#opioid

Teva : 117 millions de dollars pour solder les litiges liés aux opioïdes en Floride Par Ricky Ben-David - Time of Israel
▻https://fr.timesofisrael.com/teva-117-millions-de-dollars-pour-solder-les-litiges-lies-aux-opio

Teva Pharmaceuticals, filiale américaine du géant israélien des médicaments génériques Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, versera à l’État de Floride 117 millions de dollars en règlement des litiges liés aux opioïdes et fournira des traitements pour la dépendance aux opiacés, d’une valeur de 84 millions de dollars.

La Floride a conclu un accord similaire avec CVS Health Corp. et CVS Pharmacy Inc., qui verseront 484 millions de dollars à l’État ainsi qu’à un certain nombre d’autres défendeurs, pour un total de 860 millions de dollars, accord de Teva inclus.

Selon l’accord conclu avec Teva, les 117 millions de dollars seront versés à la Floride sur une période de 15 ans et des doses de Narcan (sous forme de spray nasal au chlorhydrate de naloxone) seront mises à disposition pendant 10 ans, a détaillé la société dans un communiqué mercredi.

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Teva a également fait l’objet de procédures judiciaires en Louisiane, en Californie, au Texas et à New York, qu’elle a choisi de traiter séparément. Ces poursuites font suite aux accusations selon lesquelles Teva et d’autres fabricants de médicaments comme Johnson & Johnson, Endo International et Allergan d’AbbVie auraient employé des techniques de marketing trompeuses minimisant les risques de dépendance aux opioïdes.

L’État de Louisiane a affirmé que Teva et d’autres sociétés pharmaceutiques « se sont livrées à un marketing frauduleux en ce qui concerne les risques et avantages des opioïdes sur ordonnance, ce qui a contribué à alimenter la crise des opioïdes en Louisiane ». Teva a conclu un règlement de 15 millions de dollars avec cet État en septembre.

Fin décembre, dans l’un des rares verdicts rendus parmi les milliers de poursuites judiciaires enregistrées à l’échelle nationale en matière d’analgésiques, un jury de la banlieue de New York a statué que Teva Pharmaceuticals avait activement contribué à la crise des opioïdes. Le jury avait conclu que la société pharmaceutique avait joué un rôle dans ce que l’on appelle légalement une « nuisance publique », avec des conséquences mortelles. Teva avait déclaré à l’époque qu’elle « n’était pas du tout d’accord » avec le verdict et qu’elle prévoyait de faire appel.

Le procès de New York de 2019 contre Teva, société réputée pour ses médicaments génériques, s’était concentré sur Actiq et Fentora, deux médicaments de marque à base de fentanyl approuvés pour des patients atteints de cancer. Teva les aurait recommandés à plusieurs reprises, plus largement, et pour d’autres types de douleurs, dans une « stratégie de marketing trompeuse et dangereuse », a indiqué la plainte.

Teva s’est déclarée intéressée par la négociation d’un accord global, comme l’ont fait d’autres sociétés pharmaceutiques impliquées.

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Plusieurs sociétés pharmaceutiques et distributeurs font face à des milliers d’accusations de la part des autorités étatiques et locales, qui les tiennent pour responsables de la crise de dépendance et surdose aux opioïdes qui a frappé les États-Unis. Selon les Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), la crise sanitaire aurait coûté la vie à près de 500 000 Américains depuis 1999.

À travers tout le pays, autorités locales, États, tribus amérindiennes, syndicats, districts scolaires et autres groupes d’intérêts poursuivent l’industrie pharmaceutique sur la question des analgésiques.

Le mois dernier, Johnson & Johnson et trois grands distributeurs (AmerisourceBergen, Cardinal Health et McKesson) ont conclu un accord global d’une valeur de 26 milliards de dollars en règlement des procès ouverts les impliquant dans la crise des opioïdes.

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L’accord global de 26 milliards de dollars a finalement été conclu sans Teva, qui a traité les poursuites au fil de l’eau, incapable de proposer davantage de liquidités, du fait d’une dette de plus de 20 milliards de dollars, comme l’avait expliqué le PDG de Teva, Kåre Schultz, en juillet dernier.

À la mi-décembre, un juge fédéral avait rejeté l’accord de grande envergure du fabricant d’OxyContin, Purdue Pharma, visant à régler des milliers de poursuites en matière d’opioïdes.

#téva #pharma #fraude #santé #big_pharma #médicaments #opioides #OxyContin #analgésiques #industrie_pharmaceutique #sackler #corruption #covid-19 #santé_publique #médecine #big-pharma #opioïdes #opiacés #Purdue_Pharma #Johnson&Johnson #Endo_International #Allergan #AbbVie #AmerisourceBergen #Cardinal_Health #McKesson #marketing

They Made the Most of the Opioid Crisis. Until They Didn’t. - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/books/review/hard-sell-evan-hughes.html

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By David Enrich

Jan. 19, 2022, 10:30 a.m. ET

THE HARD SELL
Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup
By Evan Hughes

The pharmaceutical industry is enjoying a very good crisis. The rapid development of safe and effective Covid-19 vaccines and treatments has turned drug companies into much-feted heroes. Chipper executives are boasting about saving billions of lives. Shareholders are swimming in profits.

It is a remarkable turnaround for an industry that had been widely reviled. Prepandemic, pharmaceutical companies were routinely berated for the outrageous prices they charged for drugs developed with taxpayer support. They were hauled before grand juries for their roles in what was, until the onset of Covid-19, the country’s most pressing public health crisis: the opioid epidemic.

Even as it has been overshadowed by the coronavirus, the opioid crisis has grown worse. In the most recent 12-month period for which data are available, more than 100,000 Americans — a record number — died of overdoses. Many were killed by fast-acting synthetic opioids like fentanyl, which is found in illegal street drugs and prescription painkillers.

Anyone who has read “Empire of Pain,” Patrick Radden Keefe’s epic exposé of the Sackler family behind Purdue Pharma, is aware of opioid peddlers’ dirty hands. But until I read “The Hard Sell,” about the outrageous behavior of an obscure drug company, I hadn’t appreciated the full extent of the filth or the dark stain the opioid sector has left on the entire industry.

“The Hard Sell,” by the journalist Evan Hughes, is a fast-paced and maddening account of Insys Therapeutics, whose entire business model seemed to hinge on crookedness. (The book is based in part on a 2018 article Hughes wrote for The New York Times Magazine.) Its sole branded product was Subsys, a fentanyl-based liquid that patients sprayed under their tongues. Insys executives went to extraordinary — and at times criminal — lengths to get their addictive and dangerous drug into as many mouths as possible.

The company was founded in Arizona by “an Indian-born visionary,” John Kapoor. He was a serial drug company entrepreneur who, despite repeated scrapes with regulators, investors and business partners, managed to emerge, over and over, with his fortune and reputation largely intact. (A judge found one of his early companies to have been, as Hughes puts it, “rife with misconduct,” and the Food and Drug Administration reprimanded it for endangering patient health.)

Kapoor was cut from a mold that will be familiar to readers of “Bad Blood” or “The Cult of We” (about the Theranos and WeWork debacles, respectively). He was blindly ambitious, with a sympathetic origin story that disguised his broken moral compass. Whereas Elizabeth Holmes would tell people that she started her pinprick blood-testing company because she feared needles, Kapoor claimed to have come up with the idea for Subsys after watching his wife endure excruciating pain as she died from breast cancer.

Hughes is skeptical about this cover story. The more likely explanation, he suggests, is that Kapoor detected a lucrative opportunity to jump into the booming opioid market with a newfangled narcotic.
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The innovation with Subsys was not the drug itself — its active ingredient, fentanyl, has been around since 1960 — but the delivery mechanism. An arms race was underway to develop the fastest-acting opioids. Spraying fentanyl molecules under your tongue turned out to be a super-efficient way — “close to the speed of IV drugs administered in a hospital,” Hughes writes — to deliver pain relief.
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Kapoor’s company won F.D.A. approval for Subsys to be used as a treatment for cancer patients. But that was a limited and already crowded market. From the get-go, Insys’ goal was to tap into the much larger pool of people who suffered from a broad range of pain. To do that, Kapoor and his team at Insys borrowed tactics from their rivals and exploited the peculiarities of the pharmaceutical industry.

