Pain Killer
An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America's Opioid Epidemic
(Sprache: Englisch)
A Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter exposes the roots of the opioid epidemic at the hands of Purdue Pharma and Raymond and Mortimer Sackler in Pain Killer, a timely, compelling, important (The Seattle...
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A Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter exposes the roots of the opioid epidemic at the hands of Purdue Pharma and Raymond and Mortimer Sackler in Pain Killer, a timely, compelling, important (The Seattle Times) story of corporate greed and government negligence.Groundbreaking . . . Pain Killer is the shocking account of the origins of today s opioid epidemic, the creators of this plague, and the way to help stop it. Sam Quinones, author of Dreamland: The True Tale of America s Opiate Epidemic
Between 1999 and 2017, an estimated 250,000 Americans died from overdoses involving prescription painkillers, a plague ignited by Purdue Pharma s aggressive marketing of OxyContin. Families, working class and wealthy, have been torn apart, businesses destroyed, and public officials pushed to the brink. Meanwhile, the drugmaker s owners, Raymond and Mortimer Sackler, whose names adorn museums worldwide, made enormous fortunes from the commercial success of OxyContin.
In Pain Killer, Barry Meier tells the story of how Purdue turned OxyContin into a billion-dollar blockbuster. Powerful narcotic painkillers, or opioids, were once used as drugs of last resort for pain sufferers. But Purdue launched an unprecedented marketing campaign claiming that the drug s long-acting formulation made it safer to use than traditional painkillers for many types of pain. That illusion was quickly shattered as drug abusers learned that crushing an Oxy could release its narcotic payload all at once. Even in its prescribed form, Oxy proved fiercely addictive. As OxyContin s use and abuse grew, Purdue concealed what it knew from regulators, doctors, and patients.
Here are the people who profited from the crisis and those who paid the price, those who plotted in boardrooms and those who tried to sound alarm bells. A country doctor in rural Virginia, Art Van Zee, took on Purdue and warned officials
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about OxyContin abuse. An ebullient high school cheerleader, Lindsey Myers, was reduced to stealing from her parents to feed her escalating Oxy habit. A hard-charging DEA official, Laura Nagel, tried to hold Purdue executives to account.
In this updated edition of Pain Killer, Barry Meier breaks new ground in his decades-long investigation into the opioid epidemic. He takes readers inside Purdue to show how long the company withheld information about the abuse of OxyContin and gives a shocking account of the Justice Department s failure to alter the trajectory of the opioid epidemic and protect thousands of lives. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story, and business exposé, Pain Killer is a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the gateway drug to a national tragedy.
In this updated edition of Pain Killer, Barry Meier breaks new ground in his decades-long investigation into the opioid epidemic. He takes readers inside Purdue to show how long the company withheld information about the abuse of OxyContin and gives a shocking account of the Justice Department s failure to alter the trajectory of the opioid epidemic and protect thousands of lives. Equal parts crime thriller, medical detective story, and business exposé, Pain Killer is a hard-hitting look at how a supposed wonder drug became the gateway drug to a national tragedy.
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PROLOGUE Book of the Dead
Within a span of thirty-six hours in Philadelphia, nine bodies had been found just blocks away from one another. Five were inside homes. Two were in cars. Two were on the street. The oldest of them was forty-two. The youngest was twenty-four.
They had names but they would soon become statistics, data points consumed by a tidal wave of fatal drug overdoses sweeping across the United States. In 2016, 64,000 Americans died from drug overdoses. That number equals the population of cities such as Portland, Maine; Lynchburg, Virginia; and Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was as if, in one year, a plague had entered one of these towns and killed every single inhabitant. On an average day in 2016, 175 people died of an overdose, a rate of seven fatalities an hour. Nine deaths in thirty-six hours wasn t unusual.
