The U.S. Department of Justice negotiated an $8 billion dollar settlement in 2020 with Purdue Pharma LP for the OxyContin manufacturer’s prioritizing money over the moral imperative to care for the health and well being of patients. Purdue was guilty of “greed and violation of the law,” according to the Department of Justice.

     More than half a million Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1999. Today the number of opioid overdose deaths is eight times higher than it was in 1999. Purdue’s aggressive marketing of OxyContin while dishonestly downplaying its addictive nature significantly contributed to those deaths.

     The public applauded the settlement against Purdue and its owners, the Sackler family.

     But that has not been the end of Big Pharma’s reach for profit at the expense of the public through their marketing of opioids. Instead, with opioid kingpin now Purdue out of the way, its competitors increased their aggressive marketing of these horrifyingly addictive oxycondone products to fill the supply void that had just been created.

     University of Washington research from data provided by 600,000 prescribers showed that from 2014 to 2015 – before that court case — Purdue pharmaceutical sales reps spent $1.5 million for food and drinks on their visits to prescribers so they could promote Oxycontin.

     From 2016 to 2017 – after the lawsuit – those Purdue sales reps’ expenditures dropped to $54,000, a 94 percent decrease.  However, pharmaceutical sales reps from competing Big Pharma opioid production companies increased their food and drink expenditures by 160 percent during that same time period, 2016 to 2017.

     The ravages of the opioid epidemic that had been created in America by Big Pharma were conveniently and immorally ignored for the prospect of easy profit in a now less well supplied opioid prescription market.

     This University of Washington study also showed that after Purdue’s court case there was no decrease in the marketing of opioids by other manufacturers to those areas of the country most devastated by the opioid crisis. Prescribers in Appalachia were being marketed to as aggressively as prescribers in other parts of the country.

     In 2020 opioids that had been prescribed – not obtained on the street – still accounted for one quarter of all opioid overdose deaths.

     How many more victims need there be before Big Pharma starts policing itself and curbing its greed?