The company bought access to pharmacy data that showed which doctors were prescribing lots of fast-acting synthetic opioids. About 170 doctors nationwide were responsible for roughly 30 percent of all prescriptions for these drugs, and Insys dispatched its sales force to persuade this tiny group of like-minded physicians to start prescribing Subsys. (Yes, it is crazy that drug companies are permitted to access this sort of easily abusable data.)

Allowing for even more precise targeting of amenable doctors, the F.D.A. required drug companies like Insys to closely monitor who was prescribing their drugs. “The purpose of collecting this data was to protect patient safety, but Insys found itself with a marketing gold mine,” Hughes writes. Soon doctors who prescribed Subsys began finding Insys salesmen in their offices, pushing them to write more scripts.

The Insys sales force initially tried to pitch Subsys on its merits, but there was a problem: Competitors were showering this small band of doctors with free meals, gifts and money. To succeed, Insys needed to play the same game.

Bribery is frowned upon, so, in addition to being plied with food, booze and fun, the doctors were paid to give speeches about Subsys to small audiences — sometimes to the staffs of their own offices. “The idea was to funnel cash to the speaker so that he would prescribe Subsys in return,” Hughes writes. “If he didn’t live up to his end of the deal, he wouldn’t get paid to speak anymore. It was a quid pro quo.”

The entire opioid business seems to have been awash in these underhanded tactics; as Hughes notes, “Nothing that Insys did was truly new.” Indeed, what’s most surprising and powerful about “The Hard Sell” is not one company’s criminality — we’ve grown inured to corporations behaving badly — as much as how institutionalized these practices were across the modern drug industry.

For Insys and its top executives, this was highly profitable. The price of some Subsys prescriptions ran into the tens of thousands of dollars. (When insurance companies began balking at covering these costs, Insys set up a centralized office to secretly file and process paperwork on doctors’ behalf.) Insys went public in 2013 and was the year’s best performing I.P.O., with its shares more than quadrupling.

By then, even as Wall Street and the business media celebrated Insys, the wheels were beginning to come off.

Conscientious insiders warned the government about the company’s fraudulent and abusive practices. Soon federal investigators were closing in. Kapoor and his inner circle would be the rare corporate executives to face criminal prosecution. Hughes recounts the chase and trial in dramatic fashion.

My one big complaint about “The Hard Sell” is that it’s unclear how much damage Subsys did in the context of the broader opioid epidemic. Hughes includes tales of people overdosing and becoming addicted, of lives and families shattered, but I was left unsure whether prescription drugs like Subsys were a root cause of the fentanyl crisis, a contributing factor or a meaningless blip.

At times I wondered if the answer might be the latter and if Hughes was dodging an inconvenient fact so as not to deflate an otherwise compelling story. If so, he needn’t have worried. Even if Insys turns out to be a footnote in the opioid epidemic, there is value in exposing the world to the scummy underbelly of a powerful industry — especially one that has become the sudden object of so much public gratitude.

David Enrich is the business investigations editor at The Times. He is the author, most recently, of “Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump, and an Epic Trail ofDestruction.”

THE HARD SELL
Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup
By Evan Hughes
288 pp. Doubleday. $28.95.

#Opioides #The_Hard_Sell #Insys #Voyous

«The Crime of the Century»: le crime des opioïdes | Le Devoir
▻https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/ecrans/600256/le-crime-des-opioides

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Une crise, c’est quelque chose qui arrive. Et la crise des opioïdes n’est pas simplement « arrivée », dit Alex Gibney. Elle a été fomentée, réfléchie avec attention, élaborée avec le consentement, la complicité ou l’ignorance des institutions, alimentée par la permissivité des lois, le manque d’éthique et l’arrogance de personnages tout-puissants. « Ce n’est pas une crise. C’est une escroquerie. »

Sans jamais critiquer ceux qui consomment, mais bien ceux qui poussent à consommer, il enchaîne les images d’ambulanciers, de matelas souillés, de chambres vides de tout, sauf de corps inertes. Tandis que, dans leurs bureaux aussi immaculés que leurs costards, les responsables de ce carnage se frottent les mains, impunis.

Ayant eu accès à des courriels internes censés rester secrets, le réalisateur expose à la face du monde la douleur exploitée pour le profit, la détresse pour les milliards, le désespoir pour l’opulence.

Milliardaires magouilleurs

Il montre comment des milliardaires ont magouillé pour prescrire un médicament, l’OxyContin, au plus grand nombre de personnes possible. Même, et surtout, à ceux qui n’en avaient pas besoin. Pour « créer une drogue blockbuster ». Pour la proposer en doses trop élevées non pas comme dernier recours, mais bien comme première option. Portée par le slogan sinistre « OxyContin, le médicament avec lequel vous commencez — et avec lequel vous resterez ».

« Ce sont de bons médicaments pour calmer les souffrances après une chirurgie grave, après un accident. Pour calmer les douleurs en fin de vie, celles du cancer, explique à l’écran le Dr Andrew Kolodny, directeur exécutif des Physiciens pour la prescription responsable d’opioïdes. Mais pas pour une douleur chronique commune. Pas pour des ados ayant mal au genou. »

Si un journaliste est présent, et ce, sporadiquement, c’est Patrick Radden Keefe. Posé, professionnel, le reporter de talent du New Yorker retrace sobrement l’historique de la dynastie Sackler. Comme il l’avait fait en 2017 dans The Family that Built an Empire of Pain.

Cette incroyable enquête, qu’il a depuis transformée en livre, relate le parcours d’un clan qui s’est bâti une renommée tout en bâtissant, dans l’ombre, un « empire de douleur ».

Philanthropes dont le patronyme a coiffé des salles de cours d’université, comme des ailes du Guggenheim et du Louvre, les Sackler, bonzes de la compagnie Purdue Pharma, ont fait rouler le marketing médical sans arrière-pensées. « Faites affaire avec ceux qui prescrivent. C’est là que se trouve le fric. »

Invité récemment dans le balado The Book Review, Patrick Radden Keefe faisait d’ailleurs remarquer ceci : « C’est l’histoire d’une saga familiale. Mais c’est surtout l’illustration de la façon dont, aux États-Unis, l’argent pollue toute chose. »

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En détail, Alex Gibney décortique le dédain des patrons de Purdue. Il révèle leurs messages méprisants qui pressent les équipes à écouler ce qu’ils nomment de la « hillbilly heroin ». En quantité industrielle, à qui en voudrait bien, et tant pis pour les morts.

Il raconte les partys de la compagnie. Une mascotte de pilule géante qui danse sur un classique de Van Halen modifié pour vanter le Fentanyl. Des vendeurs qui chantent avec enthousiasme une relecture de Taking Care of Business. « Selling OxyContin, everyday ! Selling OxyContin, every way ! »

Ce serait caricatural si ce n’était pas aussi tragique.

#Opioides #Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Addiction_sur_ordonnance

An Astounding List of Artists Helped Persuade the Met to Remove the Sackler Name | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/an-astounding-list-of-artists-helped-persuade-the-met-to-remove-the-sackl

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For nearly five decades, the Met Gala, among the fashion world’s most significant events, has been held in the Sackler Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a dramatic space featuring a wall of glass, a sleek reflecting pool, and the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur. Prior to this year’s gala, in September, the museum’s C.E.O., Daniel H. Weiss, gave an interview to Time, in which he was asked about the name of the wing. In recent years, controversy has engulfed the Sackler family, as revelations emerged that much of the fortune of two of the Sackler brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, and their company, Purdue Pharma, was derived from the sale of OxyContin, a painkiller that helped to precipitate the opioid crisis. (I first wrote about the Sacklers in a 2017 article for the magazine, and have since published a book about them, “Empire of Pain.”) In May, 2019, the Met had announced that it would refuse any future donations from the Sacklers. But now, Weiss indicated, the museum was considering a further step. Asked if the name of the Sackler Wing might be gone in six months, he replied that an answer could come “a lot sooner.”

On Thursday, the Met released a short statement saying that “seven named exhibition spaces in the Museum, including the wing that houses the iconic Temple of Dendur, will no longer carry the Sackler name.” It was not the first museum to take such action (the Louvre had already done so), nor was it the first major American institution (Tufts University took the name down in 2018, followed by New York University last year). But the Met is in a class of its own. Not only is it the premier art museum in the United States, it is the museum with which the Sackler family has the longest history. It was also the site of the first dramatic protest by the photographer Nan Goldin and her advocacy group, Prescription Addiction Intervention Now (PAIN), which has sought to shame museums into ending any association with the Sackler name.

