Painkiller companies are now globally exporting addiction for profit — just like Big Tobacco

German Lopez · Thursday, December 22, 2016, 10:03 am

OxyContin sales have fallen in the US since 2011. So the companies behind it are going global.

The US is in the midst of a harrowing opioid painkiller and heroin epidemic, which led to a record number of drug overdose deaths (more than 52,000) in 2015.

Unlike other drug epidemics, the current one did not start with an illicit substance. It began with legal drugs: opioid painkillers like OxyContin and Percocet, which were heavily marketed by pharmaceutical companies to sell as much of their product as possible.

The marketing, which downplayed the risks of opioids, was so misleading that in 2007 Purdue Pharma, producer of OxyContin, paid hundreds of millions of dollars in fines for it. The US Drug Enforcement Administration claimed in 2003 that Purdue’s marketing was “aggressive, excessive and inappropriate” and “very much exacerbated” abuse and criminal trafficking of opioids.

But instead of learning the lessons of the American opioid epidemic, a new report by Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion, and Scott Glover of the Los Angeles Times suggests that drug companies are simply taking their message to a global audience.

The incentive for the companies is obvious: As US officials crack down on opioids and hurt companies’ profits (sales for OxyContin have steadily fallen since 2011), opioid producers are turning to a broader audience around the world to make up for the lost revenue. But for public health officials, this creates a real risk of spreading the opioid epidemic — which has been largely contained to the US so far — to a global scale.

We’ve seen this story before. As former US Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler told the LA Times, “It’s right out of the playbook of Big Tobacco. As the United States takes steps to limit sales here, the company goes abroad.”

What’s more, opioid companies aren’t significantly changing their messaging as they expand. Instead, they’re once again promoting the idea that opioids are safe and effective, even as opioid painkiller overdoses have killed tens of thousands in the US.

Read more
http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/12/22/14039122/opioid-epidemic-oxycontin-mundipharma