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[0] More than one million Americans have died from opioid overdoses since 1999, and last year, the annual death rate in America exceeded 100 ,000.
[1] That's a rate that dwarfs other industrial countries.
[2] In 2021, the Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, was granted immunity from all legal liability for the deaths, despite their firm's role in popularizing the deadly drug OxyContin on the mass market.
[3] In December, the Supreme Court will hear a case relating to their immunity argument.
[4] In this episode, we speak with an investigative journalist about how Purdue Pharma's OxyContin flooded the market in the late 90s and early 2000s and planted the seeds for today's opioid crisis.
[5] I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Editor -in -Chief John Bickley.
[6] It's Saturday, November 25th, and this is a special holiday weekend episode of Morning Wire.
[7] Joining us is Barry Meier, author of Painkiller.
[8] Barry, thanks so much for coming on.
[9] My pleasure, Georgia.
[10] much for having me. Before we jump in, I just want to mention how much I loved the Netflix adaptation, and I'm currently loving the book.
[11] Thank you.
[12] That's kind.
[13] So first off, I think most Americans are aware that we're in an opioid crisis, but a lot of people might not know when or how things kicked off.
[14] When would you trace this back to, and what would you say were some of the precipitating events?
[15] Well, I became first involved in reporting on the drug Oxycontin and its misuse and illegal promotion back in 2001 when I was a reporter for the New York Times.
[16] The drug was introduced in the late 1990s and was promoted by its manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, as a safe and effective painkiller that wouldn't cause abuse in patients, wouldn't cause them to become addictive.
[17] And unfortunately, that turned out to be too significant.
[18] lies.
[19] And by the time Oxycontin was on the market for a few years, it was widely abused.
[20] It was the drug of choice in many communities throughout Appalachia, Maine, Florida, other parts of the United States.
[21] And in time, the use of the drug and its rampant promotion kind of planted the seeds for the opioid epidemic that now confronts us.
[22] Now, how did Purdue Pharma make OxyContin so dominant in the market.
[23] Morphine had been in use for decades, so this wasn't the first opioid.
[24] How and why did it take off the way it did?
[25] It took off very simply and also very perniciously.
[26] Morphine had been around for a very long time, but the use of morphine back in the 90s was pretty much restricted to the treatment of cancer pain, the treatment of end -of -life pain.
[27] And what Purdue wanted to do was to promote a opioid as strong as morphine for use in the treatment of general pain.
[28] It could be anything from back pain to sports pain to dental pain to the type of pain, you know, all of us experience at some point every other year or so.
[29] And so in order to get doctors to prescribe a drug this strong, they had to do two things.
[30] One was to downplay its strength.
[31] And secondly, to convince a that unlike a drug like morphine, this drug was not going to be abused by patients or cause them to become addicted.
[32] And the way they did it is that they got a special label, if you will, from the Food and Drug Administration that declared that Oxycontin, because of its formulation, it was a time -release drug, was less likely to be abused than, competing drugs, you know, drugs like Vicodin or Percocet that doctors were used to prescribing.
[33] Unfortunately, number one, the FDA gave the company that approval without a scintilla of evidence to show that Oxycontin's formulation would cause it to be less abused, and the opposite turned out to be the case, because Oxycontin contained far higher levels of narcotic than these other drugs, it became the abuse drug of choice for many years.
[34] And the real tragedy, as I came to learn over the course of my reporting for the Times and sketched out and painkiller, Purdue hid and covered up all the information it was learning and gathering about the drugs growing abuse.
[35] Now, you kind of were touching on this, but from the book and especially from the Netflix series, I was shocked by the level of corruption that allowed this to happen.
[36] Can you give some of the more egregious examples of some of the deception that went on?
[37] Oh, sure.
[38] There was the cherry picking of scientific information to make it appear that there was scientific evidence behind the theory that Oxycontin would be less prone to abuse.
[39] There were blatant lies and, you know, the lie that the drug would.
[40] cause addiction in less than 1 % of patients treated, and this was sort of like drilled in to Purdue sales rep at the company's headquarters.
[41] So when they went out to doctors and promoted the drug to them, they provided them with false information and false claims.
[42] And most shockingly, there was a massive cover -up, so Purdue essentially buried information that it was receiving almost immediately after OxyContin appeared on the market that it was becoming a popular drug of abuse.
[43] And the reason why the company did that is because had they alerted regulators or law enforcement officials or doctors to what they knew, this whole billion -dollar marketing campaign that was promoting OxyContin as some type of wonder drug would have collapsed around the company.
[44] Now, Purdue Pharma, as you mentioned, advertised OxyContin as having an addiction rate below 1%.
[45] Has it ever been established what the true percent is?
