10-10-2017 Over a 40-year career Philadelphia attorney Daniel Berger has obtained millions in settlements for investors and consumers hurt by a rogues’ gallery of corporate wrongdoers, from Exxon to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco. But when it comes to what America’s prescription drug makers have done to drive one of the ghastliest addiction crises in the country’s history, he confesses amazement.
“I used to think that there was nothing more reprehensible than what the tobacco industry did in suppressing what it knew about the adverse effects of an addictive and dangerous product,” says Berger. “But I was wrong. The drug makers are worse than Big Tobacco.”
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12-18-2016 When Purdue launched OxyContin in the U.S. in 1996, the company ran similar training seminars for specialists …. Several thousand of these specialists signed on to the Purdue “speakers bureau,” which paid them to make speeches about opioids at medical conferences and at hospitals….
“Any side effect is reversible when treatment is discontinued, and there is no permanent damage to the body,” Cole told a 2014 conference of pain specialists in Veracruz, Mexico, according to an account of the presentation published on Mexican health websites….In recent years Cole moved to the company’s international operation in a consulting role he described in an online resume as a “pain ambassador,” teaching the use of opioids to doctors in Colombia, Brazil, South Korea, the Philippines, China and Singapore….
Stefano Berterame, an officer of the U.N.-affiliated International Narcotics Control Board in Vienna, works to increase access to opioids in countries with shortages. He said most of the global problem could be solved with “very cheap morphine” but that selling it held little allure for multinational drug companies. …
Around the world Mundipharma companies cite statistics suggesting there is a great unmet need for their products. Opening an office in Mexico in 2014, Mundipharma officials declared that 28 million citizens were suffering from chronic pain. In Brazil the company cited a figure of 80 million. In Colombia last year, a company news release said 47% of the population — about 22 million people — were afflicted by “this silent epidemic…..
Mundipharma is not alone in seeking new markets for opioids outside American borders. In the last year two other manufacturers, Teva and Grunenthal, each bought drug companies in Mexico….
“But many studies have shown that it’s almost impossible for those with chronic or severe pain to become addicted to narcotics, as long as the drug is used for pain relief,” Lee Jong-ho told the Korea Herald. Lee could not be reached for comment.
Willem Scholten, a retired World Health Organization official Mundipharma has paid to speak at medical conferences, said President Obama, public health officials and the media have “exaggerated” the U.S. prescription opioid crisis. The surge in addiction and death was largely due to recreational abuse, he said.
“The problem is a lot of crime,” Scholten, a Dutch pharmacist, said in an interview. “If [other countries] make good regulations, they won’t have similar problems.” He said that “there is hardly any evidence” that pain patients abuse medications. Sharon Walsh, a University of Kentucky addiction expert who advises the FDA on risks from pain drugs, called the assertions “completely untrue. That is exactly the same thing they were teaching U.S. physicians when they launched OxyContin in this country,” said Walsh, who runs the university’s Center on Drug and Alcohol Research….
Mundipharma expanded first in Asia, then Latin America and then the Middle East and Africa, ultimately having a presence in 122 developing markets….
Across Europe people with prescriptions were eight times as likely to abuse the drugs. “They are potentially at the precipice of a major public health problem if prescribing increases,” Scott Novak, a scientist at the nonprofit RTI International in North Carolina, said in an interview.
In the Mundipharma’s Cyprus office, managing director, Menicos M. Petrou, called OxyContin “an excellent product” and said he had been honored to meet members of the Sackler family during visits to a factory on the island. “If people misuse drugs, most of the time there is little a pharmaceutical company can do,” he said.
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11-22-2019
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