Bodies were piling up too fast in some places for medical examiners and coroners to keep up. Morgues were filled to capacity, and corpses had to be stored for days in rented refrigerated tractor-trailers until space became available. Many of the dead were not autopsied. It is standard procedure in a drug-overdose case to conduct an autopsy. But even if medical examiners had had time to autopsy every victim, some stopped themselves from doing so. Professional groups that accredit medical examiners set a limit on the number of autopsies that a doctor can competently perform in a year, and examiners in areas with large numbers of overdose deaths would have exceeded that number and risked losing their accreditation. As a result, when overdose victims were discovered near hypodermic needles or pill bottles, they went straight to their graves, unexamined. The vast majority of these deaths 42,000 of them in 2016 involved opioids, prescription painkillers or illegal drugs derived from compounds either found in the opium poppy or synthesized in a lab.
The opioid crisis has become woven into the fabric of everyday American
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life. In hospitals, newborns, separated from the narcotics coursing through the bloodstream of their addicted mothers, enter the world writhing in the pain of opioid withdrawal. On the streets, police officers carry a new piece of standard equipment, a nasal spray containing medicine that could save the life of a person in the midst of an overdose. The epidemic s impact has been so pervasive that life expectancy among white men in the United States has started falling for the first time in more than twenty years.
Public officials have called for a dramatic response. President Donald J. Trump appointed a White House panel to propose solutions. Lawmakers urged that tens of billions of dollars be spent to treat the addicted. Newspapers, magazines, and television programs are filled with reports about the havoc caused in communities large and small.
All this attention makes it seem as if something new is happening. That s not the case. The recent appearance of counterfeit versions of a particularly potent synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has driven up the body count. But by 2017, over 200,000 Americans had died during the two preceding decades from overdoses involving legal drugs that were produced by pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by doctors.
People have long been sounding alarms about the mounting death toll linked to prescription painkillers. Still, year after year, politicians, lawmakers, public regulators, professional medical organizations, and insurers have neglected the growing carnage while the pharmaceutical industry has downplayed it. The result is tragic and predictable. By 2016, the number of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids had quadrupled since 1999. A disaster that might have been contained with an early response had morphed into a hydra.
Every catastrophe, natural
Public officials have called for a dramatic response. President Donald J. Trump appointed a White House panel to propose solutions. Lawmakers urged that tens of billions of dollars be spent to treat the addicted. Newspapers, magazines, and television programs are filled with reports about the havoc caused in communities large and small.
All this attention makes it seem as if something new is happening. That s not the case. The recent appearance of counterfeit versions of a particularly potent synthetic opioid, fentanyl, has driven up the body count. But by 2017, over 200,000 Americans had died during the two preceding decades from overdoses involving legal drugs that were produced by pharmaceutical companies and prescribed by doctors.
People have long been sounding alarms about the mounting death toll linked to prescription painkillers. Still, year after year, politicians, lawmakers, public regulators, professional medical organizations, and insurers have neglected the growing carnage while the pharmaceutical industry has downplayed it. The result is tragic and predictable. By 2016, the number of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids had quadrupled since 1999. A disaster that might have been contained with an early response had morphed into a hydra.
Every catastrophe, natural
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Autoren-Porträt von Barry Meier
Barry Meier was the first journalist to shed a national spotlight on the abuse of OxyContin. He was a member of the New York Times reporting team that won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Meier is also a two-time winner of the George Polk Award. His reporting at the Times concentrated on the intersection of business, medicine, and the public s health. During his career, he has exposed the dangers of various drugs and medical products, including a defective heart device and a generation of flawed artificial hips. Meier is the author of A World of Hurt and Missing Man. He lives in New York City with his wife and their daughter.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Barry Meier
- 2018, Expanded and updated Edition, 240 Seiten, Maße: 14,7 x 22,1 cm, Gebunden, Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin Random House
- ISBN-10: 0525511105
- ISBN-13: 9780525511106
- Erscheinungsdatum: 25.06.2018
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Prescient . . . a landmark work of investigative journalism. David A. Kessler, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and author of The End of OvereatingFascinating. The New York Times
A timely, compelling, important book. The Seattle Times
A thriller. Minneapolis Star-Tribune
An absorbing indictment of the modern health-care marketing industry, which, as depicted here, has blurred the line between medical education and shilling. Publishers Weekly
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