Quotes About OxyContin

Nobody ever mentions the good side of OxyContin: It makes you feel like Jesus fucking a horse.

The doctors prescribed OxyContin for the pain—a single forty-milligram tablet twice a day. Everyone said I would be fine for winter track in November.

Over several months, the drug had completely rewired my brain, hijacking more and more of my pain receptors, and now I needed OxyContin simply to exist. I couldn't sleep, or eat, or focus in class. And no one warned me this was going to happen. No one told me to expect a struggle.

If I am an American who has developed an Oxycontin addiction, as soon as my doctor realizes I'm an addict, she has to cut me off. She is allowed to prescribe to treat only my physical pain—not my addiction. Indeed, if she prescribes just to meet my addiction, she will face being stripped of her license and up to twenty-five years in jail84 as a common drug dealer—just

problem-solution marketing. They would market and publicize the problem of untreated pain. Then they'd promote the solution: OxyContin.

Purdue drilled its reps on two selling points. One, OxyContin was the first narcotic that wouldn't hook patients. And two, fewer than 1 percent of pain-management patients get addicted anyway.

By 2002, six years after its release, Purdue was selling almost $1.5 billion of the drug each year—eight times the volume the company had projected. The single drug represented 80 percent of Purdue's net sales. It was the biggest-selling brand-name controlled substance on the market. The once sleepy drugmaker was now a powerhouse, and it wasn't about to concede that its star product had a major flaw. OxyContin's

In 1993, three years before OxyContin came out, the DEA allowed pharmaceutical companies to manufacture 3,520 kilograms of oxycodone. In 2007, the DEA signed off on the production of seventy thousand kilograms of oxycodone. Almost twenty times the amount manufactured just fourteen years earlier. Twenty times.

She complained that because of Purdue's message about the drug being "good for whatever ails you," OxyContin was "creeping into a whole population of people where it doesn't belong.

2019, a team of economists from Notre Dame, Boston University, and the National Bureau of Economic Research published a dense research paper on the timing of the "rapid rise in the heroin death rate" in the years since 2010. The title of the paper was "How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic.

In 1996, Purdue had introduced a groundbreaking drug, a powerful opioid painkiller called OxyContin, which was heralded as a revolutionary way to treat chronic pain. The drug became one of the biggest blockbusters in pharmaceutical history, generating some $35 billion in revenue.

In some cases, these communities also happened to have long-standing problems with prescription drug abuse. In some parts of Appalachia, people would pair an OxyContin with a Valium—one of Richard Sackler's pills and one of his uncle Arthur's. They called this "the Cadillac high.

OxyContin was, in his view, entirely beyond reproach—a magnificent gift that the Sacklers had bestowed upon humanity that was now being sullied by a nihilistic breed of hillbilly pill poppers.

Purdue filed papers with the FDA, asking the agency to refuse to accept generic versions of the original formulation of OxyContin—the version the company had been selling all these years—on grounds that it was unsafe. The company said that it was voluntarily withdrawing the original formulation from the market for reasons "of safety.

An overdose could induce respiratory failure: you fall into a sleep so deep and blissful that you stop breathing. At small hospitals, patients were being admitted close to death. In trailers and dingy apartments and remote farmhouses, police and paramedics would arrive to a familiar scene—the OxyContin overdose—and set about trying to revive the user.

The company literally could not make OxyContin fast enough to sell it.

They "duped the FDA, saying OxyContin lasted twelve hours," Moore said. "They lied about the addictive properties. And they did all this to grow the opioid market, to make it okay to jump in the water. Then some of these other companies, they saw that the water was warm. And they said, 'Okay, we can jump in, too.

Prior to the introduction of OxyContin, America did not have an opioid crisis. After the introduction of OxyContin, it did.

Giuliani was looking to make a lot of money quickly. In 2001, he had a net worth of $1 million; five years later, he would report $17 million in income and some $50 million in assets. For Purdue, which was working hard to frame OxyContin abuse as a law enforcement problem, rather than an issue that might implicate the drug itself or the way it was marketed, the former prosecutor who had led New York City after the 9/11 attacks would make an ideal fixer.

course, OxyContin was stronger than morphine. That was a simple fact of chemistry—but one that the company would need to carefully obscure.

As for Curtis Wright, he had been giving some thought, lately, to leaving the federal government. After the approval for OxyContin went through, he resigned from the FDA. Initially, he joined a small pharmaceutical firm in Pennsylvania called Adolor. But he did not stay long. Barely a year later, he moved on, to a new position at Purdue Pharma, in Norwalk, with a first-year compensation package of nearly $400,000.

Having sold some $35 billion worth of OxyContin over two decades, the company might now be down, according to press reports, to as little as $500 million in cash.

The truth is, she said, that she, Kathe, deserved credit for coming up with "the idea" for OxyContin. Her accusers were suggesting that OxyContin was the taproot of one of the most deadly public health crises in modern history, and Kathe Sackler was outing herself, proudly, as the taproot of OxyContin.

Your priority is to sell, sell, sell OxyContin.