sally satel opioid

=<div style="font-size: small;"><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/jd-vance-2657891320/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(0, 51, 153); outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/2022/08/jd-vance-2657891320/</a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">an 8 22</div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">no twt</div><div>Vance, the billionaire-backed U.S. Senate candidate in Ohio, has routinely positioned himself as an anti-opioid China-hawk, promising to rein in Big Pharma and bring jobs back to the U.S. But in recent weeks it has been revealed that Vance, a Trump-backed author, worked for a white shoe law firm that represented multiple Chinese companies and lobbied for Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Vance then hired an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) resident who cited Purdue-funded studies to downplay the role overprescribing painkillers plays in the opioid crisis as the addiction specialist to Ohio's Appalachian region for his nonprofit, "Our Ohio Renewal."The apparent contradiction, first <a href="https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook/2022/05/05/the-book-j-d-vance-doesnt-want-you-to-read-00030287" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reported</a> by Politico, stems from a "<a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1z9kiq1nomwkzy9/AADCS4aNQ1cjAQuyAnKy0Jvea/JD%20VANCE%20VULNERABILITY%20ANALYSIS%20--%2005172021.pdf?dl=0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">vulnerability analysis</a>" posted online by Protect Ohio Values (POV), the Super PAC through which Vance has raised millions of dollars for his Senate campaign. Because campaign finance law bars any candidates from communicating with their associated Super PACs, POV appears to have posted a trove of polling data, strategic documents, and opposition research on a <a href="https://medium.com/@protectohiovaluesforms" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">low-profile Medium account</a> for Vance to reference, detailing potential weak spots in his competitors' campaigns as well as his own.Vance's vulnerability analysis reveals that the lawyer-turned-author, who founded a non-profit dedicated to curbing the opioid epidemic, had at one point worked for law firm Sidley Austin LLP in Washington, D.C. During Vance's time there, the firm's lobbying arm was working on behalf of Purdue Pharma, which <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/health/purdue-opioids-criminal-charges.html#:_{:text=In%20addition%20to%20the%20company,damages%20to%20the%20United%20States.}" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">pleaded guilty</a> in 2020 to criminal charges and faced penalties of roughly $8.3 billion. During that same time, Sidley Austin also reportedly represented "a Chinese real estate company" and lobbied Alibaba Group, a massive Chinese e-commerce platform. But as a Senate candidate, Vance has repeatedly called for the U.S. to sever its economic ties with the country, calling globalization a "<a href="https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2021/06/04/jd_vance_end_the_globalization_gravy_train_for_china.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">gravy train</a>" for China."On one side you have people who want to go back to the America Last foreign policy, the weak on China trade policies," as Vance said in a recent Fox News interview. "And on the other side you have me, supported by President Trump, trying to bring back our manufacturing jobs from China."The Associated Press (AP) then <a href="https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-entertainment-health-175153d8a80d93b2c9c6654a6a730de9" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102); opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">reported</a> this week that Vance's charity suffered a major conflict of interest when it recruited an AEI resident who never disclosed Perdue's financial contributions to AEI while favorably citing Perdue-funded studies to argue that prescription painkillers played a significant role in the region's drastic uptick in opioid addiction. According to the AP, <a href="https://www.aei.org/profile/sally-satel/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">Dr. Sally Satel</a> "occasionally shared drafts of the pieces with Purdue officials in advance." And as ProPublica reported in the past, AEI <a href="https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-purdue-pharma-media-playbook-how-it-planted-the-opioid-anti-story" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">received</a> financial support from Purdue totaling $800,000.Vance's past work may prove a problem with other areas besides Big Pharma. He was with Sidley Austin while the firm <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/21/us/in-brief-to-justices-former-military-officials-support-same-sex-marriage.html" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">filed</a> an amicus brief in support of gay marriage back in 2015, while the Supreme Court was ruling on Obergefell v. Hodges. Since then, Vance has taken countless swipes at the LGBTQ+ community. AIn 2020, Vance <a href="https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/j-d-vance-blasts-conservative-legal-movement-after-supreme-court-rules-for-gay-and-transgender-rights-in-workplace" target="blank" class="rm-stats-tracked" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; color: rgb(11, 13, 101); outline: none; opacity: 1; transition: color 0.25s ease 0s, background 0.25s ease 0s, opacity 0.25s ease 0s;">excoriated</a> the "conservative legal movement" after Supreme Court ruled that gay and trans workers cannot be fired for their gender identity or sexual orientation."The conservative legal movement has accomplished two things: libertarian political economy (enforced by judges) and betrayal of social conservatives and traditionalists," he wrote at the time in a since-deleted tweet.Since the beginning of his campaign, numerous critics have also called out Vance's funding as problematic. Vance has repeatedly blasted Big Tech, claiming that the industry systematically censors conservative voices. But the Republican's chief benefactor is Peter Thiel, a prominent tech billionaire responsible for co-founding PayPal, Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund, through which he was one of the first investors in Facebook.</div></div><div style="font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">=</div>=<a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/inside-purdue-pharmas-media-playbook-how-it-planted-the-opioid-anti-story/">https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/inside-purdue-pharmas-media-playbook-how-it-planted-the-opioid-anti-story/</a>
new an 1119Inside Purdue Pharma’s media playbook: How it planted the opioid ‘anti-story’

Written by David Armstrong / ProPublica November 21, 2019

In

2004, Purdue Pharma was facing a threat to sales of its blockbuster

opioid painkiller OxyContin, which were approaching $2 billion a year.

