As OxyContin addiction spurred a national nightmare, a member of the family that has reaped billions of dollars from the painkiller boasted that sales exceeded his “fondest dreams,” according to a secret court document obtained by ProPublica.
In May 1997, the year after Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, its head of sales and marketing sought input on a key decision from Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire family that founded and controls the company. Michael Friedman told Sackler that he didn’t want to correct the false impression among doctors that OxyContin was weaker than morphine, because the myth was boosting prescriptions — and sales.
“It would be extremely dangerous at this early stage in the life of the product,” Friedman wrote to Sackler, “to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal to morphine….We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone [the active ingredient in OxyContin] is weaker than morphine. I do not plan to do anything about that.”
“I agree with you,” Sackler responded. “Is there a general agreement, or are there some holdouts?”
Ten years later, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to understating the risk of addiction to OxyContin, including failing to alert doctors that it was a stronger painkiller than morphine, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties. But Sackler’s support of the decision to conceal OxyContin’s strength from doctors — in email exchanges both with Friedman and another company executive — was not made public.
The email threads were divulged in a sealed court document that ProPublica has obtained: an Aug. 28, 2015, deposition of Richard Sackler. Taken as part of a lawsuit by the state of Kentucky against Purdue, the deposition is believed to be the only time a member of the Sackler family has been questioned under oath about the illegal marketing of OxyContin and what family members knew about it. Purdue has fought a three-year legal battle to keep the deposition and hundreds of other documents secret, in a case brought by STAT, a Boston-based health and medicine news organization; the matter is currently before the Kentucky Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, interest in the deposition’s contents has intensified, as hundreds of cities, counties, states and tribes have sued Purdue and other opioid manufacturers and distributors. A House committee requested the document from Purdue last summer as part of an investigation of drug company marketing practices.
In a statement, Purdue stood behind Sackler’s testimony in the deposition. Sackler, it said, “supports that the company accurately disclosed the potency of OxyContin to healthcare providers.” He “takes great care to explain” that the drug’s label “made clear that OxyContin is twice as potent as morphine,” Purdue said.
Still, Purdue acknowledged, it had made a “determination to avoid emphasizing OxyContin as a powerful cancer pain drug,” out of “a concern that non-cancer patients would be reluctant to take a cancer drug.”
The company, which said it was also speaking on behalf of Sackler, deplored what it called the “intentional leak of the deposition” to ProPublica, calling it “a clear violation of the court’s order” and “regrettable.”
Much of the questioning of Sackler in the 337-page deposition focused on Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin, especially in the first five years after the drug’s 1996 launch. Aggressive marketing of OxyContin is blamed by some analysts for fostering a national crisis that has resulted in 200,000 overdose deaths related to prescription opioids since 1999.
Taken together with a Massachusetts complaint made public last month against Purdue and eight Sacklers, including Richard, the deposition underscores the family’s pivotal role in developing the business strategy for OxyContin and directing the hiring of an expanded sales force to implement a plan to sell the drug at ever-higher doses. Documents show that Richard Sackler was especially involved in the company’s efforts to market the drug, and that he pushed staff to pursue OxyContin’s deregulation in Germany. The son of a Purdue co-founder, he began working at Purdue in 1971 and has been at various times the company’s president and co-chairman of its board.
In a 1996 email introduced during the deposition, Sackler expressed delight at the early success of OxyContin. “Clearly this strategy has outperformed our expectations, market research and fondest dreams,” he wrote. Three years later, he wrote to a Purdue executive, “You won’t believe how committed I am to make OxyContin a huge success. It is almost that I dedicated my life to it. After the initial launch phase, I will have to catch up with my private life again.”
During his deposition, Sackler defended the company’s marketing strategies — including some Purdue had previously acknowledged were improper — and offered benign interpretations of emails that appeared to show Purdue executives or sales representatives minimizing the risks of OxyContin and its euphoric effects. He denied that there was any effort to deceive doctors about the potency of OxyContin and argued that lawyers for Kentucky were misconstruing words such as “stronger” and “weaker” used in email threads.
The term “stronger” in Friedman’s email, Sackler said, “meant more threatening, more frightening. There is no way that this intended or had the effect of causing physicians to overlook the fact that it was twice as potent.”
Emails introduced in the deposition show Sackler’s hidden role in key aspects of the 2007 federal case in which Purdue pleaded guilty. A 19-page statement of facts that Purdue admitted to as part of the plea deal, and which prosecutors said contained the “main violations of law revealed by the government’s criminal investigation,” referred to Friedman’s May 1997 email to Sackler about letting the doctors’ misimpression stand. It did not identify either man by name, attributing the statements to “certain Purdue supervisors and employees.”
Friedman, who by then had risen to chief executive officer, was one of three Purdue executives who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor of “misbranding” OxyContin. No members of the Sackler family were charged or named as part of the plea agreement. The Massachusetts lawsuit alleges that the Sackler-controlled Purdue board voted that the three executives, but no family members, should plead guilty as individuals. After the case concluded, the Sacklers were concerned about maintaining the allegiance of Friedman and another of the executives, according to the Massachusetts lawsuit. To protect the family, Purdue paid the two executives at least $8 million, that lawsuit alleges.
“The Sacklers spent millions to keep the loyalty of people who knew the truth,” the complaint filed by the Massachusetts attorney general alleges.
The Kentucky deposition’s contents will likely fuel the growing protests against the Sacklers, including pressure to strip the family’s name from cultural and educational institutions to which it has donated. The family has been active in philanthropy for decades, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. But the source of its wealth received little attention until recent years, in part due to a lack of public information about what the family knew about Purdue’s improper marketing of OxyContin and false claims about the drug’s addictive nature. READ MORE: