Quotes About OxyContin

It was not just OxyContin that was problematic, Berman continued, but Arthur's legacy as well. "The Sackler name is a problem, whether it's the Arthur Sackler name, or all the Sackler names," he said.

not everyone who developed a problem with OxyContin started out as a recreational abuser. In fact, many people who were prescribed the drug for legitimate pain conditions and took it precisely as the doctor ordered found that they, too, had become hopelessly addicted.

Gradually, Richard's team cultivated Curtis Wright. Early on, when Wright saw Purdue's first draft of the OxyContin package insert, he had remarked that he'd never seen an insert that contained so much promotional and marketing material. Wright told the company that all of this obviously promotional language would have to go. But, in the end, it stayed.

As the negative publicity continued to swirl around OxyContin, Richard Sackler was privately seething. "The whole thing is a sham," a sympathetic friend reassured him. If people die because they abuse the drug, "then good riddance.

But I was astonished to discover that the family that presided over the company that made OxyContin was a prominent philanthropic dynasty with what appeared to be an unimpeachable reputation.

As I make clear throughout the book, OxyContin was hardly the only opioid to be fraudulently marketed or widely abused, and my choice to focus on Purdue is in no way a suggestion that other pharmaceutical companies do not deserve a great deal of blame for the crisis. The same could be said for the FDA, the doctors who wrote prescriptions, the wholesalers that distributed the opioids, and the pharmacies that filled the prescriptions.

The marketing of OxyContin relied on an empirical circularity: the company convinced doctors of the drug's safety with literature that had been produced by doctors who were paid, or funded, by the company.

OxyContin had generated some $35 billion. A sizable amount of this revenue was channeled not through London or New York but through the tax haven of Bermuda, where, for decades, an anonymous-looking modern office building on a narrow street lined with palm trees had served as a clearinghouse for the family's wealth.

Within four years of the launch celebration at the Wigwam in Arizona, OxyContin hit $1 billion in sales, surpassing the quintessential blockbuster drug of that era, Viagra.

Purdue argued that the patented Contin coating on a dose of OxyContin would obviate the risk of addiction.

People microwaved the pills, baked them in the oven, stuck them in the freezer, soaked them in all manner of solvents. But if Purdue's narrow objective was to prevent people from breaking down the pills, then this new coating seemed to work. In fact, there were telling indications, almost immediately, in Purdue's own sales data, which suggested that some habitual OxyContin users were frustrated by the tamperproof pills.

radical strategy: the company would unveil this new, more powerful painkiller, OxyContin, and market it against MS Contin—against its own drug—in order to completely upend the current paradigm in pain treatment.

OxyContin was stronger than morphine. That was a simple fact of chemistry—but one that the company would need to carefully obscure. After all, there are only so many cancer patients.

At a certain point, her doctors caught on to her and she was struggling to access enough black-market OxyContin, so she lapsed back into using heroin. One night, she bought a batch that, unbeknownst to her, was actually fentanyl, and she overdosed.

But Purdue was a privately held company entirely owned by Kathe Sackler and other members of her family. In 1996, Purdue had introduced a groundbreaking drug, a powerful opioid painkiller called OxyContin, which was heralded as a revolutionary way

Her father died in 1987, she pointed out, long before the introduction of OxyContin, and she and her siblings had agreed to sell their one-third stake in Purdue to her uncles soon thereafter. So, none of Arthur's heirs had profited from OxyContin, she insisted.