Pharma by Gerald Posner

Author:Gerald Posner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

I. Patients covered under Medicaid and retirees with Medicare soon discovered that the government listed OxyContin as a covered drug. So did private medical insurance for the large number of the miners and construction workers in those early-hit states. In June, Britain’s Guardian reported a Medicaid patient who paid $3 for a prescription of one hundred 80 mg pills could earn $8,000. That was a third of what the average person earned annually in those West Virginia and Kentucky counties.

II. By 2005, oncologists wrote only 1 percent of Actiq’s 187,076 retail pharmacy prescriptions. Eighty percent of the patients given the drug did not have cancer. One of Cephalon’s sales representatives was so concerned about the detail team’s off-label marketing that he contacted the FDA and later wore a surveillance wire to a sales conference to help the U.S. attorney gather evidence. In 2008, Cephalon paid $375 million to settle civil charges of Medicare and Medicaid fraud and a separate $50 million for a single criminal count of illegal off-label marketing. The court awarded Bruce Boise, the detail rep turned whistleblower, $17 million.

III. The blunt language in many of Richard Sackler’s emails and memos became a weak spot for the company as it defended itself in hundreds of lawsuits. Richard’s son, David, himself a Purdue director from 2012 to 2018, tried defending his father in a 2019 Vanity Fair interview: “He just cannot understand how his words are going to land on somebody.… For a person like that, email is about the worst medium possible to communicate in, because there is no other cue. And so he’s saying things that sound incredibly strident and sound incredibly unsympathetic, and that’s not the person that he is.”

IV. Two ex-employees sued Purdue, charging that the manufacturing plant’s supervisors had forced them sometimes to bypass security protocols that required all batches of the drug always be kept on the assembly line, and even had them fake counts of vials and caps to cover up pills missing in the final inventory.

V. Friedman also disclosed that Purdue had discussions with the FDA about developing a version of OxyContin that included an opioid antagonist: “We have developed several technologies that should enable us to achieve the goal of having an opioid medicine that is resistant to abuse by the oral route as well as by injection.”

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