With abuse of the drug on the rise, prosecutors were bringing criminal

charges against some doctors for prescribing massive amounts of

OxyContin.That

October, an essay ran across the top of The New York Times’ health

section under the headline “Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain is Now

Risky Business.” Its author, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist, argued that

law enforcement was overzealous, and that some patients needed large

doses of opioids to relieve pain. She described an unnamed colleague who

had run a pain service at a university medical center and had a patient

who could only get out of bed by taking “staggering” levels of

oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin. She also cited a study

published in a medical journal showing that OxyContin is rarely the only

drug found in autopsies of oxycodone-related deaths.

“When

you scratch the surface of someone who is addicted to painkillers, you

usually find a seasoned drug abuser with a previous habit involving

pills, alcohol, heroin or cocaine,” Satel wrote. “Contrary to media

portrayals, the typical OxyContin addict does not start out as a pain

patient who fell unwittingly into a drug habit.”The

Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American

Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the

Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers

weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise

Institute’s, with Purdue.

Among the connections

revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated

$50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from

2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a

total of more than $800,000. The

unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according

to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded

by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month

before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen,

Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and

legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”

On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”
“Great piece,” Rosen responded.Purdue’s

hidden relationships with Satel and AEI illustrate how the company and

its public relations consultants aggressively countered criticism that

its prized painkiller helped cause the opioid epidemic. Since 1999, more

than 200,000 people have died from overdoses related to prescription

opioids. For almost two decades, and continuing as recently as a

piece published last year in Slate, Satel has pushed back against

restrictions on opioid prescribing in more than a dozen articles and

radio and television appearances, without disclosing any connections to

Purdue, according to a ProPublica review. Over the same period, Purdue

was represented by Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm known for its

pugnacious defense of beleaguered corporations. Purdue was paying

Dezenhall this summer, and still owes it money, according to bankruptcy

filings.Purdue

funded think tanks tapped by the media for expert commentary,

facilitated publication of sympathetic articles in leading outlets where

its role wasn’t disclosed, and deterred or challenged negative

coverage, according to the documents and emails. Its efforts to

influence public perception of the opioid crisis provide an inside look

at how corporations blunt criticism of alleged wrongdoing. Purdue’s

tactics are reminiscent of the oil and gas industry, which has been

accused of promoting misleading science that downplays its impact on

climate change, and of big tobacco, which sought to undermine evidence

that nicotine is addictive and secondhand smoke is dangerous.

Media

spinning was just one prong of Purdue’s strategy to fend off limits on

opioid prescribing. It contested hundreds of lawsuits, winning

dismissals or settling the cases with a provision that documents remain

secret. The company paid leading doctors in the pain field to assure

patients that OxyContin was safe. It also funded groups, like the

American Pain Foundation, that described themselves as advocates for

pain patients. Several of those groups minimized the risk of addiction

and fought against efforts to curb opioid use for chronic pain patients.
Purdue’s

campaign may have helped thwart more vigorous regulation of opioid

prescribing, especially in the decade after the first widespread reports

of OxyContin abuse and addiction began appearing in 2001. It may also

have succeeded in delaying the eventual reckoning for Purdue and the

billionaire Sackler family that owns the company. Although Purdue

pleaded guilty in 2007 to a federal charge of understating the risk of

addiction, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties, the

Sacklers’ role in the opioid epidemic didn’t receive widespread coverage

for another decade. As backlash against the family swelled, the company

filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September.“Efforts

to reverse the epidemic have had to counter widespread narratives that

opioids are generally safe and that it is people who abuse them that are

the problem,” said Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug

Safety and Effectiveness at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public

Health, who has served as a paid expert witness in litigation alleging

that Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin misled doctors and the public.

“These are very important narratives, and they have become the lens

through which people view and understand the epidemic. They have proven

to be potent means of hampering interventions to reduce the continued

oversupply of opioids.”Satel,

in an email to ProPublica, said that she reached her conclusions

independently. “I do not accept payment from industry for my work

(articles, presentations, etc),” she wrote. “And I am open to meeting

with anyone if they have a potentially interesting topic to tell me

about. If I decide I am intrigued, I do my own research.”
As for

Purdue’s funding of AEI, Satel said in an interview that she “had no

idea” that the company was paying her employer and that she walls

herself off from information regarding institute funders. “I never want

to know,” she said. She didn’t disclose that the study she referred to

was also funded by Purdue, she said, because “I cite peer-reviewed

papers by title as they appear in the journal of publication.”

