scrutiny. More than a dozen states and about 400 cities and counties in the U.S. have sued Purdue or other opioid-painkiller makers, accusing them of fueling addiction by misrepresenting the risks of their drugs. In response to the suits, Purdue has said it is “dedicated to being part of the solution” to the opioid crisis.
In October, Purdue said it was the subject of a probe by federal prosecutorsrelated to OxyContin. The company said it was cooperating with the investigation.
In 2016, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued guidelines urging doctors to limit their prescribing of opioids for chronic pain. Since then, Purdue’s opioid-related discussions with prescribers have included details about the CDC recommendations, the company said.

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OxyContin maker Purdue to stop promoting opioids in light of epidemic

Feb 10, 2018 | NBC News

By Phil McCausland and Tracy Connor

Purdue Pharma, the company best known for selling the prescription painkiller OxyContin, announced on Saturday that they would stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors. The move comes amid a series of state and municipal lawsuits that blame the company for contributing to the opioid epidemic.
Purdue has faced criticism for more than a decade that it has aggressively and irresponsibly pushed the sale of its drug OxyContin. The company said Saturday that it would cut its sales force by more than 50 percent, with approximately 200 people remaining in the department.
"We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," Purdue said in a statement.
The company plans to run all questions about its highly profitable drug Oxycontin — which the American Addiction Centers said has a strong “potential for addiction and subsequent withdrawal symptoms” — through its medical affairs department.
Dr. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of Opioid Policy Research at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, said he wished that the company had decided to stop marketing the drug years ago and that other opioid manufacturers would agree to do the same.
"The problem we have is doctors over-prescribing opioids, and it’s difficult to promote more cautious prescribing if manufacturers are sending drug reps into doctor’s offices and advertising in medical journals and investing millions to get them to prescribe more," Kolodny said.
"Overall, the impact will be small because the genie is out of the bottle," he said of the opioid manufacturer's decision. "But if other opioid manufacturers would do the same, it would have a bigger effect."
Purdue generated $1.94 billion in Oxycontin sales in 2017, according to Symphony Health Solutions. That is approximately $1 billion less than its all-time high in 2013.
First introduced in 1995, Oxycontin was marketed by Purdue as being a non-addictive, time-release version of oxycodone used for the treatment of chronic pain. Users soon learned that they could bypass its time-release function by crushing the pills and snorting or injecting them.
Because of Oxycontin’s rising cost, many people who developed an addiction to the opioid subsequently turned to heroin, contributing to the ongoing drug epidemic.
In 2007, Purdue Pharma and three of its executives were fined $634.5 millionfor misleading the public about the painkiller's addictive properties. The company's top lawyer, former president and former chief medical pleaded guilty to misbranding the drug. They were placed on probation for three years and ordered to perform 400 hours of community service.
The drug maker recently attempted to recast itself as an advocate in the fight to end the opioid crisis, while maintaining an aggressive sales push. According to new details released in a 2017 Washington state lawsuit, Purdue’s sales staff collected data to find the highest prescribers it could and then aggressively market its drugs to those individuals.
More recently, the company identified nurses and physician assistants as "a high value target, particularly due to impact on primary care," and pushed its sales team to target these potential prescribers. The drug maker noted an 18 percent uptick in sales from nurses and physician assistants between 2014 to 2015.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1 in 4 people who received prescriptions to drugs like Oxycontin currently struggle with an opioid addiction. The CDC also reported that more than 1,000 people are treated in emergency rooms for prescription opioid overdoses.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse reported that opioid pain reliever prescriptions escalated from 76 million in 1991 to nearly 207 million in 2013. The institute also found that the United States is the biggest consumer of hydrocodone in the world, taking in almost 100 percent of the world’s doses.
The White House Council of Economic Advisers announced in November that the ongoing opioid crisis cost the country $504 billion in 2015, attributing the high dollar amount to health care, criminal justice spending and lost worker productivity. Their finding is more than six times the most recent estimate.
In the past year, Purdue has been named in lawsuits filed by the Ohio, Alabama and Washington attorneys general. Even cities like Philadelphia have filed a suit against the company for exacerbating the drug addiction crisis.
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall announced earlier this week that he had filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma, stating that drugs like Oxycontin had left "a trail of addiction and death winding through every community of this state."
"Alabama ranks first in the nation for the number of painkiller prescriptions per capita,” Marshall said in a statement. "As a result, it is estimated that almost 30,000 of our residents over age 17 are dependent upon heroin and prescription painkillers. Alabama’s drug overdose death rate skyrocketed by 82 percent from 2006 to 2014 and it is believed that many of those deaths were from opioid painkillers and heroin."
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, whose state leads the nation with the highest per capita rate of fatal drug overdoses, said in a statement that he was "encouraged by Purdue's decision to stop marketing deadly opioids," but "they are still a long way from reversing the damage they've done to families and communities across the country."
"If they really want to start helping the communities they've devastated, they should support and implement my LifeBOAT legislation, and contribute one penny per milligram of every opioid they sell to funding treatment centers," Manchin, a Democrat said.
The legislation "would establish a permanent funding stream to provide and expand access to substance abuse treatment," and impose a fee of 1 cent per milligram of active opioid ingredients in prescription pain pills, and include rebates for cancer-related pain and hospice care, according to his office. The re-introduced bill was referred to the Finance Committee last year.