After all, for institutions that rely on the generosity of donors, this process of un-naming is a deeply vexing issue. As Weiss told the Times, in 2019, “We are not a partisan organization, we are not a political organization, so we don’t have a litmus test for whom we take gifts from based on policies or politics.” A few years ago, someone who worked at the Met joked to me that, if the museum were to start purging donors on the basis of their corporate social responsibility, it might soon find itself with no donors left. Philanthropic gifts that are bestowed in exchange for naming rights should not be confused with charity; these are business deals, and any prospective donors in the future may wonder about the security of their investment, in the event that at some point a company pleads guilty to criminal charges or a family name falls into disrepute. So, for the Met to remove the name in this manner marked a very bold and decisive step—and one that the museum could not have taken without a great deal of legal consultation.

Behind the scenes, the museum was also under pressure from a constituency that it could not ignore: artists. This fall, Nan Goldin and her allies prepared a letter to the Met’s board of trustees urging the removal of the Sackler name. The Met “is a public institution dedicated to art, learning and knowledge,” they argued. “Honoring the Sackler name on the walls of the Met erodes the Met’s relationship with artists and the public.” Given the fact that Purdue Pharma has twice pleaded guilty to federal criminal charges, and considering the staggering death toll of the opioid crisis, they suggested, “This is a situation of force majeure.”

Because of Goldin’s prominence in the art world, and the moral vigor of her campaign, she was able to assemble an astounding list of signatories, featuring many of the most significant living artists, among them Ai Weiwei, Laurie Anderson, Maurizio Cattelan, Jim Dine, Jenny Holzer, Arthur Jafa, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Cindy Sherman, Brice Marden, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, and Kara Walker.

#Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Opioides #Sackler #Musées #Philanthropie #Met

100 000 morts en un an : les Etats-Unis dépassés par la crise des opioïdes Hélène Vissière (Washington) 05/12/2021
▻https://www.lexpress.fr/actualite/monde/amerique-nord/100-000-morts-en-un-an-les-etats-unis-depasses-par-la-crise-des-opioides_21

En ce mardi matin, ils sont une petite poignée devant le camping-car de Family and Medical Counseling Service, Inc., ou FMCS, stationné dans un quartier noir de Washington. Cette ONG échange les seringues usagées et fournit diverses aides aux toxicomanes. « Avant, quand on arrivait, il y avait foule, c’était de longues files d’attente, explique Tyrone Pinkney, l’un des responsables. Mais aujourd’hui tellement de gens sont morts... » A Washington, comme ailleurs aux Etats-Unis, c’est une véritable hécatombe. 

Plus de 100 000 Américains ont succombé à une overdose entre avril 2020 et avril 2021, soit plus que le total combiné des décès causés par les accidents de la route et par les armes à feu. Les chiffres sont vertigineux : les morts par overdose ont crû de près de 30 % par rapport à l’année précédente, et plus que doublées depuis 2015. Deux tiers d’entre elles sont dues aux opioïdes de synthèse, principalement le fentanyl. 

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Cet analgésique 100 fois plus puissant que la morphine et beaucoup moins cher, fabriqué par des trafiquants et vendu via les réseaux sociaux ou dans la rue, est souvent mélangé subrepticement à la cocaïne, à l’héroïne ou à de faux comprimés d’OxyContin, de Percocet, d’hydrocodone ou de Xanax, médicaments normalement vendus sur ordonnance. 

Selon la DEA, l’agence fédérale de lutte contre la drogue, 42 % des pilules testées en contenaient au moins 2 milligrammes, une dose potentiellement mortelle. Et le consommateur, lorsqu’il les achète, croit souvent qu’il s’agit de vrais médicaments et ne sait donc pas ce qu’il ingère. En 2016, le chanteur Prince est mort d’une overdose accidentelle. Selon le procureur, il pensait prendre un cachet de Vicodin pour soulager des douleurs à la hanche. Il avalait en fait du fentanyl. 

La crise des opioïdes n’est pas nouvelle. A la fin des années 1990, les compagnies pharmaceutiques ont vanté, à coup d’énormes campagnes marketing, les mérites de l’OxyContin pour le mal de dos, l’arthrite, la fibromyalgie (affection chronique, caractérisée par des douleurs diffuses persistantes) et toutes les autres douleurs chroniques. Cette pilule miracle s’est révélée très addictive et moins efficace qu’annoncé. Et des milliers de mères de famille, d’adolescents et de retraités, à qui leur médecin avait prescrit de l’OxyContin pour une sciatique, une rage de dents ou une fracture, se sont retrouvés accros sans le savoir. 

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« Il faut arrêter de prescrire frénétiquement des opioïdes par ordonnance »
Ces analgésiques de synthèse ont une autre conséquence dramatique. Ils causent des ravages même chez ceux qui n’utilisent pas d’opioïdes. En février, Mia Gugino, une étudiante de Las Vegas de 17 ans, a pris un soir une pilule d’ectasy mêlée à son insu à du fentanyl. A midi, quand son père est entré dans sa chambre, elle était mourante. « Un seul comprimé peut tuer », a résumé le responsable de la police locale. On en trouve même dans la marijuana. Depuis juillet dans le Connecticut, 39 individus ont fait une overdose après avoir fumé de l’herbe. 

L’épidémie faisait déjà rage avant la pandémie, mais l’isolement, la dépression, l’accès limité aux traitements et surtout au naloxone, un antidote à l’overdose, ont exacerbé la crise. Assis dans le camping-car de l’association FMCS, Terrence Cooper, un autre coordinateur, est très pessimiste. « C’est tragique. Le Covid a dopé le marché de la drogue. Les gens veulent du fentanyl, car c’est mieux pour se défoncer. On a perdu plein de patients qui ont rechuté parce que leur organisme n’était plus prêt à tolérer une substance aussi forte. On mène une lutte très dure et sans fin. » 

Le fentanyl est très facile à produire, et rapporte à ses producteurs bien plus que la cocaïne ou l’héroïne. Il vient principalement de Chine - sous forme de composant ou de produit fini - et est acheminé au Mexique, où les cartels le récupèrent et le transportent clandestinement aux Etats-Unis, le plus souvent en petites quantités, ce qui complique son interception. 

L’épidémie d’overdoses est « une crise nationale » qui « ne cesse de s’aggraver », affirme Anne Milgram, patronne de la DEA. L’administration Biden a prévu 2 milliards de dollars dans son plan de relance économique et 11 milliards supplémentaires dans le projet de budget pour améliorer prévention et traitement, et distribuer davantage de naloxone et de tests rapides pour aider les toxicomanes à détecter des traces de fentanyl dans leurs produits. 

Des mesures « insuffisantes » pour le Dr Andrew Kolodny, de la Brandeis University, l’un des premiers à avoir mis en garde contre les dangers de ces analgésiques. « Il faut arrêter de prescrire frénétiquement des opioïdes par ordonnance. Il faut ensuite faciliter l’accès aux traitements comme la buprénorphine, qui soigne la dépendance, mais celle-ci reste chère et compliquée à obtenir. » Il milite pour la mise en place d’un grand programme sur le modèle de celui créé pour le sida, où les médicaments étaient accessibles à tous. « C’est une urgence de santé publique », conclut-il. D’autant que de nouvelles drogues - le protonitazène et l’isotonitazène - encore plus puissantes que le fentanyl et qui exigent une plus forte dose d’antidote en cas d’overdose sont en train d’arriver sur le marché. 

#Johnson_&_Johnson #opioides #sackler #big_pharma #purdue_pharma #oxycontin #addiction #opioïdes #santé #pharma #purdue #opiacés #etats-unis #drogue #opioids #mundipharma #santé_publique

US author to give away £10,000 prize cash over role of sponsor in opioid crisis | Books | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/dec/03/us-author-to-give-away-10000-prize-cash-over-role-of-sponsor-in-opioid-
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US author to give away £10,000 prize cash over role of sponsor in opioid crisis

Investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe will give money from business book of the year shortlisting to charity over involvement of McKinsey firm
Patrick Radden Keefe
‘Irony’ … the New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Photograph: Albert Llop/NurPhoto/Rex/Shutterstock
Lucy Knight
Fri 3 Dec 2021 18.24 GMT

Last modified on Fri 3 Dec 2021 18.26 GMT

The American writer Patrick Radden Keefe has said he will give away the £10,000 he was awarded by a book prize whose sponsor helped to sell the opioid painkiller OxyContin.

