Investigation Reveals Drugmakers’ Deep Influence On Nation’s Response To Opioid Crisis
The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity find that drugmakers set in place a strategy to continue to profit off of doctors' aggressive overprescribing, even as they claim to play an important role in curbing the epidemic.
The Center for Public Integrity/The Associated Press:
Pharma Lobbying Held Deep Influence Over Policies On Opioids
The Associated Press and The Center for Public Integrity teamed up to investigate the influence of pharmaceutical companies on state and federal policies regarding opioids, the powerful painkillers that have claimed the lives of 165,000 people in the U.S. since 2000. The news agencies tracked proposed laws on the subject and analyzed data on how the companies and their allies deployed lobbyists and contributed to political campaigns. (9/18)
The Center For Public Integrity/The Associated Press:
Pro-Painkiller Echo Chamber Shaped Policy Amid Drug Epidemic
For more than a decade, members of a little-known group called the Pain Care Forum have blanketed Washington with messages touting prescription painkillers' vital role in the lives of millions of Americans, creating an echo chamber that has quietly derailed efforts to curb U.S. consumption of the drugs, which accounts for two-thirds of the world's usage. In 2012, drugmakers and their affiliates in the forum sent a letter to U.S. senators promoting a hearing about an influential report on a "crisis of epidemic proportions": pain in America. Few knew the report stemmed from legislation drafted and pushed by forum members and that their experts had helped author it. The report estimated more than 100 million Americans — roughly 40 percent of adults — suffered from chronic pain, an eye-popping statistic that some researchers call deeply problematic. (Perrone and Wieder, 9/19)
The Center for Public Integrity/The Associated Press:
Politics Of Pain: Drugmakers Fought State Opioid Limits Amid Crisis
The makers of prescription painkillers have adopted a 50-state strategy that includes hundreds of lobbyists and millions in campaign contributions to help kill or weaken measures aimed at stemming the tide of prescription opioids, the drugs at the heart of a crisis that has cost 165,000 Americans their lives and pushed countless more to crippling addiction. The drugmakers vow they're combating the addiction epidemic, but The Associated Press and the Center for Public Integrity found that they often employ a statehouse playbook of delay and defend that includes funding advocacy groups that use the veneer of independence to fight limits on their drugs, such as OxyContin, Vicodin and fentanyl, the narcotic linked to Prince's death. (Whyte, Mulvihill and Wieder, 9/18)
Meanwhile, a major gaffe from two pharmaceutical companies comes at an inopportune time —
Stat:
FDA Chastises Companies For Touting An Opioid Painkiller On The Web
At a time when selling opioid painkillers is fraught with challenges, two companies committed an unnecessary blunder. The US Food and Drug Administration decided that Pain Therapeutics and Durect were jointly touting an experimental drug on their web sites in a way that appeared so misleading that the agency issued a rare letter to criticize their marketing practices.According to the Sept. 8 letter, which the FDA posted on its website this week, the companies made statements that consumers might construe to mean the drug, Remoxy ER, is already approved for use. The agency pointed to certain language on the company websites — such as “long-acting” and “tamper-resistant” — that gave the impression these were “established facts” pertaining to an approved drug. (Silverman, 9/16)