A Nun, a Doctor and a Lawyer — and Deep Regret Over the Nation’s Handling of Opioids - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/18/health/opioids-purdue-pennington-gap.html
PENNINGTON GAP, Va. — Years before there was an opioid epidemic in America, Sister Beth Davies knew it was coming.
In the late 1990s, patient after patient addicted to a new prescription painkiller called OxyContin began walking into the substance abuse clinic she ran in this worn Appalachian town. A local physician, Dr. Art Van Zee, sensed the gathering storm, too, as teenagers overdosed on the drug. His wife, Sue Ella Kobak, a lawyer, saw the danger signs in a growing wave of robberies and other crimes that all had links to OxyContin.
The Catholic nun, the doctor and the lawyer were among the first in the country to sound an alarm about the misuse of prescription opioids, the beginnings of a cycle of addiction that would kill 400,000 people in the ensuing two decades as it spread to illegal opioids like heroin and counterfeit versions of fentanyl. They led a burst of local activism against Purdue Pharma, OxyContin’s maker, that the company ultimately crushed. It would eventually help kindle national awareness that led to a wave of legal actions that are still awaiting resolution.
The three also believe that the Justice Department could have changed the behavior of other opioid makers if it had charged executives of Purdue Pharma in 2007 with felonies, as federal prosecutors had recommended, in connection with OxyContin’s illegal marketing.
Instead, department officials negotiated a deal under which the executives pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges that did not include jail time. In the years that followed, executives of other opioid makers and distributors kept shipping millions of addictive pain pills into towns like this one apparently without fear of serious penalties.
“I think the trajectory would have been completely different,” Dr. Van Zee said recently. “It would not have reached the magnitude that it did.”
A local pharmacist, Greg Stewart, said a sales representative for Purdue Pharma had told him that OxyContin was safe because it was a long-acting narcotic and so would not appeal to drug abusers who liked Percocet and other short-acting pain pills because they delivered a quick high. But teenagers and others in town quickly discovered that crushing an OxyContin pill released large quantities of the narcotic oxycodone.
Sister Beth recalls getting a phone call from Mr. Stewart as she was starting to see people addicted to the drug.
“Beth, believe me,” she recalled him saying, “this is going to be the worst disaster that ever hit Lee County.”
Sister Beth, Dr. Van Zee and Ms. Kobak, who is now retired, have been reading with fascination the new documents about Purdue Pharma and its owners, members of the wealthy Sackler family, that have recently emerged in lawsuits and elsewhere. As it turns out, it was in 2001, the year they and others in town confronted Purdue Pharma executives about the overzealous marketing of OxyContin, that a son of one of company’s founders, Dr. Richard Sackler, wrote a now infamous email about the need “to hammer on the abusers in every way possible” for the drug’s problem.
“You lie so much you believe your own lies,” Sister Beth said. “That’s what devastates me; it was always profits over people.”
Both Purdue Pharma and a representative for Dr. Sackler insist that the email and others cited in recent lawsuits have been taken out of context.
The lawyers assured him, he said, that they wanted exactly what he did: to finally see all of Purdue Pharma’s internal documents brought to public light.
“I was impressed by what looked like their commitment to get some type of accountability and responsibility,” he said.
But that never happened. In March, Purdue Pharma agreed to pay $270 million to settle. As a result, all its internal documents remain sealed. Oklahoma state officials said they struck the deal because of concerns that Purdue Pharma, which faces thousands of lawsuits, might soon file for bankruptcy.