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OxyContin maker says it will no longer market opioid to doctors

Feb 11, 2018 | FOX News

By Amy Lieu

In a surprise reversal, the maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin said Saturday that it will stop promoting opioid drugs to doctors.
Manufacturer Purdue bowed to a key demand of lawsuits that blame the Connecticut-based company for helping trigger the opioid epidemic.
The company's statement said it eliminated more than half its sales staff this week and will no longer send sales representatives to doctors' offices to discuss opioid drugs.
Its remaining sales staff of about 200 will focus on other medications.
"The genie is already out of the bottle," said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, director of opioid policy research at Brandeis University and an advocate for stronger regulation of opioid drug companies. "Millions of Americans are now opioid-addicted because the campaign that Purdue and other opioid manufacturers used to increase prescribing worked well. "
He said Purdue's decision is helpful, but it won't make a major difference unless other opioid drug companies do the same.
"We would have more success in encouraging cautious prescribing if drug companies stopped promoting aggressive prescribing," he told the Times.
U.S. deaths linked to opioids have quadrupled since 2000 to roughly 42,000 in 2016, or about 115 lives lost per day. More than 7 million Americans are estimated to have abused OxyContin since its 1996 debut, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The report said states where OxyContin abuse rates were the highest "experienced the largest increases in heroin deaths," a research from Penn’s Wharton School and Rand said.
OxyContin has long been the world's top-selling opioid painkiller, bringing in billions in sales for the privately-held company.
Eventually, Purdue acknowledged that its promotions exaggerated the drug's safety and minimized the risks of addiction.
"They are still doing this abroad," Kolodny said of their international arm Mundipharma. "They are following the same playbook that they used in the United States."
Purdue and other opioid drugmakers and pharmaceutical distributors continue defending themselves against hundreds of local and state lawsuits seeking to hold the industry accountable for the drug overdose epidemic.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Pain Pill Giant Purdue to Stop Promotion of Opioids to Doctors

