Sackler behind OxyContin fraud offered twisted, mind-boggling defense

Richard Sackler turned to verbal acrobatics and leaps in logic to try to dodge blame in the fraudulent marketing of Purdue’s potent opioid, OxyContin. The contorted explanations—which at points involved creating new definitions of words and claiming an enigmatic level of politeness—were first unveiled Thursday, February 21 from a sealed, 337-page deposition obtained by ProPublica.

The deposition was taken in August of 2015 as part of lawsuit brought by the state of Kentucky, which alleged Purdue illegally promoted its potent opioid painkiller. Back in 2007, federal prosecutors made similar allegations against Purdue, resulting in the company and three executives pleading guilty to misleading doctors, regulators, and patients over OxyContin’s addictiveness. Numerous legal complaints have piled up against Purdue in the aftermath. Purdue settled many of them, including Kentucky’s, which it settled for $24 million.

Yet in all the court battles, the mega-rich, secretive family behind Purdue, the Sacklers, have largely gone unscathed. In fact, the newly disclosed 2015 deposition is believed to be the only time a member of the Sackler family has been questioned over the fraudulent marketing.

Last month, the public release of a complaint brought by the commonwealth of Massachusetts made waves as the first to allege that members of the Sackler family were directly involved in Purdue’s abhorrent marketing practices. Massachusetts alleges that Sacklers, particularly Richard, personally directed the expansion of Purdue’s sales force, relentlessly pushed for increased sales of their highly addictive opioid, encouraged obscuring the addictiveness, and suggested labeling those who became addicted as “reckless criminals,” among other things.

Still, the 2015 deposition offers the first glimpse of a Sackler’s direct defense—and it’s mind-boggling.

Killing with kindness

Over the years, Richard Sackler had a variety of roles at Purdue and its entities, including being president of Purdue Pharma from 1999 to 2003 and a member of its board of directors until last year. Richard is the son of Raymond Sackler, who bought The Purdue Frederick Company in 1952 with his brother (Richard’s uncle) Mortimer. Purdue Frederick was founded as a pharmaceutical company in 1892 by John Purdue Gray and George Frederick, but the Sacklers turned it into a “shell company,” according to Richard.

In his deposition, Richard claimed he couldn’t identify all the Purdue companies involved with OxyContin; there are “many. I’ve never counted them,” he said. The family formed Purdue Pharma L.P. in 1991 to “take on the risk of new products,” Richard said. It transferred the rights to OxyContin from Purdue Frederick to Purdue Pharma shortly after. But Richard had trouble delineating the two throughout the deposition.

In 1997, Richard was involved in discussion with employees of a Sackler-owned company in Germany over whether they could get regulatory authorities there to let them sell OxyContin as an uncontrolled drug. Though OxyContin developer Robert Kaiko warned that this was a terrible idea, Richard seemed supportive of the idea, asking in a subsequent message: “How substantially would it improve your sales?” But in his deposition, Richard insisted he was never a fan of the idea, arguing, “we were not in favor of this, but we were trying to be polite and solicitous rather than saying, this is a terrible idea, forget it, don't do it.”

When the idea ultimately failed, Richard sent a message to an employee in Germany saying, “When we are next together we should talk about how this idea was raised and why it failed to be realized. I thought that it was a good idea if it could be done."

In the deposition, Richard explained this by saying, “That’s what [my response] said, but I didn’t mean it. I just wanted to be encouraging.”

Word play

In another stretch, Richard insisted that other messages were misinterpreted because he and Purdue executives had made up their own definitions of common words. The argument came up while Richard was defending against the allegation that Purdue knew that many doctors had the misapprehension that oxycodone (OxyContin) was “weaker” than morphine, but the company failed to correct them because the mistake was good for sales.

“We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone is weaker than morphine,” Purdue’s head of marketing wrote in a 1997 email. “We all know that this is the result of their association of oxycodone with less serious pain syndrome.” But, he went on, “…it would be extremely dangerous at this early stage in the life of the product to tamper with this 'personality' to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal to morphine.” That “personality” resulted in doctors using OxyContin earlier in pain treatments and for non-cancer pain.

Oxycodone is considered twice as strong (potent) as morphine, Richard noted. But when people at Purdue used the word “weaker,” they knew it meant something else. Richard argued:

He's using the word ‘weaker,’ but not meaning less potent than morphine. Within this time, it appears that people had fallen into a habit of signifying less frightening, less threatening, more patient acceptable as under the rubric of weaker or more frightening, more—less acceptable and less desirable under the rubric or word ‘stronger.’ But we knew that the word ‘weaker’ did not mean less potent. We knew that the word ‘stronger’ did not mean more potent.

In the deposition, Richard went on to also change the definition of “powerful” when, in another instance discussing non-cancer pain, oxycodone is called “as powerful as morphine.”

"[P]owerful" in this case has to do with the hierarchy that they place drugs. Morphine was the last because it was the most stigmatized,” he said.

In a two-page statement released to ProPublica, Purdue wrote, “The intentional leak of the deposition is a clear violation of the court’s order and, as such, is regrettable.” It went on to defend Purdue’s actions, saying, “The company’s determination to avoid emphasizing OxyContin as a powerful cancer pain drug was made out of a concern that non-cancer patients would be reluctant to take a cancer drug.