Steve Williams, mayor of Huntington, a city ravaged by prescription pill and heroin addiction, said he wants to see executives face criminal prosecution, after it was revealed that a member of the family that made billions of dollars from the painkiller that unleashed the epidemic stands to profit further after he was granted a patent for an anti-addiction medicine. Dr Richard Sackler, an executive in the company who was instrumental in it’s marketing of OxyContin and one of those named in the Massachusetts lawsuit, was revealed to have patented an anti-addiction medicine in what appeared an effort to profit further from the tragedy his company was instrumental in creating.
“They are drug dealers in Armani suits,” said Williams. “You have the corporate executives that are the ones who make the decisions. Just because this person is working on a street corner selling drugs and this other person is working in the executive suite 50 storeys up, is there really that much of a difference? Just because you are in the executive suite doesn’t mean that you are immune from the results of the corporate decisions that you make. Just because you have billions of dollars at your disposal doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be held accountable. The decisions that have been made within the pharmaceutical industry have ravaged our nation.” Williams was among the first mayors to pursue the drug companies. West Virginia has the highest drug overdose rate in the US. Huntington is capital of the county with the largest number of opioid deaths in the state although it has brought the toll of addiction down sharply over the past year. He is not alone in believing that the crisis spread unchecked for years in part because big corporations were allowed to pay fines or civil penalties when they broke the law and then carry on as before. The mayor questions whether civil suits alone are sufficient to call those responsible to account and to discourage what he regards as a lethal disregard for the law. “I can guarantee you this, that if an executive all of a sudden knew that they were going to be hearing iron doors closing behind them that would immediately send a ripple throughout all of the corporate boardrooms. All it takes is one public execution,” he said.
“I think criminal charges are really important and serve as a deterrent,” said Dr Andrew Kolodny, a founder of Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing who has long campaigned for curbs on the use of opioid painkillers. “To some extent these are violent crimes that have been committed and I don’t think that a manufacturer or distributor should be able to pay their fine and move along. If we want to deter corporations from acts that can lead to a public health catastrophe, there should be criminal prosecutions. I don’t think it’s enough to just fine these companies.”
In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges of falsely marketing OxyContin, including telling doctors it was less addictive and more effective than other prescription opioids. The pharmaceutical firm paid a $640m fine but negotiated for the conviction to be pinned on its parent company, Purdue Frederick, which allowed the drug maker to go on selling OxyContin unhindered by restrictions that would have come with a criminal conviction. Three top executives responsible for the illegal marketing were allowed to plead guilty to misdemeanours and fined heavily but were not jailed. Senator Arlen Specter called fines “expensive licenses for criminal misconduct”. Senator Patrick Leahy said that “nothing makes corporate executives think twice about malfeasance more than the prospect of the iron bars slamming shut”. The present wave of lawsuits accuse Purdue Pharma of continuing its criminal practices and of regarding financial penalties as the cost of doing business – an accusation leveled against a number of other drug makers, distributors and pharmacy chains that have paid civil settlements sometimes into the hundreds of millions of dollars but avoided criminal prosecution even when they repeatedly committed the same infractions.
Massachusetts became the first state to sue individual executives and owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug, OxyContin, which kicked off the biggest drug epidemic in American history, estimated to be killing more than 115 people a day. The lawsuit seeks to recover the billions of dollars in profit banked by members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue and is divided between the US and the UK.
Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey, accused the company and its officials of knowingly profiting from overdoses and death. “Purdue Pharma and its executives built a multi-billion-dollar business based on deception and addiction. The more drugs they sold, the more money they made, and the more people in Massachusetts suffered and died,” she said.
Billionaire founder and CEO of the drug-maker Insys Theraputics, John Kapoor, is charged with racketeering, conspiracy and corruption. Kapoor has denied allegations of bribing doctors to prescribe a powerful and highly addictive opioid approved for cancer patients, Subsys, for people who did not have the disease. An Inysys sales manager has already pleaded guilty to paying kickbacks to doctors to prescribe Subsys and in August the company paid $150m to settle the justice department investigation into its practices.
Critics of the pharmaceutical industry say Insys was a latecomer to profiting from the epidemic, opportunistically seizing on the chance to sell more drugs only in recent years. They point to Purdue and other firms pursuing a much longer strategy of misrepresenting and promoting opioid painkillers, including using political lobbying and well-funded front organisations to influence medical policy, and then resisting efforts to reduce mass prescribing even as the death toll rose in order to preserve profits.
Another drug-maker, the Irish company, Endo, has objected to accusations by Ohio’s attorney general, Mike DeWine, that the pharmaceutical industry “laid waste to Ohio as only the worst plague could”
A former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration division responsible for ensuring drug distributors follow their legal obligations, Joe Rannazzisi, said the fines and civil settlements were not an effective deterrent.
“They were making a lot of money so why the heck are they going to change their way of doing business when they’re bringing all this money in? They didn’t want to change the way they were doing anything,” he said.
Purdue helped fund an effort by the Washington Legal Foundation, a conservative group that litigates on behalf of corporate interests, to weaken laws holding executives criminally responsible for breaches of the law. Purdue is conducting a public relations campaign to portray itself as committed to combatting the epidemic. In newspaper adverts the company claims to be a “partner” in the fight against opioid addiction.https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/sep/30/theyre-drug-dealers-in-armani-suits-executives-draw-focus-amid-us-epidemic
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