Feb 9, 2018 | Bloomberg

By Jared S. Hopkins

Pain-pill giant Purdue Pharma LP will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors, a retreat after years of criticism that the company’s aggressive sales efforts helped lay the foundation of the U.S. addiction crisis.
The company told employees this week that it would cut its sales force by more than half, to 200 workers. It plans to send a letter Monday to doctors saying that its salespeople will no longer come to their clinics to talk about the company’s pain products.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement. Instead, any questions doctors have will be directed to the Stamford, Connecticut-based company’s medical affairs department.
OxyContin, approved in 1995, is the closely held company’s biggest-selling drug, though sales of the pain pill have declined in recent years amid competition from generics. It generated $1.8 billion in 2017, down from $2.8 billion five years earlier, according to data compiled by Symphony Health Solutions. It also sells the painkiller Hysingla.
Purdue is credited with helping develop many modern tactics of aggressive pharmaceutical promotion. Its efforts to push OxyContin included OxyContin music, fishing hats and stuffed plush toys. More recently, it has positioned itself as an advocate for fighting the opioid addiction crisis, as overdoses from prescription drugs claim thousands of American lives each year.
Rising Toll
Purdue and other opioid makers and distributors face dozens of lawsuits in which they’re accused of creating a public-health crisis through their marketing of the painkillers. Purdue officials confirmed in November that they are in settlement talks with a group of state attorneys general and trying to come up with a global resolution of the government opioid claims.
More than 60,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016, and there was a fivefold increase in overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids -- from 3,105 in 2013 to about 20,000 in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control. The addiction epidemic cost the American economy $504 billion in 2015, the equivalent of 2.8 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product that year, according to a report by the Council of Economic Advisers.
About 200 remaining Purdue salespeople will focus on promoting the company’s opioid induced constipation drug, Symproic. The drug launched last year in partnership with Shionogi & Co.

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OxyContin maker stops promoting opioids, cuts sales staff

Feb 10, 2018 | Reuters

By Jim Finkle & Nate Raymond

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP said on Saturday that it has cut its sales force in half and will stop promoting opioids to physicians, following widespread criticism of the ways that drugmakers market addictive painkillers.
The drugmaker said it will inform doctors on Monday that its sales representatives will no longer be visiting physician offices to discuss its opioid products. It will now have about 200 sales representatives, Purdue said.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the Stamford, Connecticut-based company said in a statement.
Doctors with opioid-related questions will be directed to its medical affairs department. Its sales representatives will now focus on Symproic, a drug for treating opioid-induced constipation, and other potential non-opioid products, Purdue said.
Opioids were involved in more than 42,000 overdose deaths in 2016, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Amid the opioid epidemic, Purdue and other drugmakers have been fighting a wave of lawsuits by states, counties and cities that have accused them of pushing addictive painkillers through deceptive marketing.
The lawsuits have generally accused Purdue of significantly downplaying the risk of addiction posed by OxyContin and of engaging in misleading marketing that overstated the benefits of opioids for treating chronic, rather than short-term, pain.
At least 14 states have sued privately-held Purdue. Most recently, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall filed a lawsuit on Tuesday accusing Purdue of deceptively marketing prescription opioids to generate billions of dollars in sales.
Purdue is also facing a federal investigation by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Connecticut.
Purdue has denied the allegations in the various lawsuits. It has said its drugs are approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and account for only 2 percent of all opioid prescriptions.
Purdue and three executives previously pleaded guilty in 2007 to federal charges related to the misbranding of OxyContin and agreed to pay a total of $634.5 million to resolve a U.S. Justice Department probe.

That year, Purdue also reached a $19.5-million settlement with 26 states and the District of Columbia. It agreed in 2015 to pay $24 million to resolve a lawsuit by Kentucky.

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Capping years of criticism, Purdue Pharma will stop promoting its opioid drugs to doctors

