When Purdue pharmaceutical company launched OxyContin in 1996, ads and sales representatives told doctors that it was safe for back aches, knee pain and other common conditions. The claimed, falsely, that it was less addictive than other prescription opioids.
Such claims should have been stopped by the Food and Drug Administration, according to Beth Macy, a former Roanoke Times journalist whose award-winning books “Dopesick” and “Raising Lazarus” have described the epidemic, the lawsuits and the grave moral issues. (Macy is seen in a 2022 interview with Ralph Berrier in the video on this page.)
The false claims and FDA backing were followed by large scale advertising and marketing campaigns targeting Central Appalachia (Southwestern Virginia, West Virginia, Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee).
The result has been an epidemic of opioid abuse and death. From 1999-2022, over 725,000 people died from overdosing on opioids. In 2021, opioid toxicity was responsible for 10 percent of all deaths among those aged 15 to 19 years, and 21 percent of deaths among those aged 20 to 39 years. In fact, the odds of dying from an accidental opioid overdose in the U.S. are greater than those of dying in a car accident.
Oxycodone is similar to heroin and twice as powerful as morphine, and therefore is among the most dangerous kinds of prescription medicines usually reserved for acute cancer pain and end-of-life palliative care.
With tens of billions of dollars in profits per year, Purdue Pharma used its influence and wealth. gained in part from opioid drug sales, to spread a veneer of scientific credibility over hyped-up sales tactics, while doing nothing to actually make the pain killing drugs safer.
The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to regulate advertising for medicine for these potentially lethal products. Yet the FDA’s regulation of Purdue Pharma‘s OxyContin did not control false advertising.
The opioid crisis is getting worse
The opioid epidemic and similar drug overdose issues are getting worse, not better, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
And they are about to get much worse with marketing driven by artificial intelligence according to a June 23, 2023 article in Business Insider, “The looming addiction crisis fueled. by AI – targeted advertising.”
A new breed of direct-to-consumer services is aggressively using targeted ads to sell habit-forming medications. Not only do these companies make it easier for those seeking recreational drugs to access them, they’re also poised to inundate and threaten the sobriety of people in recovery. And unlike a typical prescriber who might interrogate answers to assess genuine need, some of these firms appear to be designed to remove every possible barrier.
In short, AI and surveillance capitalism, which empower today’s targeted ads, have joined forces with the deadly OxyContin playbook. But unlike the opioid crisis of the early 2000s, advertisers today have much more data and far more precise tools to push prescriptions, and our privacy laws haven’t even tried to keep up. Without intervention, another public-health catastrophe looms.
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The family that built an Empire of Pain, New Yorker, 2017.
FDA medical advertising examples from FDA web site, 2023
Understanding. Drug Overdoses and. Deaths, CDC, 2023. – Note this gives facts about opioids but does not provide any idea of what went wrong.
Guardian interview with Beth Macy, 2022
Excerpt from the book “Dopesick” by Beth Macy:
… When a new drug sweeps the country, it historically starts in the big cities and gradually spreads to the hinterlands, as in the cases of cocaine and crack. But the opioid epidemic began in exactly the opposite manner, grabbing a toehold in isolated Appalachia, Midwestern rust belt counties, and rural Maine. Working-class families who were traditionally dependent on jobs in high-risk industries to pay their bills—coal mining in southwest Virginia, steel milling in western Pennsylvania, logging in Maine—weren’t just the first to experience the epidemic of drug overdose; they also happened to live in politically unimportant places, hollows and towns and fishing villages where the treatment options were likely to be hours from home.