[46] There's conflicting studies based on various data that's been collected, but it's generally accepted that somewhere between 5 to 13 percent of patients who are prescribed opioids over long periods of time, that would be more than 30 days or more, develop what is known as iatrogenic or doctor -induced addiction to these drugs.
[47] So it's a significant number.
[48] I mean, what we're talking about, let's say, we'll pick a number of the hat and say that it's 7%.
[49] So, you know, if 100 ,000 people are prescribed oxycontin, then 70 ,000 of them are going to get addicted to the drug.
[50] Now, I want to talk a little bit about the pain movement.
[51] What was and or is that, and then is the healthcare industry still fully embracing it the way they were at the beginning?
[52] So what was happening in the 1980s, early 1990s, was actually a very well -meaning medical movement to treat pain more aggressively.
[53] There were almost puritanical views about opioids in the United States to the extent that people, People who were dying of significant cancer pain were being denied these drugs because of fears they would get addicted.
[54] And it was sort of cruel and inhumane.
[55] And there was a movement of doctors who formed a coalition that was known as the War on Pain, which was advocating for the more widespread use of opioids in treating significant pain.
[56] The problem was that around the appearance of Oxycontin in the late 1990s, Purdue and other people hijacked this well -meaning movement and turned it into promoting the use of powerful opioids for treating more basic types of pain.
[57] And then they also began to influence, and one could use the term corrupt, the medical profession to adopt standards that encourage the use of these drugs.
[58] For example, an organization that certifies hospitals adopted what was known as the fifth vital sign, pain being the fifth vital sign, so that any time a patient came into a hospital, their level of pain had to be checked and assessed.
[59] Doctors were then ranked and rated.
[60] on their aggressiveness and treatment of pain.
[61] And so, you know, the whole system kind of got tilted towards treating pain more aggressively, which by its very nature meant using stronger and stronger opioids for longer periods of time.
[62] Now, the downside for this, along with, you know, they're being a surfeit of these drugs now pouring onto the streets, to patients becoming addicted or developing, dependence on these drugs was that, you know, in time, and it took a very long time, there was a reaction from regulators who started clamping down.
[63] This is in the last three or four years.
[64] And so people who actually could benefit from these drugs, for whom the benefits of these drugs outweigh their significant risk because they had very significant medical situations are finding it difficult to get these drugs.
[65] Now, did other countries have a similar pain movement with similar results, or is this something unique in the Western world?
[66] We are very unique.
[67] Approximately, the time I was working on the book, I believe the statistic was something like 80 to 85 % of all the opioids in the world are consumed in the United States.
[68] So our use of opioids are way out of whack.
[69] with the rest of the world.
[70] In some places, they're used more conservatively.
[71] Other drugs are used, sadly, in some other places, particularly in less economically developed countries, they're rarely used.
[72] So you have a situation in those countries where people do die in pain unnecessarily because of the lack of availability of these drugs or, you know, prevailing negative views about these drugs.
[73] But like any reasonable measure, our use of these drugs are way out of line with the rest of the world.
[74] Now, you may or may not know this, but what percent of today's opioid addicts began their addiction with a prescription from their doctor?
[75] That's an issue that I think is hotly debated, that there really isn't very good data.
[76] on, it's quite possible that that number is small.
[77] It's not like 50 % or probably even 25%.
[78] Most of the people who go on to overdose on these drugs, their first experience of them may be on the street or at a party or through social use of drugs, but even while they themselves may not have gotten these drugs through a medical encounter, any prescription drugs that end up on the street got there through medical encounters.
[79] The situation is even more complicated in recent times because the ratio of overdoses from prescription drugs to illegal drugs has shifted, unfortunately, in favor of illicit drugs like fentanyl, so that the vast majority of overdoses these days involve counterfeit versions of fentanyl, which, you know, have their origins in Mexico or Central America where they're produced by drug cartels.
[80] Now, there was a striking scene.
[81] I think this actually was from dopesick, which, as you know, is like very similar.
[82] Right.
[83] Where I think it's the detective Rosario Dawson is talking to a high.
[84] school kid and the high school kid basically says that half of the kids in their school are using OxyContin.
[85] Is that a statistic that they got from somewhere?
[86] Yeah, I mean, there's a central character in my book.
[87] My book is said in Western Virginia, a small town there, and there's a doctor who kind of is becoming increasingly concerned about the addiction of teenagers and misuse of these drugs by young people in his town.
[88] So he, like, has a survey done where the high school kids respond to the survey, and I think it's something like half the kids in the survey respond that they've used oxy.
[89] So at that time, the drug use by teenagers in these smaller towns was rampant.
[90] All right, well, Barry, thanks so much for coming on, and of course for doing all this reporting and exposing the story.
[91] pleasure.
[92] That was Barry Meyer, author of Painkiller, which has also been adapted to a Netflix series.
[93] And this has been a special edition of Morning Wire.