Feb 10, 2018 | Los Angeles Times

By Ben Poston & Harriet Ryan

The manufacturer of the powerful painkiller OxyContin announced this week that it will stop promoting its opioid drug to doctors after years of criticism and mounting lawsuits.
Purdue Pharma informed its employees that it was cutting its sales force in half, leaving about 200 representatives in the U.S. who no longer will visit doctors' offices to discuss the company's opioid products.
"We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," the company said in a statement. "Going forward, questions and requests for information about our opioid products will be handled through direct communications with … our medical affairs department."
The company is facing dozens of lawsuits from cities across the country that were prompted by a Times investigation last year that revealed that Purdue had extensive evidence pointing to illegal trafficking of its pills but in many cases did not share it with local law enforcement agencies or cut off the flow of the drugs. The plaintiffs are seeking to hold the company financially responsible for a raging opioid epidemic.
Brandeis University researcher Andrew Kolodny, a longtime critic of the pharmaceutical industry's role in the opioid epidemic, welcomed Purdue's announcement but said, "It's pretty late in the game to have a major impact."
"The genie is already out of the bottle," Kolodny said. "Millions of Americans are now opioid-addicted because the campaign that Purdue and other opioid manufacturers used to increase prescribing worked well. And as the prescribing went up, it led to a severe epidemic of opioid addiction."
One Los Angeles ring tracked by Purdue and highlighted by The Times supplied large quantities of OxyContin to gang members and other criminals who trafficked the drug to a Crips leader in Everett, Wash., from 2008 to 2010. That dealer sold the highly addictive pills to low-level dealers, who blanketed the entire region.
Many addicts later switched to heroin, a cheaper opioid.
Attorneys for the drug manufacturer have argued that the plaintiffs suffered from a number of legal failings — including statute of limitations problems and a failure to demonstrate a close connection between the company's conduct and the criminal acts of drug dealers and addicts.
"[T]here is no basis in law for a municipality to bring such an action against a pharmaceutical manufacturer," Purdue's lawyers wrote in the case brought by Everett, a city of 100,000 north of Seattle.
In an attempt to stem the abuse of OxyContin, Purdue spent a decade and several hundred million dollars developing a version of the painkiller that was more difficult to snort, smoke or inject. Since those "abuse-deterrent" pills debuted seven years ago, misuse of OxyContin has fallen and the company has touted them as proof of its efforts to end the opioid epidemic.
But a study released in January 2017 found that rather than curtail deaths, the change in OxyContin contributed heavily to a surge in heroin overdoses across the country and as a result, there was "no net reduction in overall overdose deaths."
Experts have long blamed skyrocketing heroin use on painkiller addicts transitioning to the cheaper, more easily available street opioid. But the study by scientists at the University of Pennsylvania and Rand Corp. was the first large-scale research to tie the alarming growth in heroin deaths to Purdue's introduction of its new pills.
More than 7 million Americans are estimated to have abused OxyContin since its 1996 debut, with some regions of the country more seriously affected. The researchers from Penn's Wharton School and Rand analyzed levels of OxyContin abuse on a state-by-state basis in the years leading up to the pill reformulation and then looked at deaths from heroin in a three-year period after the change. They found that heroin deaths more than tripled — from 3,000 in 2010 to 10,500 in 2014. And states where OxyContin abuse rates were the highest "experienced the largest increases in heroin deaths," the authors wrote.
Washington University School of Medicine professor Theodore J. Cicero, who separately has studied the role that OxyContin reformulation played in heroin addiction, said he found the Penn-Rand study credible.
One of the big remaining questions is whether other opioid makers will follow suit and cease marketing the drugs to doctors, said Kolodny, executive director and co-founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing.
"We would have more success in encouraging cautious prescribing if drug companies stopped promoting aggressive prescribing," he said.
It's unknown if Purdue will continue marketing the drug outside the United States through its international arm, known as Mundipharma.
Purdue spokesman Bob Josephson said that Purdue is an independent company operating in the U.S. and that "the other companies operate under different leadership structures, within distinct regulatory environments."
A Mundipharma representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Kolodny said Mundipharma is using the same playbook abroad that Purdue used in this country to increase prescriptions.

"If it takes off the way it did in the United States, these other countries will be dealing with the same problem we are dealing with today," he said.

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End of an era: Purdue to stop marketing opioids to doctors

