Former Pharmaceutical Rep Details How Oxycontin Took Over

The other thing they did, the only thing I saw in pharma, personally that was shady, is they would do these courses on never off-label promote, don't talk about this, don't talk about that, and you would sign all these documents saying, I'm not going to talk about this. Yeah, definitely. And then a week later have us come listen to a thought leader in the field off-label promoting all the shit they told us not to talk about. Explain off-label promoting. So let me think of an example. An example would be Zyprexa, and they got exposed for this on Zyprexa. Zyprexa was indicated essentially for, let me, I'll do it a better one. If you look at OxyContin, how did OxyContin take over the marketplace? It's because what they did is they got the reps to go out and begin to recommend Oxy, so originally Oxy was meant for people who were like terminally ill with cancer and were in severe pain, or somebody who's on the upper echelon of the pain threshold. And the goal of a company and a rep is to grow the market and to hit the number. And so when you go out, it's like, how do you grow the market? Well, we're going to grow the patient demographic. We're going to have to grow. We need the doctors to write more of this. So what they did with OxyContin was they went out and started. It got to a point where they were literally promoting it for people with migraines, and they were pumping these pain pills into all these practices. Was this before or after it had been proven that it was highly addictive? They knew it was highly addictive based off the study. So I know you and I have talked about Dopesick, but the story on this family is absolutely insane. So the family that owned OxyContin is one of the richest families in the country. They're up there with the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts. They made all of their wealth in the 1960s by creating the Valium pandemic. They launched Valium into the marketplace, told people that it was non-addictive, non-appusive, grew the market. They were writing Valiums for headaches, Valiums for knee, shoulder, elbow pain. And it created it. They went under governmental investigation. The government ended up investigating the family in the 60s and then jumped forward. They get off. They buy their way out of that, jump forward. And this is another thing we'll talk about. There's so many data points. Their patent on hydrocodone was expiring. So Big Pharma does this a lot, and I'll get into this. Like they say we innovate, but it costs 10 times. We make 10 fold on one drug because we innovate and so many go by the wayside. They don't innovate. They re-engineer and reapply and like Zyprexa got combined with Symbiax to two drugs that were already on the market to extend the patent. So the goal is to play this shell game where when your patent's close to expiring, you have to reapply and extend the patent via a new indication or some sort of new combination of a couple of different products. And so hydrocodone was expiring. The hydrocodone oxy, like long delivery system was, or the cotton system was expiring. So what they did is they looked at their revenues and they're like, we're fucked. Like we can't, we won't hit our numbers. We can't continue these growth trajectories unless we get a new patent on a new pain med. So they went out and they said, what else is out there that we could put into our patented delivery system? And the answer was oxy. And the problem with that is it's 10 times more addictive than hydrocodone. So then you go, okay, well, they're going to have to do safety studies and prove it in humans and show that it's not addictive, not abusive. Nope. Human study never happened. They were able to piggyback on their hydrocodone cotton delivery system, take the delivery mechanism. And all it is is basically they grind up the powder and they create layers. So in theory, if you take the pill, you won't get 100 milligrams of oxy at once. It'll over eight hours dissolve into your body and you'll get that absorption. That was the premise. And so they said, because of our patented delivery system, this drug is non-abusive, non-addictive. We have a great safety profile. The other thing that happened is they went to the FDA and this is where there's a lot of fuckery. They literally met with the head of the FDA at the time, after hours at a hotel. This is all documented now. And he helped them draft their application, then rubber stamped it and pushed it through and gave OxyContin the golden fucking ticket. He put in the label that OxyContin is less likely to be addictive or abusive compared to other opioids in the market. And then you give a rep that and you set them out in a marketplace and you give them a $20,000 per month expense account and you have them taking guys to dinner, drinking wine and eating steaks and they show in the label, hey, we're less addictive. This is a safe drug. We've got to stop pain. This isn't just anymore for the cancer patient. This is anybody in your practice who has pain. We're on a mission to stop pain and all of them started getting addicted. I mean, it was rampant and the system was trashed because once you grind up the pill, you've just circumvented the delivery mechanism and now it's super addictive because they're going to get high doses of an opioid. And that's what a lot of people were doing that were abusing it, right? They were grinding it up and snorting it up. And then it reminded me a lot with COVID because what happened is patients, doctors were blowing the company up. Purdue Pharma is the name of the company and the family is the Sacklers. So the Sackler family, this is all documented now. And also, Jamie, anything I bring up, I've put on the Ways2Well website slash JRE because we're going to go over a lot of stuff. So any data point or study or any of that I bring up is available on the website. What they did was the Sackler family ended up taking a agreement with the US government. And part of that deal was they would pay, I think, $3 billion. And then there was no, they could not prosecute them or come after them criminally. And it was done. So it was a settlement. And where did the $3 billion go? Well, they made, I think, $9 or $12 billion, $9 to $12 billion. I can't remember the number. But the three that they paid. I don't know if it goes to the family or the government. I don't know. I'm not sure where at all, if it went to the families of people. And this hits close to home for me because my brother died of opioids. My brother died at 27, man. I watched that documentary and it makes me want to fucking vomit. And it's not just the Sacklers. It's Johnson and Johnson. They're known for their diapers and their no teary eyes, baby soap. Johnson and Johnson made more than anybody during the opioid pandemic. They were literally growing. They were doing what people do in the marijuana trade. They were turning, basically juicing up and synthetically altering opioid plants to grow faster and more potent so they could turn them over quicker. And so they supplied all the