Who invented oxycodone

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Or, if you are already a subscriber Sign in. Other options. Close drawer menu Financial Times International Edition. The north wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a vast, airy enclosure featuring a banked wall of glass and the Temple of Dendur, a sandstone monument that was constructed beside the Nile two millennia ago and transported to the Met, brick by brick, as a gift from the Egyptian government.

The Brooklyn-born brothers Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond Sackler, all physicians, donated lavishly during their lifetimes to an astounding range of institutions, many of which today bear the family name: the Sackler Gallery, in Washington; the Sackler Museum, at Harvard; the Sackler Center for Arts Education, at the Guggenheim; the Sackler Wing at the Louvre; and Sackler institutes and facilities at Columbia, Oxford, and a dozen other universities.

The Sacklers have endowed professorships and underwritten medical research. Mortimer died in , and Raymond died earlier this year. The brothers bequeathed to their heirs a laudable tradition of benevolence, and an immense fortune with which to indulge it.

Sackler Center for Feminist Art. While the Sacklers are interviewed regularly on the subject of their generosity, they almost never speak publicly about the family business, Purdue Pharma—a privately held company, based in Stamford, Connecticut, that developed the prescription painkiller OxyContin.

Upon its release, in , OxyContin was hailed as a medical breakthrough, a long-lasting narcotic that could help patients suffering from moderate to severe pain. The drug became a blockbuster, and has reportedly generated some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue for Purdue.

But OxyContin is a controversial drug. Its sole active ingredient is oxycodone, a chemical cousin of heroin which is up to twice as powerful as morphine. In the past, doctors had been reluctant to prescribe strong opioids—as synthetic drugs derived from opium are known—except for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care, because of a long-standing, and well-founded, fear about the addictive properties of these drugs.

Purdue launched OxyContin with a marketing campaign that attempted to counter this attitude and change the prescribing habits of doctors. The company funded research and paid doctors to make the case that concerns about opioid addiction were overblown, and that OxyContin could safely treat an ever-wider range of maladies. But many others grew so hooked on it that, between doses, they experienced debilitating withdrawal.

Since , two hundred thousand Americans have died from overdoses related to OxyContin and other prescription opioids. Many addicts, finding prescription painkillers too expensive or too difficult to obtain, have turned to heroin. According to the American Society of Addiction Medicine, four out of five people who try heroin today started with prescription painkillers.

The most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest that a hundred and forty-five Americans now die every day from opioid overdoses. Andrew Kolodny, the co-director of the Opioid Policy Research Collaborative, at Brandeis University, has worked with hundreds of patients addicted to opioids. He told me that, though many fatal overdoses have resulted from opioids other than OxyContin, the crisis was initially precipitated by a shift in the culture of prescribing—a shift carefully engineered by Purdue.

That was the year Purdue launched a multifaceted campaign that misinformed the medical community about the risks. Arthur was a gap-toothed, commanding polymath who trained under the Dutch psychoanalyst Johan H. All three attended medical school, and worked together at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, in Queens, collectively publishing some hundred and fifty scholarly papers. But the brothers made their fortunes in commerce, rather than from medical practice.

They shared an entrepreneurial bent. He proved so adept at this work that he eventually bought the agency—and revolutionized the industry. Until then, pharmaceutical companies had not availed themselves of Madison Avenue pizzazz and trickery. As both a doctor and an adman, Arthur displayed a Don Draper-style intuition for the alchemy of marketing.

He recognized that selling new drugs requires a seduction of not just the patient but the doctor who writes the prescription. Sackler saw doctors as unimpeachable stewards of public health. Seeing that physicians were most heavily influenced by their own peers, he enlisted prominent ones to endorse his products, and cited scientific studies which were often underwritten by the pharmaceutical companies themselves.

But it was advertising. In , an investigative reporter for The Saturday Review tried to contact some of the doctors whose names were on the cards. They did not exist. During the sixties, Arthur got rich marketing the tranquillizers Librium and Valium. One Librium ad depicted a young woman carrying an armload of books, and suggested that even the quotidian anxiety a college freshman feels upon leaving home might be best handled with tranquillizers.

Win Gerson, who worked with Sackler at the agency, told the journalist Sam Quinones years later that the Valium campaign was a great success, in part because the drug was so effective.

By , American doctors were writing more than a hundred million tranquillizer prescriptions a year, and countless patients became hooked. While running his advertising company, Arthur Sackler became a publisher, starting a biweekly newspaper, the Medical Tribune , which eventually reached six hundred thousand physicians.

He scoffed at suggestions that there was a conflict of interest between his roles as the head of a pharmaceutical-advertising company and the publisher of a periodical for doctors. But in it emerged that a company he owned, MD Publications, had paid the chief of the antibiotics division of the F. After the payments were discovered, he resigned. In , the Sackler brothers bought a small patent-medicine company, Purdue Frederick, which was based in Greenwich Village and made such unglamorous staples as laxatives and earwax remover.

According to court documents, each brother would control a third of the company, but Arthur, who was occupied with his publishing and advertising ventures, would play a passive role.

In the early sixties, Estes Kefauver, a Tennessee senator, chaired a subcommittee that looked into the pharmaceutical industry, which was growing rapidly. Kefauver, who had previously investigated the Mafia, was especially intrigued by the Sackler brothers. A panel of senators assailed him with pointed questions, but he was a formidable interlocutor—slippery, aloof, and impeccably prepared—and no senator landed a blow.

As the Sacklers grew wealthy, they became patrons of the arts. In , the brothers gave the Met three and a half million dollars, enabling the construction of the wing housing the Temple of Dendur.