Feb 10, 2018 | STAT News

By Lev Facher & David Armstrong

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the opioid painkiller OxyContin, said it would no longer actively market opioid products — a major about-face for a company increasingly viewed as a principal culprit in the country’s addiction and overdose crisis.
The company said it is reducing its sales staff by more than half, and that its remaining salespeople will no longer visit doctor’s offices to push their product. Instead, the company said it will direct prescribers to materials published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the office of the U.S. surgeon general.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” Purdue said in a statement.
The announcement, first reported by Bloomberg, marks the end of an era for a company that changed the paradigm for opioid use in part through aggressive, in-person marketing to doctors. Sales of OxyContin and other opioids have fallen recently amid pressure from regulators, insurers, and the general public. The company has been unable to develop or buy a drug to replace OxyContin’s sales.
Instead, the company has mounted a vast public-relations effort in the face of increasing criticism — most notably with recent full-page ads in major newspapers.
“We manufacture prescription opioids,” reads one of the ads. “How could we not help fight the prescription and illicit opioid abuse crisis?”
State lawsuits against Purdue have mounted in recent months as governments at all levels have struggled to combat the opioid epidemic — much of which, experts say, was caused by excessive prescription of powerful painkillers like OxyContin. The company in 2007 paid out $600 million to settle civil and criminal charges related to the drug’s marketing, with three company executives agreeing to pay an additional $34.5 million.
The health insurer Cigna also announced in October it would no longer cover OxyContin through employer-based plans, shortly after the pharmaceutical industry lobby group PhRMA broadly endorsed policies that limit opioid prescriptions to seven days.
In an effort to shed light on the marketing practices of Purdue, STAT filed a motion in March 2016 to unseal records including the deposition of Dr. Richard Sackler, a former president of Purdue and a member of the family that owns the privately held Connecticut company. The records could provide new information on how Purdue marketed the potent opioid and what top executives knew about the addictive nature of the painkiller.
A three-judge panel of the Kentucky Court of Appeals is now considering the matter.

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OxyContin maker will stop marketing opioid products to doctors amid scrutiny

Feb 10, 2018 | The Hill

By Max Greenwood

The maker of the painkiller OxyContin will stop actively marketing its opioid products to doctors.
Purdue Pharmaceuticals announced that it would cut its sales staff by more than half and would stop sending sales representatives to doctor's offices to discuss opioid products.
"We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," the company said in a statement.
Purdue also said it will start referring opioid-related requests and questions from prescribers to health-care professionals in its medical affairs department.
In a message to health-care professionals, Monica Kwarcinski, the head of Purdue's medical affairs department, said that the new policies would go into effect on Monday.
"Effective Monday, February 12, 2018, our field sales organization will no longer be visiting your offices to engage you in discussions about our opioid products," she said.
President Trump declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency in October.
Many experts have placed blame on the over-prescription of powerful painkillers for the opioid epidemic that has ravaged the country in recent decades.
A number of states have filed lawsuits against Purdue, alleging that the company misled prescribers and patients about the risks of prescription opioids.
Purdue has denied the allegations, noting that its products are approved by the Food and Drug Administration, and that they account for only a small portion of all opioid prescriptions.

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Purdue to end opioid promotion to doctors

Feb 10, 2018 | Stamford Advocate

By Paul Schott

Purdue Pharma, the maker of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, will no longer market its opioids to doctors, a major change for a company frequently accused of deceptively promoting its drugs.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement.
The new strategy cuts the Stamford-based company’s salesforce by more than 50 percent, to a total of 200. Purdue also plans to send a letter Monday to doctors to announce its sales personnel will no longer come to their offices to discuss the company’s opioids. Prescribers’ questions and requests for information about opioids such as OxyCotnin will be handled by Purdue’s medical affairs department.
Approximately 200 sales representatives who remain will focus on Symproic, which treats opioid-induced constipation in adult patients with non-cancer chronic pain, and other potential non-opioid drugs.
Among earlier measures aimed at combatting the opioid crisis, Purdue said it has directed prescribers for the past two years to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. The company said it also refers prescribers to U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s open letter urging medical professionals to join him in tackling the epidemic of opioid abuse.
The salesforce overhaul follows a torrent of lawsuits in the past year that have accused Purdue of falsely marketing its opioids. OxyContin is its top-selling drug, bringing in billions of dollars in annual revenues.
Prosecutors who have sued Purdue say the marketing and proliferation of OxyContin have fueled opioid abuse and overdoses in their cities and states. Among the most recent complaints, Alabama sued last week and New York City filed litigation last month.
The company has denied the lawsuits’ allegations.
From 1999 to 2016, more than 200,000 people in the U.S. died from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were five times higher in 2016 than in 1999, while sales of those drugs quadrupled, the CDC said.

