Documents reveal new details about OxyContin marketing - STAT

New details revealed about Purdue's marketing of OxyContin- STAT

Documents reveal new details about OxyContin marketing

Just-released documents reveal new details about how Purdue marketed the powerful painkiller OxyContin. The documents are newly public portions of a lawsuit filed by the state of Massachusetts against Purdue. Here's what you need to know:

• The drug’s debut: At a launch party when Purdue started selling OxyContin in 1996, Dr. Richard Sackler — a member of the family that controls Purdue and who at the time was a company exec — told those gathered that the drug’s debut “will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition.”
• The pushback: When questions were being raised about the risk of addiction and overdose with OxyContin and other opioids, Sackler sent an email outlining a strategy to divert the blame. “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in a February 2001 email. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
• The response: In a statement, Purdue criticized the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, calling the complaint “a rush to vilify” Purdue.

More here.