Mortimer used the space for a lavish birthday party. In April, , when Arthur Sackler was seventy-three, he demanded that his third wife, Gillian, account for all their household expenditures. The company, which had moved to Connecticut and would eventually change its name to Purdue Pharma, had made a great deal of money under their stewardship. But such riches were about to seem paltry. By the time the brothers made their bid, Purdue was already developing a new drug: OxyContin. Humans have cultivated the opium poppy for five thousand years.

The father of medicine, Hippocrates, recognized the therapeutic properties of the plant. But even in the ancient world people understood that the benevolent powers of this narcotic were offset by the perils of addiction. But, by the late eighties, its patent was about to expire, and Purdue executives started looking for a drug to replace it.

Richard had joined Purdue in as an assistant to his father, and worked his way up. His name appears on numerous medical patents. Oxycodone, which was inexpensive to produce, was already used in other drugs, such as Percodan in which it is blended with aspirin and Percocet in which it is blended with Tylenol.

Purdue developed a pill of pure oxycodone, with a time-release formula similar to that of MS Contin. The company decided to produce doses as low as ten milligrams, but also jumbo pills—eighty milligrams and a hundred and sixty milligrams—whose potency far exceeded that of any prescription opioid on the market.

Highly regarded doctors, like Russell Portenoy, then a pain specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, in New York, spoke out about the problem of untreated chronic pain—and the wisdom of using opioids to treat it.

The statement was written by a committee chaired by Dr. David Haddox, a paid speaker for Purdue. The F. Purdue had conducted no clinical studies on how addictive or prone to abuse the drug might be. But the F. Curtis Wright, left the agency shortly afterward. Within two years, he had taken a job at Purdue. Mortimer, Raymond, and Richard Sackler launched OxyContin with one of the biggest pharmaceutical marketing campaigns in history, deploying many persuasive techniques pioneered by Arthur.

At a celebratory dinner following the training, he was seated at a table with Richard Sackler. He has a company that his family owns. I want to be him one day. A major thrust of the sales campaign was that OxyContin should be prescribed not merely for the kind of severe short-term pain associated with surgery or cancer but also for less acute, longer-lasting pain: arthritis, back pain, sports injuries, fibromyalgia.

The number of conditions that OxyContin could treat seemed almost unlimited. According to internal documents, Purdue officials discovered that many doctors wrongly assumed that oxycodone was less potent than morphine—a misconception that the company exploited. So Purdue set out to do exactly the opposite. If a doctor inquired about addiction, May had a talking point ready. I can still remember, all these years later.

Doctors were offered all-expenses-paid trips to pain-management seminars in places like Boca Raton. The company advertised in medical journals, sponsored Web sites about chronic pain, and distributed a dizzying variety of OxyContin swag: fishing hats, plush toys, luggage tags. Purdue also produced promotional videos featuring satisfied patients—like a construction worker who talked about how OxyContin had eased his chronic back pain, allowing him to return to work.

The videos, which also included testimonials from pain specialists, were sent to tens of thousands of doctors. The level of influence is just mind-boggling. Purdue gave money to continuing medical education, to state medical boards, to faux grassroots organizations. In , a Purdue-funded study of patients who used OxyContin for headaches found that the addiction rate was thirteen per cent.

Within five years of its introduction, OxyContin was generating a billion dollars a year. The sales force was heavily incentivized to push the drug. One day, May drove with a colleague to Lewisburg, a small city in West Virginia. When they arrived, the doctor was ashen. A relative had just died, she explained. The girl had overdosed on OxyContin. Arthur and Mortimer Sackler each married three times, and Raymond married once. There are fifteen Sackler children in the second generation, most of whom have children of their own.

The Sackler clan has pursued a variety of causes and interests. A publicly traded company makes periodic disclosures to its shareholders. On occasion, press accounts about OxyContin note that profits from the drug flow to the Sacklers, but these stories tend to depict the family as a monolith. As with any large clan, however, there are fissures of discord. In the eighties, Mortimer sued his ex-wife Gertraud, claiming that she had illegally taken possession of an apartment that he owned on Fifth Avenue and had loaned it out to a contingent of models and photographers.

Sackler have ever had anything to do with, or benefited from, the sale of OxyContin. Even though Mortimer Sackler had a large stake in the company, he was only an occasional presence at the Connecticut headquarters.

But Judge Drain pushed back today. He said bankruptcy law gives him full authority to do this. MANN: It looks more and more likely. The DOJ has signaled an appeal as possible, so have many states. We should know in the next couple of weeks, Mary Louise, whether that will happen. MANN: Yeah, under the Sacklers' leadership, Purdue Pharma introduced this pain medication, OxyContin, in the late s, and the company's misleading and at times illegal marketing of OxyContin contributed to the nation's opioid crisis.

It's claimed more than half a million lives. It was a tsunami of opioid lawsuits that drove Purdue Pharma into bankruptcy. They say they acted ethically, and they declined to apologize. But many of their critics really view them as the public face of corporate America's role in this opioid crisis. The fact that they'll walk away from this epidemic, which is still raging with a clean legal slate and most of their wealth, it's agonizing for people like Alexis Pleus.

Her son, Jeff, became addicted to OxyContin, and he died of an opioid overdose. And we feel that there is no accountability and no justice here. We have not heard back. I want to note before we let you go there is support for this bankruptcy plan. A lot of government officials have come out in support of it, including a lot of states attorneys general.

What do they like about it? MANN: Well, the bottom line is government officials, and even many opioid victims say the settlement could really help, you know, sending billions of dollars to fund drug treatment and health care programs. And today, Judge Drain spoke at length about that, saying this is a model for how communities can begin to recover with money that comes from Purdue Pharma and from members of the Sackler family.