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Report: OxyContin Maker to Stop Marketing Opioid Products to Physicians

Feb 10, 2018 | Newsmax

By Solange Reyner

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the powerful painkiller OxyContin, said on Saturday it will stop marketing opioid drugs to physicians following a slew of lawsuits against the company over the opioid epidemic, The Hill reports.
Alabama last Tuesday became the latest state to file a lawsuit accusing the private Connecticut company of fueling the U.S. epidemic by misrepresenting the risks and benefits of opioids. OxyContin is the nation’s top-selling opioid painkiller. Purdue, which has reportedly generated approximately $35 billion dollars in revenue, in a statement said it had "restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers."
The company also said it eliminated more than half its sales staff this week and will no longer send sales representatives to doctors' offices to discuss opioid drugs. The FDA approved OxyContin in 1995, and the drug was hailed as a medical breakthrough because of its ability to help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain.
The FDA even approved a package insert for OxyContin, announcing the drug was safer than rival painkillers because the delayed-absorption mechanism was "believed to reduce the abuse liability."
Opioids, though, were involved in more than 42,000 overdose deaths in 2016, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the most recent figures suggest that 145 Americans now die every day from overdoses.

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Purdue Pharmaceuticals Says It Will Stop the Aggressive Opioid Marketing That Made It Billions

Feb 10, 2018 | Gizmodo

By Tom McKay

Purdue Pharmaceuticals, one of the companies which has made billions of dollars selling massive amounts of opioids across the country even as addiction rates and overdose deaths skyrocketed, has announced it will no longer be directly marketing the painkillers to U.S. doctors.
Purdue, which the New Yorker dubbed an “Empire of Pain” in a 2017 profile, is the company that developed and released the long-lasting painkiller OxyContin in 1995 and then aggressively marketed it to doctors with campaigns presenting the threat of addiction as overblown. As the New Yorker noted, the painkiller has reportedly made Purdue as much as $35 billion over the years, while doctors and patients alike soon found that its only active ingredient, the semi-synthetic opioid oxycodone, often resulted in “debilitating” withdrawal symptoms upon cessation or even between doses.
According to Bloomberg, Purdue is now making significant changes to the way it markets its stable of opioid drugs amid a nearly incontrovertible body of evidence that pharmaceutical companies understated their potential dangers:
The company told employees this week that it would cut its sales force by more than half, to 200 workers. It plans to send a letter Monday to doctors saying that its salespeople will no longer come to their clinics to talk about the company’s pain products.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement. Instead, any questions doctors have will be directed to the Stamford, Connecticut-based company’s medical affairs department.
...
Purdue is credited with helping develop many modern tactics of aggressive pharmaceutical promotion. Its efforts to push OxyContin included OxyContin music, fishing hats, and stuffed plush toys.
Research has shown the “the evidence for opioids treating long-term, chronic pain is very weak (despite their effectiveness for short-term, acute pain), while the evidence that opioids cause harm in the long term is very strong,” per Vox.
As Bloomberg wrote, having made its $35 billion, Purdue is now positioning “itself as an advocate for fighting the opioid addiction crisis” that it helped create. Bloomberg also noted that one factor in all this might be OxyContin’s growing competition from generic equivalents, which Symphony Health Solutions told the news agency has helped to reduce its 2017 revenue from the drug to $1.7 billion from $2.8 billion five years earlier.
While the New York Times estimated some 64,000 people in the U.S. died of drug overdoses in 2016, it doesn’t have data showing which of the overdoses were due to opioids or what kind were involved. But many of the deaths were related to prescription painkillers and a growing number involve one of the many analogs of fentanyl, an extremely powerful and dangerous class of narcotic that is often sold on the black market in lieu of prescription painkillers or mixed with heroin.
As Vox noted, research shows that the vast majority of heroin users—and likely thus fentanyl users—started with prescription painkillers. Pharmaceutical companies which manufacture naloxone, a drug that can reverse the effects of an opioid overdose, have accordingly raised pricesas it came into higher demand.
Purdue and its executives paid out over $634 million in settlements over “civil and criminal” allegations related to its marketing techniques in 2007, per Stat, which is fighting in court to unseal records which could shed light on what the company knew as it was pushing OxyContin. At least 14 states are currently fighting other lawsuits against Purdue, according to Reuters, with hundreds of pending suits in Ohio alone.
While Purdue’s cessation of direct marketing is likely to at least remove some of the fuel from the raging wildfire that is the opioid epidemic, it’s probably cold news to the friends and loved ones of the tens of thousands of people who have died in the meantime. Stat predicts nearly 500,000 people will die of opioid overdoses in the U.S. over the next decade, with a worst-case death toll forecase at over 650,000.