Radden Keefe’s damning investigative book Empire of Pain deals with the opioid addiction crisis, focusing on the role of the Sackler family. He was one of six authors shortlisted for the prize, sponsored by the consultancy McKinsey, five of whom, including him, each received runner-up awards of £10,000.

Tweeting about the “irony” on Thursday, the New Yorker journalist and author posted a photo of himself at the Financial Times/McKinsey business book of the year 2021 award ceremony at the National Gallery in London, pointing to a sign reading “The Sackler Room”. The Sacklers’ company Purdue Pharma sold the OxyContin painkiller which is said to have fuelled the US’s opioid crisis.

I’m told it was the British who invented irony, so a short 🧵 about my experience last night in London. My book on the Sacklers, Empire of Pain, had been shortlisted for the FT / McKinsey Business Book of the Year award… pic.twitter.com/DnP7HiUzvm
— Patrick Radden Keefe (@praddenkeefe) December 2, 2021

In a further tweet, Keefe went on to write that “if you throw a brick in the London art world, you’ll hit a Sackler room”, because the family were keen supporters of art and made generous donations to many prominent galleries.

What was more ironic than the ceremony being held in a room next to one named after the Sacklers, he continued, was the fact that he had been shortlisted for an award sponsored by McKinsey & Company. The consultancy firm had previously advised the Sacklers and Purdue on how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin, and in February agreed to pay nearly $600m in settlement for its role in the opioid crisis.

This “made for some pretty fraught emotions”, said Keefe. “On the one hand, it means a great deal to me to see this book recognised. On the other, I could not take part in the lovely gala dinner and not at least acknowledge the proverbial elephant.”

He has chosen to donate the money he received as a shortlisted author to the charity Odyssey House, which works to help people recover from drug and alcohol abuse.

The writer, who won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in November, lost out on the business book of the year award to Nicole Perlroth, whose winning book This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends is about the cyber weapons arms race.

Keefe was keen to stress that he believes the jury was “100% independent” and not in any way influenced by the prize’s sponsor.

#Patick_Radden_Keefe #Opioides #Prix_littéraire

Walmart, CVS und Walgreens - Jury spricht großen US-Apothekenketten Mitschuld an Opioidkrise zu
▻https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/opioid-krise-bei-walmart-cvs-und-walgreens-jury-in-ohio-spricht-us-apotheken

Sans drogues la vie est insupportable. Parfois les responsables se disputent les profits encaissés sur le fond de cette situation.

24.11.2021 - Die USA leiden unter einer Opioidkrise mit Hunderttausenden Toten. Nun sind erstmals Apotheken wegen eines zu laxen Umgangs bei der Abgabe schuldig gesprochen worden.

Die Pharmakonzerne und Großhändler hinter den umstrittenen und abhängig machenden Opioiden wie »Oxycontin« von Purdue stehen bereits seit Jahren im Fokus der US-Justiz. Neu ist, dass vor einem US-Gericht nun auch Apotheken erfolgreich verantwortlich gemacht worden sind – für den allzu lockeren Umgang mit diesen Schmerzmitteln, die in den USA zu einer Opioidkrise mit inzwischen Hunderttausenden Toten geführt haben.

In dem richtungsweisenden Verfahren in Cleveland im US-Bundesstaat Ohio wurden nun drei große Apothekenketten schuldig gesprochen, durch zu laxe Vergabe der süchtig machenden Arzneimitteln zu der Krise beigetragen zu haben. Die Jury des Bundesgerichts kam am Dienstag (Ortszeit) zu dem Schluss, dass die US-Einzelhändler Walmart, CVS und Walgreens den Verkauf von Schmerzmitteln im Bundesstaat Ohio nicht ausreichend kontrolliert haben.
Im Schnitt Hunderte Pillen für jeden Einwohner abgegeben

Die Unternehmen kündigten Berufung an. Sie weisen eine Mitschuld an der Opioidkrise zurück und berufen sich darauf, von lizenzierten Ärzten verschriebene Pillen verkauft zu haben. Walgreens-Sprecher Fraser Engerman kritisierte etwa, die Apothekenkette habe »niemals Opioide hergestellt oder vermarktet, und wir haben sie auch nicht an die ›Pillendienste‹ und Internetapotheken geliefert, die diese Krise angeheizt haben«.

Geklagt hatten zwei Countys in Ohio. Sie fordern von den Konzernen Milliarden Dollar an Entschädigungen für Kosten, die ihnen im Kampf gegen Opioid-Abhängigkeit und Überdosierungen entstanden sind. Sie konnten die Geschworenen davon überzeugen, dass die Ketten durch die Art und Weise, wie sie die Schmerzmittel ausgeben, ein öffentliches Ärgernis sind.

»Das Gesetz verlangt von den Apotheken, dass sie bei der Abgabe von Medikamenten gewissenhaft vorgehen. Dieser Fall sollte ein Weckruf sein, dass Versäumnisse nicht akzeptiert werden«, sagte Mark Lanier, ein Anwalt der Countys Lake und Trumbull. Allein in Trumbull County wurden zwischen 2012 und 2016 rund 80 Millionen verschreibungspflichtige Schmerzmittel ausgegeben – das sind rechnerisch etwa 400 für jeden Einwohner.

Wie viel Walmart, CVS und Walgreens zahlen müssen, soll ein Bundesrichter im Frühjahr bestimmen. Es gibt zahlreiche ähnliche US-Klagen, darunter außer gegen Hersteller und Großhändler auch gegen Apotheken. Die Entscheidung in dem Verfahren gilt deshalb nun als wichtiger Wegweiser.

Opioide sind zum Teil synthetisch hergestellte Arzneimittel mit unter anderem schmerzlindernden Eigenschaften. Sie bergen jedoch auch enorme Abhängigkeitsrisiken und hohes Missbrauchspotenzial. Die Opioid-Epidemie hat in den USA laut Gesundheitsbehörde CDC in den vergangen zwei Jahrzehnten zu fast einer halben Million Toten geführt.

#USA #opioides #aliénation #exploitation #capitalisme

« Mort à Mud Lick », d’Eric Eyre : narcotrafic légal
▻https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2021/11/18/mort-a-mud-lick-d-eric-eyre-narcotrafic-legal_6102621_3260.html

https://img.lemde.fr/2021/11/15/278/0/3400/1700/1440/720/60/0/a9d8cab_433880666-gettyimages-1234145273.jpg

Mais depuis quelques années émergent d’édifiants livres enquêtes. Tels ­Addiction sur ordonnance. La crise des antidouleurs (C & F Editions, 2019), et Pharma : Greed, Lies, and the Poisoning of America (« Pharma : profits, mensonges et empoisonnement de l’Amérique », 2020, non traduit), l’un signé par un journaliste du New Yorker, l’autre par un reporter du New York Times. Tous deux ont étudié les coulisses d’une industrie pesant 1 000 milliards de dollars et le parcours de la famille Sackler, ­propriétaire du laboratoire pharmaceutique Purdue Pharma, à l’origine de l’OxyContin, un composé chimique plus fort que la ­morphine. Un troisième ouvrage d’investigation, Dopesick ­ (« addicts », 2018, non traduit), de Beth Macy, vient de donner lieu à une série de fiction ­diffusée en France, par Disney+, depuis le 12 novembre.
Lire aussi Article réservé à nos abonnés L’inquiétant succès de l’OxyContin, puissant antalgique opiacé

Bâti d’une plume alerte et rigoureuse, à partir de reportages parus dans la Charleston Gazette, récompensé, en 2017, par le prestigieux prix Pulitzer, le récit pionnier d’Eric Eyre humanise la tragédie et donne chair au combat local de citoyens et d’avocats ouest-virginiens, pour obtenir des données chiffrées, intenter des actions en justice et pointer la faillite des organismes de contrôle censés réguler le marché, qu’il s’agisse de l’ordre des pharmaciens ou de la Drug Enforcement Administration.

#Addiction #Opioides

Zombieville: Kensington Avenue: la calle más peligrosa de Filadelfia
▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqQ6-ANjL4

Debido a la gran cantidad de drogas en Kensington, el vecindario tiene una tasa de delitos relacionados con las drogas de 3.57, la tercera tasa más alta por vecindario en Filadelfia.3 Como gran parte del país, una gran parte de este problema es el resultado de los opioides epidemia. El abuso de opioides se ha disparado durante las últimas dos décadas en los Estados Unidos y Filadelfia no es una excepción. Además de tener una alta tasa de muertes por sobredosis de drogas, el 80% de las muertes por sobredosis en Filadelfia involucraron opioides2 y Kensington es un gran contribuyente a este número. Este vecindario de Filadelfia es supuestamente el mercado de narcóticos al aire libre más grande de heroína en la costa este, con muchos residentes vecinos que acuden en masa al área en busca de heroína y otros opioides.4 Con una cantidad tan alta de drogas en Kensington, muchos funcionarios estatales y locales se han dividido en zonas en esta área para tratar de abordar el problema de Filadelfia.

