New Hampshire on Tuesday became the latest state to launch a lawsuit against a prescription painkiller manufacturer, Perdue Pharma, for deceptively marketing OxyContin.
The state’s attorney general accused Perdue in a civil complaint of downplaying OxyContin’s risk of addiction, overstating its effectiveness, and failing to report medical providers who were over-prescribing the medication. According to the document, the state believes the company “engaged in a long-running campaign of deception to create and sustain a market for its opioids.”
Other states — like Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio — as well as cities, have taken similar measures in recent months as the death toll from opioid overdoses continues to climb. Such overdoses killed more than 33,000 people in 2015, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Addictions to opioids, federal data has shown, often begin after a prescription of a painkiller like OxyContin from a doctor, and later patients often then turn to cheaper, more available alternatives like heroin. These drugs are sometimes mixed with fentanyl, a more potent opioid, without a person’s knowledge.
As doctors have become more aware of the epidemic, prescriptions of such drugs have decreased, but deaths have increased, driven by a rise in illicit drug use. Doctors initially believed these drugs were not addictive, and they were urged by drug manufacturers to prescribe them for people with chronic pain. In New Hampshire, nearly 500 people died of overdoses in 2016, a 10-fold increase since 2000.
President Trump was criticized last week for describing New Hampshire as a “drug-infested den” during a January phone call with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, the transcript of which was published by the Washington Post last Thursday. The deputy administrator for the DEA also called New Hampshire “ground zero” for the crisis.
States have struggled to handle the costs associated with the overdose reversal drug, naloxone, as well as costs related to treatment and recovery.
The New Hampshire lawsuit comes after attorney general’s office investigated the issue for two years, and the lawsuit states it found several medical providers who said drug representatives visited them up to three times a week, encouraging them to prescribe OxyContin to treat chronic pain.
Perdue and three of its executives pleaded guilty to criminal charges for deceptive conduct in 2007, but the New Hampshire lawsuit claims these practices continued. The company denied the allegations in an interview with the Associated Press and said it shares the state’s concern about drug abuse.
“OxyContin accounts for less than 2 percent of the opioid analgesic prescription market nationally, but we are an industry leader in the development of abuse-deterrent technology, advocating for the use of prescription drug monitoring programs and supporting access to Naloxone — all important components for combating the opioid crisis,” said Robert Josephson, company spokesman.
