How Big Pharma Mixed Addiction With Social Justice
Opioid marketing teams planned to "educate women in their natural settings" — including "Tupperware parties" — that female "empowerment" meant demanding more pain pills.
Note to readers: This is the latest in an ongoing series about the Opioid Crisis by friend-of-Racket Matt Bivens, a full-time ER doctor (and an EMS 911 medical director) who also writes his own Substack at The 100 Days. Dr. Bivens is board-certified in emergency medicine and addiction medicine.
One of America’s most infamous corporate characters just made its final curtain call. The $7 billion bankruptcy deal approved over the holidays for Purdue Pharma and its billionaire owners, the Sackler family, includes compensation for individuals harmed by OxyContin® or other prescribed opioids: from $3,500 to $16,000 (before legal fees), available to anyone who filled out the right paperwork a long time ago and who promises not to sue. The payments might begin as soon as this March.
Purdue, with a new name (Knoa Pharma) and under new management, gets to re-dedicate itself now to treating opioid addiction. As an ER doctor also board-certified in addiction medicine, I’ve spent years reviving (or failing to revive) people who’ve overdosed on fentanyl or heroin or oxycodone, and who, more often then not, first got hooked on opioids via a prescription from a doctor.
I’ve also spent years commiserating with other doctors about how, back in the day, we were set up to fail our patients, thanks to a confused mishmash of nonsense about how no one gets addicted to modern opioid therapy anymore. Yet even today — after all of the multi-billion-dollar settlements and lawsuits, after hundreds of thousands of overdose deaths, after hearings and speeches in Congress — few people seem to really understand how coldly and methodically Purdue (and other opioid manufacturers, but especially Sackler-led Purdue) worked at getting people addicted. They focused in marketing and sales trainings on the need not just to convince doctors to start patients on opioids, but to keep them on opioids, and at the highest achievable doses.
As laid out in particularly withering detail in the Massachusetts and New York state lawsuits, Purdue had an opioid sales strategy for every American identity group with good insurance. They targeted the elderly, using “profiles of fake elderly patients, complete with staged photographs” to convince doctors to prescribe opioids. They targeted veterans — who, in my state of Massachusetts, are three times more likely to die of a drug overdose than non-veterans, but until that sad day also do have great insurance!
Purdue, both directly and through front organizations like the American Pain Foundation, even came up with the idea that getting addicted to OxyContin could be a form of feminist self-actualization. Under the heading “Empowerment — women,” notes from a marketing strategy session elaborate approvingly that the “empowerment angle can be used with any program.” And that wasn’t all:
