Is opioid addiction about marketing?

Purdue Pharma, maker of the painkiller drug OxyContin, has agreed to stop marketing opioid drugs to doctors.

OxyContin, a timed-release version of oxycodone, was first approved in 1995. The company marketed the drug aggressively, inviting doctors, nurses and pharmacists to all-expense-paid conferences at resorts in California, Florida and Arizona. Sales reps received generous bonuses tied to OxyContin sales, creating incentives for more visits to physicians who treated chronic pain. Sales of the drug rose from $48 million in 1996 to nearly $1.1 billion in 2000 and continued to climb. In 2001, Purdue paid $40 million in sales-incentive bonuses.

But by 2004, OxyContin had become a significant drug of abuse. Users were able to obtain a heroin-like high by crushing the pills to defeat the timed-release feature.

In 2007, Purdue and three of its executives pled guilty to criminal charges stemming from a federal investigation into the company’s claims that OxyContin was less addictive and less subject to abuse than other opioids. They paid $634 million in fines.

The company has faced hundreds of private lawsuits related to misrepresenting the risk of addiction to OxyContin. That’s apparently what led to Purdue’s decision to halt marketing of opioid drugs.

Opioids are prescribed for severe pain, including cancer-related pain, but the market for chronic, non-cancer-related pain accounted for 86 percent of the total opioid market in 1999. The risk of addiction when the drugs are taken for chronic pain is obviously much higher.

But a crackdown on opioid prescriptions, which dropped 18 percent from 2010 to 2015, did not reduce overdose deaths, which increased from 12.3 to 16.3 per 100,000 population.


Source: sbsun