opium into the United States and made billions of dollars, billions of dollars. And the FDA, at this point in time, the DEA was getting involved, going to the FDA, going to all these governmental bodies and saying, look, this shit's getting crazy. This is getting out of control. The addiction rates are through the roof. What Purdue did at that time was pivot and go out and educate doctors on breakthrough pain. These patients aren't addicted. They're just still in pain. And the way to fix it is to write them more opioids. So they launched a 200 milligram pill and gave people more opioids. Oh my God. There's a tragic, the one that is dope sick is like a docu-series, but it's not a documentary. It's like a fictional reality. Yeah. There is a documentary documentary. It's tragic. It's this Mormon family. And he talks about this is the level of bravado that physicians oftentimes have. His wife, they grew up Mormon and they had been married. They had multiple kids. And the story is his wife got in a car wreck, injured her neck, and was doing okay. She was seeing a primary care doctor. And a neighbor said, you need to go to the pain clinic and go meet Dr. So-and-so. All the story short, he puts her on oxy. He puts her on a bunch of other meds. She ends up passing out all over the house. The husband's like taking pictures of her to document for the doctor. And she ends up in the ER at one point. After she gets out, they put her in rehab. They get her clean again. And that doctor's practice reaches back out and asks to meet with the family and the wife. This is like a true story in this docu-series. And when the doctor meets with them, and I've seen stuff like this happen, the doctor said, I and I alone will make the medical decisions on my patient, not you. So are we on the same page here? And this guy said, I looked him in the eye and I said, yes, sir. Anyway, the guy's wife OD'd and died like literally a month later. And so they're suing the doctor. They're suing his practice. So the doctor got her back on pills. Dr. got her back on pills. And what was his justification? What's this is where it gets so tough, because when you're in it, like when I was in it, like erectile dysfunction and Viagra, like I said, Cialis, that's fun. Right. But some of the drugs you're you are really passionate about. Like, and so I think he I do believe that there's good and bad in every person. Right. And sometimes people's egos get in the way. And he's probably been to course after course. I mean, the narrative they spin in this is he made hundreds of thousands of dollars. And consulting fees from Purdue Pharma and was paid as a consultant. And over a time span made, I think like three or four hundred thousand dollars off Purdue Pharma. And so of course he's going to push Purdue Pharma's product. Is the narrative. But what I saw a lot was you begin to drink the Kool-Aid and bleed the belief, if that makes sense. Like this is we're changing the world. We're going to launch these pain meds and they're going to help. Because you're being financially incentivized for it. So you have a reason to think you have a reason to be skewed. And then you're opening the door to let yourself be educated in a biased manner. That makes sense. You're only listening to half the narrative. And that's a problem. And a lot of times physicians are listening to the big pharma company rather than their patients. God damn. So I mean, I experienced that like we had a drug Stratera. And it wasn't like a dangerous drug. It was a really safe drug meant to treat children with ADHD. And I was passionate about it. Like I believed in it because I fucking failed kindergarten. I literally went to pre first. There were kids in my class with helmets because I was ADHD and dyslexic. And at the time, the only thing on the market was Ritalin. And they said, we want your son on Ritalin or we're recommending that he goes to like special education basically. So I had to go to a pre first. And then I jumped forward. I'm 23 and had graduated college and I'm making great money. And I see this drug that is non-abusive, non-addictive that we could be using to treat ADHD and kids and have them not go through with all the headaches that I went through as like an ADHD kid. I was like, this is amazing instead of Adderall and all these stuff. And so you bleed it. Like you get really passionate about it when you buy in. And nothing bad ever happened with that drug. It wasn't as efficacious as the company presented it to be. It didn't seem to work as effectively. Isn't that always the case though? I mean, is there ever a drug other than Cialis, which really does what it advertises. But is there are there I mean, that's kind of always the case that they exaggerate the benefits. Well, the biggest challenge is not only the exaggeration potentially of the benefits. It's the if they begin to re-engineer or apply it to a different disease state. I'm trying to think of an example that would be a good one to give you. They can take a drug and the patent's about to expire. All right. So let's say they have a year left on the patent. At that point, the company will begin to say, how do we extend the patent so we can continue to get insurance coverage and get paid and hit our numbers for Wall Street. We've got to get another indication. So when they resubmit for a new indication, based off just efficacy, they do not have to go back and do safety studies. And so they don't do human trials. And so what they're doing is they're piggybacking. But the dosages may change. The disease states change. The patient populations change. Yeah, it may have been safe, you know, as an osteoporosis drug and 60 year old women. But is it safe now that you're using it in a 20 year old girl? You know, that's the type of stuff that happens all the time. And the guy who approved Purdue Pharma, this is the craziest part, the one who helped them draft their agreement and all that. Guess where he went to work 18 months later? Purdue Pharma. Making 300 grand a year. Which is always the case, whether it's in the financial sector or in medical. Right. That's what they do. They always wind up working for some enormous corporation after they set the regulations that would benefit that corporation. They get a cushion job. Yeah, I think it was 12 out of the last 15 heads of the FDA have taken jobs with in private industry for a big medical or a big pharma. God. And so I will say being behind the scenes, it's the same. I've heard you say this about police officers. 90% of people I think are trying to do good. They're good people, but there are outliers in every capacity of life, period. Just because somebody works for the government doesn't mean they're good. And just because somebody's a doctor doesn't mean they're good. And just because somebody's a rep doesn't mean they're bad. I didn't see very many bad reps. Like there weren't. I didn't see unethical. When I say bad, I mean, like I didn't see a lot of unethical reps. They existed. I'm not saying they didn't, but not disproportionately any more than I saw in the rest of society.