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Oxycontin maker Purdue Pharma will stop promoting opioids to physicians

Feb 11, 2018 | WWLP (MA)

By Taylor DiChello

This announcement is coming after widespread criticism of the ways drug-makers market addictive painkillers.
At least 14 states have sued Purdue, and many cities including Greenfield and Springfield in Western Massachusetts. The suits accuse pharmaceutical companies of pushing doctors to sell addictive painkillers.
The drug-maker said it will inform doctors on Monday and that sales reps will no longer be visiting physician offices to discuss opioid products. They will cut their sales force in half to about 200 sales reps. Doctors with questions about opioids will be directed to the company’s medical affairs department.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, 42 thousand overdose deaths in 2016 were linked to opioids.

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OxyContin Maker Cuts Half Of Sales Staff, Stops Promoting Painkillers To Doctors

Feb 10, 2018 | Daily Caller

By Steve Birr

The pharmaceutical giant behind the painkiller OxyContin is “restructuring,” announcing Friday they will stop promoting their opioid-based drug to doctors.
The unexpected shift in policy from Purdue Pharma is likely a concession to the demands of dozens of states and localities suing the drug maker, along with other manufacturers of opioid painkillers, for igniting the addiction crisis through deceptive marketing practices that downplayed the risks of their drugs. Purdue Pharma is the first major opioid drug maker to end the practice of marketing painkillers to medical professionals, reports Bloomberg.
The company slashed more than half of its current sales force, alerting staff to the changes in a letter earlier this week. The move reduces the sales staff to 200 employees. Purdue Pharma’s medical affairs team will now field any questions regarding pain medications from doctors.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” representatives of Purdue Pharma said in a statement to Bloomberg Friday evening.
Dozens of lawsuits across the country allege Purdue Pharma launched a fraudulent marketing scheme to boost sales of OxyContin in the late 1990s that downplayed the risks for addiction from pain medication. Officials in Tennessee, which filed a lawsuit against Purdue Pharma Sept. 29, claim the company’s tactics served as a model for other major drug makers to do the same thing.
Medical professionals say a shift in the 1990s to “institutionalize” pain management opened the doors for pharmaceutical companies to encourage the mass prescribing of painkillers by doctors, and Purdue Pharma led that effort.
Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty in 2007 to felony charges for false marketing of OxyContin and paid $635 million as a result. The company was found to have overstated how long the effects of the medication lasted and severely downplayed the addiction risks of the drug. Three executives also pleaded guilty to criminal charges but dodged prison time.
Purdue Pharma denies allegations of complicity in the opioid epidemic and says it is committed to curbing rates of opioid abuse.
“We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution,” a spokesman for Purdue Pharma previously told The Daily Caller News Foundation in response to a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of New Jersey. “Although our products account for approximately 2 percent of the total opioid prescriptions, as a company, we’ve distributed the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, developed three of the first four FDA-approved opioid medications with abuse-deterrent properties and partner with law enforcement to ensure access to naloxone. We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense.”
Purdue Pharma is owned by the Sackler family, which is listed as one of the wealthiest families in the country on the annual Forbes list, worth approximately $13 billion. The family’s fortune largely comes from OxyContin sales, which their company branded and introduced as an extended release painkiller in 1995.
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of accidental death for Americans under age 50, killing more than 64,000 people in 2016, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The increase is driven primarily by opioids, which claimed 42,249 lives last year, a 28 percent increase over the roughly 33,000 lives lost to opioids in 2015.

