Opioids: Greed, Death, and $$$$ with Barry Meier (Encore)

Reasonably Happy with Paul Ollinger

The new Netflix series Painkiller is based on a book my guest, Barry Meier wrote over 20 years ago. In Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic, Meier explores how Purdue Pharma’s drug OxyContin catalyzed a plague of addiction and death that has destroyed families and whole communities across the country.

Between 1999 and 2020, 564,000 Americans died from an opioid overdose. In 2020, the most recent year for which statistics are available, opioids killed 68,000. That's 188 per day and each one of these deaths represents a son or daughter, a brother or sister or a mother or father, who is not coming back. Yes, people died of opioid overdoses before the 1996 launch of OxyContin, but it’s clear that Oxy and Purdue Pharma’s aggressive and deceptive marketing practices threw gasoline on a spark that has turned into a raging wildfire.

In our conversation today, Barry and I discuss the Sackler family's legacy of ethically dubious marketing of pharmaceuticals and how they made tens of billions of dollars selling OxyContin using the same techniques, like pushing free samples, while knowing that the drug was quite addictive. We discuss how and why the FDA approved claims that OxyContin was less prone to addiction in the complete absence of evidence proving that it actually was. And lastly, we discuss the extent to which OxyContin kicked off this opioid epidemic for which there is no clear way out.

The Netflix series stars Matthew Broderick, Taylor Kitsch, and Uzo Aduba and is very well done.

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