Etats-Unis : l’accord à 26 milliards sur les opiacés prêt pour la prochaine étape
▻https://www.letemps.ch/economie/etatsunis-laccord-26-milliards-opiaces-pret-prochaine-etape

Trois distributeurs américains de médicaments et le laboratoire Johnson & Johnson ont reçu le soutien d’assez d’Etats pour passer à la prochaine étape de l’accord lié aux opiacés. Ils ont accepté en juillet de payer 26 milliards de dollars pour solder des litiges.

Ce règlement à l’amiable doit leur permettre d’éviter des milliers d’actions en justice intentées par des Etats américains et collectivités locales qui accusent les entreprises d’avoir un rôle dans cette crise sanitaire, à l’origine de plus de 500 000 morts par overdose en 20 ans aux Etats-Unis.

https://ds1.static.rtbf.be/article/image/1920xAuto/b/4/3/ddc50153e833ef7ba52f9367f48b8eb257197d40.jpg

#AmerisourceBergen, #Cardinal_Health et #McKesson ont, dans un communiqué commun, expliqué avoir reçu le feu vert de 42 des 49 Etats qui les poursuivaient, ainsi que du district de Washington, la capitale, et de cinq territoires américains.

Le laboratoire pharmaceutique Johnson & Johnson a indiqué dans un message séparé être aussi prêt à passer à la prochaine étape prévue dans l’accord. « Ce règlement ne constitue pas une admission de responsabilité ou d’acte répréhensible et l’entreprise continuera de se défendre contre tout litige que l’accord final ne résout pas », a souligné la société.

Aux collectivités locales de se prononcer
Johnson & Johnson, qui fait partie des laboratoires accusés d’avoir alimenté la crise en produisant des opiacés, a confirmé en juin avoir arrêté la production et la vente de ces substances. Les distributeurs de médicaments sont, eux, accusés d’avoir fermé les yeux sur des commandes d’opiacés suspectes.

Selon les termes négociés, le versement des 26 milliards de dollars (23,7 milliards de francs) - qui doivent permettre aux Etats et collectivités de financer les traitements rendus nécessaires par ce fléau - dépend du nombre d’Etats américains qui valideront l’accord.

Chaque Etat participant a maintenant jusqu’au 2 janvier pour demander à leurs collectivités locales respectives si elles veulent aussi être parties prenantes à l’accord. Si les conditions sont remplies, l’accord entrera en vigueur « 60 jours après que les distributeurs auront déterminé qu’il y a une participation suffisante pour procéder », détaille le communiqué.

S’il se confirme, l’accord sera le plus important de l’épique et complexe bataille juridique engagée par les Etats et collectivités américaines pour faire payer les entreprises.

#Johnson_&_Johnson #opioides #sackler #big_pharma #purdue_pharma #oxycontin #procès #addiction #opioïdes #santé #pharma #purdue #opiacés #etats-unis #drogue #opioids #mundipharma #marketing #McKinsey

Painkiller: Everything you need to know about new Netflix series
▻https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a37270981/painkiller-netflix-series-cast-plot-release-date-trailer

https://hips.hearstapps.com/digitalspyuk.cdnds.net/18/28/1531148943-orange-is-the-new-black-season-6-trailer-crazy-eyes-suzanne-uzo-aduba.jpg?crop=0.998xw:0.953xh;0.00163xw,0.0155xh&resize=1200:*

What is Painkiller about?

Painkiller will focus on the opioid crisis that has gripped America since the 1990s.

Speaking about how the series will explore the crisis, show creator Newman said: “A tragedy decades in the making, the opioid crisis has become one of the most devastating public health crises of our time. Unlike other drug epidemics, born from underground manufacturing and covert smuggling, this epidemic began by prescription–dispensed by doctors, approved by government regulators and promoted by a family-owned pharmaceutical giant that made billions while betraying the trust of patients and the public.”

#Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Opioides #Sackler #Painkiller

Painkiller : La mini-série Netflix dominée par Uzo Aduba & Matthew (...) - Unification France
▻https://www.unificationfrance.com/article68355.html

https://www.unificationfrance.com/IMG/arton68355.jpg

Newman supervise le projet dans le cadre de son accord global exclusif signé avec Netflix. Fitzerman-Blue et Harpster ont écrit les scénarios des 6 épisodes de la série limitée et feront office de showrunners. L’article du New Yorker, The Family That Built an Empire of Pain de Patrick Radden Keefe et le livre Pain Killer - An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, du journaliste et auteur lauréat du prix Pulitzer, Barry Meier, ont servi de base narrative à la série, avec Keefe et Meier comme consultants.

N’oubkliez pas que la traduction en français de l’article de Patrick Radden Keefe est disponible :
►https://cfeditions.com/addiction

https://cfeditions.com/addiction/ressources/addiction-900.jpg

#Addiction #Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Opioides

Covid hat die Opioid-Epidemie in den #USA aus den Schlagzeilen gedr...
▻https://diasp.eu/p/12859309

Covid hat die Opioid-Epidemie in den #USA aus den Schlagzeilen gedrängt, aber die Auswirkungen verschlimmert. (engl.) ▻https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/fentanyl-opioid-crisis-overdoses-covid-pandemic

Superpharma a encore frappé Claude-Inga Barbey

▻https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW6GxmnxmJA

#Humour #Suisse #RTS #pharma #santé #big_pharma #industrie_pharmaceutique #médicaments #brevets #cancer #opioides #corruption #big-pharma #médecine #multinationales #médicament #lobbying #covid-19 #tests #autotests

Ebene Magazine – Certains membres de la famille Sackler critiqués pour des liens avec des opioïdes | EBENE MAGAZINE
▻https://news.ebene-magazine.com/ebene-magazine-certains-membres-de-la-famille-sackler-critiqus-
▻https://i2.wp.com/news.ebene-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Ebene-Magazine-Certains-membres-de-la-famille-Sackler-critiqueacutes-pour-des

Le nom Sackler est peut-être partout, a déclaré Keefe, mais il est étrangement absent de la société qui les a rendus riches. « Eh bien, pour moi, c’était le paradoxe qui a lancé tout ce projet », a-t-il déclaré. « C’est une fortune dont la grande majorité provient de cette société, Purdue Pharma, qui n’a pas leur nom. »

Purdue Pharma, propriété privée de certains membres de la famille Sackler, est le fabricant de médicaments qui a développé et commercialisé le puissant analgésique OxyContin. La société a été accusée d’avoir contribué à déclencher l’épidémie d’opioïdes qui a tué près d’un demi-million de personnes dans ce pays au cours des deux dernières décennies.

Et pourtant, pendant une grande partie de ce temps, les Sackler – l’une des familles les plus riches d’Amérique (telle que compilée par le magazine Forbes) – ont largement évité l’examen public du rôle qu’ils auraient joué.

Ils font maintenant l’objet du nouveau livre de Keefe : « Empire of Pain : The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty » (Doubleday).

« Isaac Sackler, le patriarche originel, il perd en quelque sorte sa chemise dans la dépression », a déclaré Keefe. « Et il convoque ses trois fils auprès de lui, et il dit :« Le plus important est le bon nom de famille, ce bon nom de famille. Si vous perdez une fortune, vous pouvez toujours en faire une autre. Mais si vous perdez votre bonne réputation, vous ne pourrez jamais le récupérer. ‘ »

Les trois frères – Mortimer, Raymond et Arthur – sont devenus médecins. Mais c’est le plus âgé, Arthur, qui s’est fait le premier nom (et sa fortune) en tant que pionnier de la publicité.

