An opioid crisis now entering its third decade continues to claim the lives of hundreds of New Hampshire residents per year, most of them young.
A villain has been identified, Purdue Pharma, the maker and aggressive marketer of the addictive pain reliever OxyContin. The majority owners of Purdue Pharma are members of one billionaire family, the descendants of three psychiatrists, Arthur, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler. The company, and the family members individually, have been sued by at least 29 states, including New Hampshire, seeking compensation for the harm caused by its allegedly deceitful marketing of the drug.
Last week attention turned to just one of the many assets in the Sackler portfolio, an ownership share in 17 ski resorts. Three are in New Hampshire – Attitash, Wildcat and Crotched Mountain. The Sackler family is expected to receive some $60 million from the sale, money many communities coping with the opioid epidemic hope will come their way.
They shouldn’t count on it. Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy last month and entered into a settlement agreement with the majority of states and communities suing it. The move may succeed in protecting the Sackler family fortune.
Most of the suits filed against the drug maker accuse the company and its sales staff of lying to doctors about the severe addiction risk inherent in OxyContin use. But focusing on the misdeeds of one company or one family carries the risk that much larger systemic problems could get short shrift.
Last week, a Washington Post story by reporter Christopher Rowland focused on the sale of the ski areas and Purdue Pharma’s role in fueling the addiction plague. It contained some startling facts and raised questions that are a long way from being answered.
In North Conway, six chain pharmacies received 5.4 million oxycodone and hydrocodone pills between 2006 and 2012, enough according to Drug Enforcement Administration data, to provide every person within a five-mile radius 201 pills per year. Most of those pills were supplied not by Purdue Pharma but two makers of generic drugs. Those companies also must be held to account for their role.
Just one pharmacy in Rockingham County, CVS’s Neighborcare of New Hampshire, sold 5.7 million oxycodone and hydrocodone pills during the same period, Rowland reported. Who wrote the prescriptions for all those addictive drugs? Are we really to believe that gullible physicians took the word of Purde Pharma’s typically youthful salespeople when they said OxyContin was not addictive if used properly? Or was something else at work, a profit motive perhaps?
Why did pharmacy chains blithely supply enough opioids to create an army of addicts? Was a lack of oversight to blame?
Most overdose deaths are caused not by prescription drugs but by the cheaper substitutes addicts take when legal drugs become difficult to obtain. They die, not from pain medication, but from heroin, fentanyl and other street drugs. Potentially addictive drugs allow millions of chronic pain sufferers to lead productive lives. How can their needs be met without creating more addicts?
Deaths from opioid overdoses increased nearly sixfold between 1999 and 2017. How many of them were deaths of people who despaired of ever escaping poverty and leading an economically secure, purposeful life? How can society combat its citizens’ growing fear of a bleak future?
Chasing Sackler money around the globe won’t answer such questions. It’s a necessary exercise and justice must be served, but it won’t do much to solve the problem.