Pain Killer by Barry Meier

Author:Barry Meier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2018-05-29T04:00:00+00:00

SEVEN

Kiddie Dope

It was a promotion that got Laura Nagel her first real glimpse of the OxyContin crisis. Nagel had spent her career first working as an agent and then as a supervisor in the criminal division of the DEA, the high-profile part of the agency that goes after dealers and traffickers in illegal drugs such as heroin and cocaine. But in late 2000, she was promoted to head a little-known DEA section called the Office of Diversion Control; its job was to investigate cases where legal drugs such as OxyContin ended up on the street.

The promotion made Nagel one of the highest-ranking women at the DEA. She also was a person who did not waste time or shy away from a fight. Within weeks of taking her new job, she called together longtime staffers in the diversion unit to help her assess the OxyContin situation. Those officials had already reached a consensus. They believed that Purdue’s claim that OxyContin might be less prone to abuse was wrong and had concluded the drugmaker wasn’t doing enough to alert doctors and others about the problem. As a result, doctors were still prescribing the narcotic too freely, and it was winding up on the street. Nagel made a decision. With FDA officials seemingly unwilling to take on Purdue, the DEA would do so by going public about the havoc that OxyContin was causing. “It may take years to repair the damage that this drug has done,” one DEA official said during a newspaper interview in early 2001.

Michael Friedman of Purdue quickly contacted Nagel, asking to meet. “We are writing as a consequence of the recent and widespread news reports concerning the illegal diversion and abuse in various areas of the country of one of this Company’s analgesic products, OxyContin,” Friedman wrote. He then added:

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