« Arthur devient une sorte de Don Draper de la publicité médicale », a déclaré Keefe. « C’est cet incroyable pionnier visionnaire qui conçoit toutes ces nouvelles façons de vendre des médicaments, et plus particulièrement de vendre des médicaments aux médecins. »

Moriarty a demandé, « Vous écrivez dans le livre que la première fortune Sackler a été construite sur Valium. Il n’a pas créé ce médicament, il est juste de la publicité ? »

« Juste de la publicité. Mais quand il a négocié son accord pour ce faire, il a dit : » Ecoutez, je veux avoir une série de bonus croissants en fonction de la quantité de drogue que vous vendez. » Le valium devient alors la drogue la plus rentable au monde, et ainsi, il le rend fabuleusement riche. « 

https://cfeditions.com/addiction/ressources/addiction-900.jpg

#Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Sackler #Addiction_sur_ordonnance #Opioides

Book Review: ‘Empire of Pain,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/books/review-empire-of-pain-sackler-dynasty-patrick-radden-keefe.html

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2021/04/12/books/review/12BOOKKEEFE1/12BOOKKEEFE1-facebookJumbo.png

Taking cover under complexity has been a common strategy for tobacco companies and big oil — entities that have profited from disaster while seeking ways to avoid any moral opprobrium and expensive accountability. But even the most elaborately complex phenomena can still have relatively simple beginnings, a kernel that requires only the ingenuity and ruthlessness of people who are ready to exploit it.

Since 1996, 450,000 Americans have died from opioid overdoses, making them the leading cause of accidental death in the country. In “Empire of Pain,” Patrick Radden Keefe tells the story of how the Sackler family became a decisive force in a national tragedy. “Prior to the introduction of OxyContin, America did not have an opioid crisis,” Keefe writes. “After the introduction of OxyContin, it did.”

Throughout his career, Arthur maintained that he wasn’t trying to influence physicians, just to “educate” them. Among his biggest triumphs as an adman was the marketing of the tranquilizers Librium and Valium, beginning in the 1960s. The drugs’ manufacturer, Roche, insisted they weren’t addictive — even though the company had evidence showing they were. Once the patents on the tranquilizers were about to expire, Roche finally relented to government controls. By then, 20 million Americans were taking Valium, and Arthur was rich. “The original House of Sackler was built on Valium,” Keefe writes, but Arthur would spend the rest of his life trying to downplay the connection.
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Keefe nimbly guides us through the thicket of family intrigues and betrayals — how Arthur purchased the patent medicine company Purdue Frederick for his brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, in 1952, before he grew apart from them; and how Arthur’s heirs sold their shares to the surviving brothers after he died in 1987. Arthur’s descendants have tried to distance themselves from their cousins, protesting that they weren’t involved in the creation of OxyContin, but Keefe suggests they can’t get away from Purdue’s origin story. Arthur had created a fortune and a template.

Even when detailing the most sordid episodes, Keefe’s narrative voice is calm and admirably restrained, allowing his prodigious reporting to speak for itself. His portrait of the family is all the more damning for its stark lucidity.

#Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Addiction_sur_ordonnance #Opioides #Oxycontin

Les décès liés aux #opioïdes montent en flèche au Canada alors que la pandémie aggrave une crise sanitaire et sociale déjà très sévère - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2021/03/25/opio-m25.html
▻https://www.wsws.org/asset/c7290921-acc2-4e42-a812-79132120eae7?rendition=image1280

Avec la pandémie de coronavirus et la stratégie « les profits avant les vies » de l’élite dirigeante qui exacerbe la crise sociale et des soins de santé déjà terrible au Canada, le nombre de Canadiens qui meurent de surdoses d’opioïdes a augmenté de façon spectaculaire au cours de la dernière année. Bien que certaines données provinciales soient encore en cours de compilation, 2020 apparaîtra probablement comme l’année la plus meurtrière jamais enregistrée à ce jour.

Selon les estimations, le nombre total de décès liés aux opioïdes s’élève à environ 16.000 depuis 2016 à l’échelle nationale. Le flux constant de tragédies a été souligné cette semaine par des reportages faisant état de deux décès par surdose en deux jours dans la petite ville d’Owen Sound, dans le sud de l’Ontario.

Ce que le règne de McKinsey et des cabinets de conseil nous dit du capitalisme et de l’Etat | Nicolas Framont
▻https://www.frustrationmagazine.fr/mckinsey

Le gouvernement fait appel à McKinsey pour mener sa stratégie vaccinale. Que nous dit cet engouement national pour les cabinets de conseil ? Source : Frustration

HBO & Alex Gibney Making Opioid Crisis Documentary ‘The Crime Of The Century’ – Deadline
▻https://deadline.com/2021/02/hbo-alex-gibney-documentary-opioid-the-crime-of-the-century-1234690970

https://deadline.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/crime-of-century.jpg?w=1024

Un documentaire sur la crise des opioides, avec une série de noms bien connus de celles et ceux qui ont lu « Addiction sur ordonnance » de Patrick Radden Keefe.

HBO is reuniting with Emmy and Oscar winning filmmaker Alex Gibney for the two-part documentary The Crime of the Century, which will explore Big Pharma and government regulations over the reckless distribution and abuse of synthetic opiates. The Crime of the Century will debut on HBO and be available to stream on HBO Max in May.

The doc will explore the origins and fallout of the opioid epidemic which has resulted in half a million deaths from overdoses in this century alone.

With the help of whistleblowers, insiders, newly-leaked documents, exclusive interviews and access to behind-the-scenes investigations, and featuring expert input from medical professionals, journalists, former and current government agents, attorneys and pharmaceutical sales representatives, as well as sobering testimony from victims of opioid addiction, Gibney’s exposé will posit that drug companies are in fact largely responsible for manufacturing the very crisis they profit from, to the tune of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

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Specifically, the doc will zero in on family-owned Purdue Pharma which produced the highly addictive drug OxyContin. Purdue worked closely with the FDA to get the highly profitable pain medication approved for wider use, promoting its safety without sufficient evidence, and creating a campaign to redefine pain and treatment. When government regulators or Justice Department officials tried to mitigate the wrongdoing, Purdue Pharma and companies like Cardinal-Health that were huge opioid distributors would settle the cases, keep the details private and continue on unabated.

Gibney previously made such HBO docs such as The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and Going Clear: Scientology & the Prison of Belief. Gibney writes, produces and directs The Crime of the Century.

Contributing to Part One of The Crime of the Century are: author Patrick Radden Keefe; opioid specialist Dr. Andrew Kolodny; former Purdue sales rep. Mark Ross; addiction specialist Dr. Anne Lembke; Life Tree pain clinic founder Dr. Lynn Webster; Roy Bosley, whose wife died of an opioid overdose; author and New York Times reporter Barry Meier; primary care physician Dr. Art Van Zee; former Department of Justice official Paul Pelletier; and EMT Giles Sartin.

#Opioides #Patrick_Radden_Keefe #Sacklers

Les CDC rapportent un record de 81.000 décès par surdose de médicaments aux États-Unis sur une période de 12 mois - World Socialist Web Site
▻https://www.wsws.org/fr/articles/2020/12/23/crar-d23.html
▻https://www.wsws.org/asset/1a9959dc-fd75-4f5d-bfca-e4ebe274ebb2?rendition=image1280

Sur les 38 États disposant de données sur les surdoses d’#opioïdes synthétiques, 37 ont signalé une augmentation des décès, dont 18 ont fait état d’une augmentation de plus de 50 %. Dix États de l’ouest des États-Unis ont également signalé une augmentation de plus de 98 % des décès liés aux opioïdes synthétiques. Les CDC n’ont pas précisé les États.

En outre, les décès par surdose de cocaïne ont augmenté de 26,5 %, et les décès liés aux psychostimulants, comme la méthamphétamine, ont augmenté de 34,6 %. Les CDC pensent que l’augmentation des décès par surdose de cocaïne a été influencée par co-utilisation ou contamination par fentanyl ou l’héroïne. Le rapport note également que le nombre de décès liés aux psychostimulants dépasse celui des décès liés à la cocaïne.

L’accélération des décès par surdose de médicament au cours de la pandémie est le résultat de la croissance exponentielle plus vaste de ce type de décès survenue au cours des quatre dernières décennies. Le nombre de décès par surdose de médicament est passé de 1,13 pour 100.000 personnes en 1979 à 16,96 pour 100.000 en 2016, selon une étude publiée dans le magazine Science. Cette croissance a entraîné presque 600.000 décès sur une période de 38 ans, avec un doublement des décès tous les 9 ans.

Les tendances des différents médicaments ont fluctué dans le temps ; cependant, les 20 dernières années ont vu les opioïdes prendre une position centrale dans la croissance des décès par surdose. Selon les données des CDC, le nombre de prescriptions d’opioïdes est trois fois plus élevé qu’en 1999.