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OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma LP to stop promoting opioids to physicians: report

Feb 10, 2018 | Salon

By Nicole Karlis

Purdue Pharma LP, an opioid maker that has been at the center of several lawsuits following America’s opioid crisis, said it will discontinue promoting opioids to prescribers, according to a report in Reuters.
“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement to Reuters. “Doctors with opioid-related questions will be directed to its medical affairs department.”
The company also said it will reportedly turns its focus to “other potential non-opioid products.”
“Its sales representatives will now focus on Symproic, a drug for treating opioid-induced constipation, and other potential non-opioid products,” the statement said.
The announcement could be a result of the several lawsuits the company is facing.
“The lawsuits have generally accused Purdue of significantly downplaying the risk of addiction posed by OxyContin and of engaging in misleading marketing that overstated the benefits of opioids for treating chronic, rather than short-term, pain,” Reuters staff explained in the report.
According to data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) prescription opioid sales nearly quadrupled from 1999 to 2014; during this timespan, overdose deaths from prescription opioids increased as well. While opioid prescriptions should only be prescribed to cancer patients, or those with pain-related diagnosis, only an estimated one out of five fit the bill. Overdose deaths from opioid prescriptions were fives times higher in 2016 than they were in 1999, and overall, 40 percent of all U.S. opioid overdose deaths involved prescription drugs.
The National Institute on Drug Abuse found that half of young people who inject heroin abused opioid prescriptions first; in other words, opioid prescriptions are often a gateway to heroin.
Some cities like New York have taken matters into their own hands and sued the manufacturers and distributors of opioid prescription drugs.
“More New Yorkers have died from opioid overdoses than car crashes and homicides combined in recent years. Big Pharma helped to fuel this epidemic by deceptively peddling these dangerous drugs and hooking millions of Americans in exchange for profit,” Mayor Bill de Blasio said. “It’s time for hold the companies accountable for what they’ve done to our City, and help save more lives.”
The state of Alabama was the latest to join the string of cities and states to file a lawsuit against opioid makers.
“It will take years to undo the damage but an important first step we must take is to hold the parties responsible for this epidemic legally liable for the destruction they have unleashed upon our citizens,” Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

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Oxycontin Maker Purdue Pharma To Stop Agressive Marketing Of Opioids

Feb 11, 2018 | Tech Times

By Allan Adamson

Figures from the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that one in four people who received prescriptions to opioid drugs such as Oxycontin struggle with addiction.
About 115 people die in the United States every day from an opioid overdose. As the country continues to battle with an opioid epidemic, one of the largest producers of prescription opioids has made an important marketing decision that may potentially impact the war on addictive drugs.
Restructured Commercial Operation
Purdue Pharma, the drug company behind Oxycontin, said on Saturday that it will stop promoting opioids to physicians and has, in fact, halved its sales force. The decision comes as the drug maker continues to face criticism for marketing addictive painkillers.
The Connecticut-based drugmaker said that it has already reduced its sales representative to 200 and has restructured its commercial operation.The drug company said that its sales representatives will longer visit doctors' offices to promote the company's opioid products.
Purdue's sales representatives will now focus on the Symproic drug designed to treat opioid-induced constipation, and other non-opioid products. Physicians who have opioid-related questions will be directed to Purdue's medical affairs department.
"We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers," the company said.
Effects On Opioid Epidemic In The US
Andrew Kolodny, from the Heller School for Social Policy and Management's Opioid Policy Research, said that the impact of Purdue's decision is small but there could be a bigger effect if other opioid makers will stop the aggressive marketing of their products.
"Overall, the impact will be small because the genie is out of the bottle," Kolodny said. "But if other opioid manufacturers would do the same, it would have a bigger effect."Oxycontin
Purdue first introduced Oxycontin in 1985. The drug was marketed as a non-addictive treatment for chronic pain. Users, however, later learned that they could be heroin-like high from the drug by crushing the pills or by injecting or snorting them.
In 2010, the company reformulated Oxycontin so it would be hard to crush. Purdue also stopped selling the original form of the drug. It later acknowledged that its promotions exaggerated the safety of the drug and minimized its risk for addiction.
The company and three executives pleaded guilty in 2007 for misleading the public about the risks of the drug but Oxycontin continued to generate blockbuster sales.

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