Sacklers Face Furious Questions in Rare Testimony on Opioid Epidemic - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/health/opoids-sacklers-purdue-testimony.html

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Les salauds ont un visage. Mais leur bouche ne sert qu’à évacuer du vent.

By Jan Hoffman

Dec. 17, 2020

Members of Congress on Thursday hurled withering comments and furious questions at two members of the billionaire Sackler family that owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, seeking to use a rare public appearance to extract admissions of personal responsibility for the deadly opioid epidemic as well as details about $10 billion that records show the family withdrew from the company.

The hearing, before the House Oversight Committee, offered a highly unusual opportunity for the public to hear directly from some members of the family, whose company is a defendant in thousands of federal and state lawsuits for misleading marketing of OxyContin, the painkiller seen as initiating a wave of opioid addiction that has led to the deaths of more than 450,000 Americans. Eight members of the family have been individually named in many state cases.

The singularity of the Sacklers’ appearance on Thursday was underscored by the likelihood that they may never testify in open court, because the ongoing bankruptcy proceedings and nationwide litigation may resolve in settlements rather than trials. Despite millions of dollars in legal expenses racked up by plaintiffs and Purdue alike — and the company’s subsequent filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2019 — one obstacle to resolution persists: the refusal of the Sacklers to be held personally or criminally responsible and to turn over substantial portions of their fortune.

During the tense, nearly four-hour hearing, David Sackler, 40, and his cousin, Dr. Kathe Sackler, 72, who both served on the company’s board for years, testified remotely and largely sidestepped would-be booby traps and deflected blame to “management” and independent, nonfamily board members.

Or, as Mr. Sackler said, “That’s a question for the lawyers.”

In the absence of direct admissions of responsibility by the Sacklers — or by Dr. Craig Landau, Purdue’s chief executive since 2017, who also testified — committee members used their questions to highlight the most egregious actions over the years by the company and by Mr. Sackler’s father, Dr. Richard Sackler, a hands-on executive during the cresting period of the epidemic.
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In particular, they explored the actions that followed a 2007 federal fine of nearly $635 million that the company and three executives paid after pleading guilty to federal criminal charges of “misbranding.” The settlement included no admission of liability by any of the Sacklers.

The committee chairwoman, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, asked Mr. Sackler whether in 2008, after the company’s federal settlement, the family was concerned about state investigations. Mr. Sackler denied knowing that investigations had been mounting.

But then Ms. Maloney read from an email exchange between Mr. Sackler and other relatives in 2007, just a week after that settlement. Referring to courtroom activity, he wrote: “We’re rich? For how long? Until which suits get through to the family?”

Last month, Purdue pleaded guilty to three felonies involving kickbacks and fraud related to promotion of its opioid and failure to report aberrant sales. The Justice Department settled with the company for $8.3 billion in criminal and civil penalties, and family members for $225 million in civil penalties. The Sacklers did not admit any wrongdoing. The amount they paid represents about 2 percent of the family’s net worth.

Maura Healey, the attorney general for Massachusetts, the first state to name individual Sacklers in litigation, said that the Sacklers want “special treatment.” In a letter to the House committee she wrote: “If we let powerful people cover up the facts, avoid accountability, or create a government-sponsored OxyContin business — that’s not justice. This time, we have to get it right.”

#Opioides #Sackler #Purdue_Pharma

The Sacklers Destroyed My Family
▻https://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a34590930/sacklers-opioid-addiction-essay

https://hips.hearstapps.com/hmg-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/images/sackler2-1607460485.jpg?crop=1xw:1xh;center,top&resize=1200:*

On November 24, 2020, an alert popped up on my phone. Purdue Pharmaceuticals had pled guilty to federal criminal charges with an $8.3 billion settlement. The dollar amount seemed significant, but when I dug a bit further, I learned the Sackler family, who owns Purdue and has been accused of causing the opioid abuse crisis by marketing OxyContin as safe and nonaddictive, has so far escaped with no criminal charges. The vast majority of their wealth—as one of the world’s richest families—remains intact.

I have followed the Sacklers for years, tracking the lawsuits against them as mine suffered from opiate abuse. In 2017, I read “The Family That Built an Empire of Pain,” Patrick Radden Keefe’s longform piece in The New Yorker on the role the Sackler family played in addicting millions of Americans. Keefe lays out an unprecedented wave of criminal activity Purdue began in the early 1990s, using kickbacks and fraudulent marketing to saturate the market with its products.

Around the time Purdue’s marketing campaign was picking up steam, a doctor wrote my mother a prescription for opioids. She has been addicted, on and off, ever since. I cannot prove it, but I strongly suspect the doctor who wrote my mother that prescription—and the subsequent doctors who renewed it or wrote new ones—were influenced by Purdue’s corrupt, illegal marketing. Purdue’s reach extended past the doctor’s office and the prescribing pad: To this day, my mother believes the lies Purdue told her doctors and repeats them as articles of faith.

Not one member of the Sackler family has ever faced criminal charges for their role in opiate epidemic. Under the latest settlement with the Department of Justice, the Sacklers were not even required to testify under oath, protecting the full extent of their crimes from public view. The Trump Administration’s Justice Department charged no one—not one single person—with the felonies Purdue Pharmaceuticals committed. Corporations are not only people in this country, but when convenient, apparently employ no one who can be held responsible for their misdeeds. The Sackler family name will remain on the Met and on the halls of the Ivy League institutions I clawed my way into all those years ago, while families like mine will have no justice.

#Opioides #Sackler #OxyContin #Addiction_Ordonnance #Patrick_Radden_Keefe

OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma pleads guilty to criminal charges | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-purdue-pharma-opioids-plea/oxycontin-maker-purdue-pharma-pleads-guilty-to-criminal-charges-idUSKBN2842
▻https://static.reuters.com/resources/r/?m=02&d=20201124&t=2&i=1542326960&r=LYNXMPEGAN1JN&w=800

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Purdue Pharma LP pleaded guilty to criminal charges over the handling of its addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin, capping a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve an investigation into the drugmaker’s role in the U.S. opioid crisis.

Members of the billionaire Sackler family who own Purdue and previously sat on the company’s board were not part of Tuesday’s court proceedings and have not been criminally charged. They agreed in October to pay a separate $225 million civil penalty for allegedly causing false claims for OxyContin to be made to government healthcare programs such as Medicare. They have denied the allegations.

Purdue’s plea deal carries more than $5.5 billion in penalties, most of which will go unpaid. A $3.54 billion criminal fine is set to be considered alongside trillions of dollars in unsecured claims as part of Purdue’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Purdue earlier settled separate Justice Department civil claims, agreeing to a $2.8 billion penalty also expected to receive little financial recovery in the drugmaker’s bankruptcy case.

The plea deal and other related settlements have come under fire from Democrats on Capitol Hill calling for Purdue and its owners to face more severe consequences for their alleged roles in the opioid crisis.

The company reaped more than $30 billion from sales of OxyContin over the years, enriching Sackler family members, according to U.S. and state officials. Since 1999, roughly 450,000 people have died in the United States from opioid-related overdoses, according to U.S. data.

Purdue, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year here under an onslaught of litigation, has proposed settling thousands of lawsuits in a deal it values at more than $10 billion. That is contingent on donations of opioid reversal and addiction treatment medications it has under development and a $3 billion cash contribution from the Sacklers, who would cede control of Purdue.

#Opioides #Sackler #A_gerber

Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family’s Plan to Keep Its Billions | The New Yorker
▻https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-sackler-familys-plan-to-keep-its-billions

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5f774d575f6e3bc99d9e049f/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/Keefe-Sacklers.jpg

Many pharmaceutical companies had a hand in creating the opioid crisis, an ongoing public-health emergency in which as many as half a million Americans have lost their lives. But Purdue, which is owned by the Sackler family, played a special role because it was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown. With the launch of OxyContin, in 1995, Purdue unleashed an unprecedented marketing blitz, pushing the use of powerful opioids for a huge range of ailments and asserting that its product led to addiction in “fewer than one percent” of patients. This strategy was a spectacular commercial success: according to Purdue, OxyContin has since generated approximately thirty billion dollars in revenue, making the Sacklers (whom I wrote about for the magazine, in 2017, and about whom I will publish a book next year) one of America’s richest families.

But OxyContin’s success also sparked a deadly crisis of addiction. Other pharmaceutical companies followed Purdue’s lead, introducing competing products; eventually, millions of Americans were struggling with opioid-use disorders. Many people who were addicted but couldn’t afford or access prescription drugs transitioned to heroin and black-market fentanyl. According to a recent analysis by the Wall Street Journal, the disruptions associated with the coronavirus have only intensified the opioid epidemic, and overdose deaths are accelerating. For all the complexity of this public-health crisis, there is now widespread agreement that its origins are relatively straightforward. New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, has described OxyContin as the “taproot” of the epidemic. A recent study, by a team of economists from the Wharton School, Notre Dame, and RAND, reviewed overdose statistics in five states where Purdue opted, because of local regulations, to concentrate fewer resources in promoting its drug. The scholars found that, in those states, overdose rates—even from heroin and fentanyl—are markedly lower than in states where Purdue did the full marketing push. The study concludes that “the introduction and marketing of OxyContin explain a substantial share of overdose deaths over the last two decades.”

Arlen Specter, then a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, was unhappy with the deal. When the government fines a corporation instead of sending its executives to jail, he declared, it is essentially granting “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct.” After the settlement, Purdue kept marketing OxyContin aggressively and playing down its risks. (The company denies doing so.) Sales of the drug grew, eventually reaching more than two billion dollars annually. The fact that, thirteen years after the 2007 settlement, Purdue is alleged to have orchestrated another criminally overzealous campaign to push its opioids suggests that Specter was right: when the profits generated by crossing the line are enormous, fines aren’t much of a deterrent.

Ne jamais oublier la corruption

The Sacklers have long maintained that they and their company are blameless when it comes to the opioid crisis because OxyContin was fully approved by the Food and Drug Administration. But some of the more shocking passages in the prosecution memo involve previously unreported details about the F.D.A. official in charge of issuing that approval, Dr. Curtis Wright. Prosecutors discovered significant impropriety in the way that Wright shepherded the OxyContin application through the F.D.A., describing his relationship with the company as conspicuously “informal in nature.” Not long after Wright approved the drug for sale, he stepped down from his position. A year later, he took a job at Purdue. According to the prosecution memo, his first-year compensation package was at least three hundred and seventy-nine thousand dollars—roughly three times his previous salary. (Wright declined to comment.)

But, at the time, Purdue was being sued by forty-five other states, and David Sackler offered to resolve all the cases against the company and the family in a single grand gesture. A wave of headlines reported the news: “PURDUE PHARMA OFFERS $10-12 BILLION TO SETTLE OPIOID CLAIMS.”

This seemed like a significant figure, but the headlines were misleading. According to a term sheet in which attorneys for the Sacklers and Purdue laid out the particulars of this proposed “comprehensive settlement,” the Sacklers were prepared to make a guaranteed contribution of only three billion dollars. Further funds could be secured, the family suggested, by selling its international businesses and by converting Purdue Pharma into a “public benefit corporation” that would continue to yield revenue—by selling OxyContin and other opioids—but would no longer profit the Sacklers personally. This was a discomfiting, and somewhat brazen, suggestion: the Sacklers were proposing to remediate the damage of the opioid crisis with funds generated by continuing to sell the drug that had initiated the crisis. At the same time, the term sheet suggested, Purdue would supply new drugs to treat opioid addiction and counteract overdoses—though the practicalities of realizing this initiative, and the Sacklers’ estimate that it would represent four billion dollars in value, remained distinctly speculative.

When the attorneys general refused to consent to the deal, the Sacklers followed through on their threat, and Purdue declared bankruptcy. But, significantly, the Sacklers did not declare bankruptcy themselves. According to the case filed by James, the family had known as early as 2014 that the company could one day face the prospect of damaging judgments. To protect themselves on this day of reckoning, the lawsuit maintains, the Sacklers assiduously siphoned money out of Purdue and transferred it offshore, beyond the reach of U.S. authorities. A representative for Purdue told me that the drugmaker, when it declared bankruptcy, had cash and assets of roughly a billion dollars. In a deposition, one of the company’s own experts testified that the Sacklers had removed as much as thirteen billion dollars from Purdue. When the company announced that it was filing for Chapter 11, Stein derided the move as a sham. The Sacklers had “extracted nearly all the money out of Purdue and pushed the carcass of the company into bankruptcy,” he said. “Multi-billionaires are the opposite of bankrupt.”

You might think that this would leave open the possibility of future suits brought by states, but Drain has signalled a desire to foreclose those as well, maintaining that a blanket dispensation is a necessary component of the bankruptcy resolution. In February, he remarked that the “only way to get true peace, if the parties are prepared to support it and not fight it in a meaningful way, is to have a third-party release” that grants the Sacklers freedom from any future liability. This is a controversial issue, and Drain indicated that he was raising it early because in some parts of the country it’s illegal for a federal bankruptcy judge to grant a third-party release barring state authorities from bringing their own lawsuits. The case law is evolving, Drain said.

The Trump Administration has paid lip service to the importance of addressing the opioid crisis. Bill Barr, Trump’s Attorney General, has said that his “highest priority is dealing with the plague of drugs.” In practice, however, this has meant rhetoric about heroin coming from Mexico and fentanyl coming from China, rather than a sustained effort to hold the well-heeled malefactors of the American pharmaceutical industry to account. Richard Sackler once boasted, “We can get virtually every senator and congressman we want to talk to on the phone in the next seventy-two hours.” Although the Sacklers may now be social pariahs, the family’s money—and army of white-shoe fixers—means that they still exert political influence.

According to three attorneys familiar with the dynamics inside the Justice Department, career line prosecutors have pushed to sanction Purdue in a serious way, and have been alarmed by efforts by the department’s political leadership to soften the blow. Should that happen, it will mark a grim instance of Purdue’s history repeating itself: a robust federal investigation of the company being defanged, behind closed doors, by a coalition of Purdue lawyers and political appointees. And it seems likely, as was also the case in 2007, that this failure will be dressed up as a success: a guilty plea from the company, another fine.

In a statement to The New Yorker, a representative for the families of Raymond and Mortimer Sackler denied all wrongdoing, maintaining that family members on Purdue’s board “were consistently assured by management that all marketing of OxyContin was done in compliance with law.” The statement continued, “Our hearts go out to those affected by drug abuse and addiction,” adding that “the rise in opioid-related deaths is driven overwhelmingly by heroin and illicit fentanyl smuggled by drug traffickers into the U.S. from China and Mexico.” At “the conclusion of this process,” the statement suggested, “all of Purdue’s documents” will be publicly disclosed, “making clear that the Sackler family acted ethically and responsibly at all times.”

The states have asserted in legal filings that the total cost of the opioid crisis exceeds two trillion dollars. Relative to that number, the three billion dollars that the Sacklers are guaranteeing in their offer is miniscule. It is also a small number relative to the fortune that the Sacklers appear likely to retain, which could be three or four times that amount. As the March filing by the states opposed to the deal argued, “When your illegal marketing campaign causes a national crisis, you should not get to keep most of the money.” What the Sacklers are offering simply “does not match what they owe.”

Nevertheless, in absolute terms, three billion dollars is still a significant sum—and the Sacklers have made it clear that they are prepared to pay it only in the event that they are granted a release from future liability. It may be that the magnitude of the dollars at stake will persuade Drain, the Justice Department officials on the case, and even the state attorneys general who initially rejected the Sacklers’ proposal to sign off. The problem, one attorney familiar with the case said, is that “criminal liability is not something that should be sold,” adding, “It should not depend on how rich they are. It’s not right.”

#Opioides #Sackler #Patrick_Radden_Keefe

Opioids and Public Health | Journal of Ethics | American Medical Association
▻https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/issue/opioids-and-public-health

Manufacturers of prescription opioids offered assurance in the mid-to-late 1990s that these drugs wouldn’t make patients with pain into patients with substance use disorders. Some physicians believed them and prescribed these drugs without appropriate regard for their addictiveness, contributing to prescription and street opioid misuse that has reached alarming proportions. This issue considers ethical questions that contextualize the opioid epidemic from social, cultural, and policy-based perspectives and illuminates potential solutions.
Volume 22, Number 8: E645-750

Le dernier numéro en date du journal d’éthique de l’American Medical Association. Son contenu confirme ce que Patrick Radden Keefe a montré dans « Addiction sur ordonnance » (traduit et publié par C&F éditions). Notamment un article par Andrew Kolodny sur le rôle (par inaction et complaisance) de la Food and Drug administration dans le déclenchement de la crise, une auteur largement cité par P.R. Keefe.

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#Opioides #FDA #Ethique #Big_pharma #Régulation