The

sharing of drafts before publication with subjects of stories or other

interested parties is prohibited or discouraged by many media outlets.

Satel said she didn’t remember sharing the draft with Rosen and it was

not her usual practice. “That’s very atypical,” she said. However, Satel

shared a draft of another story with Purdue officials in 2016,

according to emails she sent. In that case, Satel said, she was checking

facts.
Satel said she didn’t remember why the doctor with a patient

on high doses of painkillers wasn’t named in the Times story. The draft

she sent to Purdue identified him as Sidney Schnoll, then the company’s

executive medical director, who defended OxyContin at public meetings

and in media stories. In an interview, Schnoll described Satel as an old

friend and said her description of his patient was accurate. He left

Purdue in 2005 and now works for a consulting company that has Purdue as

a client, he said.
Purdue, in a statement, said it has held

memberships in several Washington think tanks over the years. “These

dues-paying memberships help the company better understand key issues

affecting its business in a complex policy and regulatory environment,”

it said. “Purdue has been contacted over the years by policy experts at a

variety of think tanks who are seeking additional context on industry

issues for their work. Our engagement has always been appropriate and

aimed at providing a science-based perspective that the company felt was

often overlooked in the larger policy conversation.” The company

declined to discuss specific questions about internal documents and

emails reviewed by ProPublica.

A spokeswoman for the Times,

Danielle Rhoades Ha, said in an email that the company doesn’t know the

details of how the Satel story was handled because the editors who

worked on it are no longer employed there. She noted that the Times

labeled the article as an “Essay” and cited Satel’s connection to AEI.

Currently, she said, Times editors “generally advise reporters not to

share full drafts of stories with sources in the course of

fact-checking,” but there is no formal rule.
Purdue launched

OxyContin in 1996, and it soon became one of the most widely prescribed

opioid painkillers. By 2001, it was generating both enormous profits as

well as growing concern about overdoses and addiction. That August, a

column in the New York Post opinion section criticized media reports

that OxyContin was being abused. The piece — headlined “Heroic

Dopeheads?” — mocked a “new species of ‘victim,’ the ‘hillbilly heroin’

addict.” The real victims, the article contended, were pain patients who

may lose access to a “prescription wonder drug.”
At 5:17 a.m. on the

day the article was published, Eric Dezenhall, the founder of

Washington, D.C., crisis management firm Dezenhall Resources, sent an

email to Purdue executives, according to documents filed by the Oklahoma

attorney general in a lawsuit against opioid makers.
“See today’s New York Post on OxyContin,” he wrote. “The anti-story begins.”

Purdue

had hired Dezenhall Resources that summer. Dezenhall’s hard-nosed

reputation fit the blame-the-victim strategy advocated by Purdue’s

then-president, Richard Sackler. “We have to hammer on the abusers in

every way possible,” Sackler wrote in a 2001 email quoted in a complaint

by the state of Massachusetts against the company. “They are the

culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”
Purdue later

followed this approach to fend off a New Jersey mother who was urging

federal regulators to investigate the marketing of OxyContin. Her

daughter had died while taking the drug for back pain. “We think she

abused drugs,” a Purdue spokesman said without offering evidence. Purdue

later apologized for the comment.
However, pain patients with

legitimate prescriptions for OxyContin and similar painkillers can and

do become addicted to the drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and

Prevention warns that “anyone who takes prescription opioids can become

addicted to them,” and that “as many as one in four patients receiving

long-term opioid therapy in a primary care setting struggles with opioid

addiction.” A review article in The New England Journal of Medicine

reported rates of “carefully diagnosed addiction” in pain patients

averaged just under 8% in studies, while misuse, abuse and

addiction-related aberrant behaviors ranged from 15% to 26% of pain

patients.Although

Dezenhall Resources was working for Purdue until recently, it rarely

has been linked publicly to the company. Purdue paid Dezenhall a total

of $309,272 in July and August of this year and owes it an additional

$186,575, according to bankruptcy court filings. The total amount paid

to Dezenhall since 2001 was not disclosed in records reviewed by

ProPublica.
Dezenhall Resources has also defended Exxon Mobil

against criticisms from environmental groups and former Enron CEO

Jeffrey Skilling as he fought against fraud charges, according to a 2006

BusinessWeek profile of Eric Dezenhall that called him “The Pitbull of

Public Relations.” (Skilling was later convicted.) It reported that

Dezenhall arranged a pro-Exxon demonstration on Capitol Hill to distract

attention from a nearby environmental protest, and that the company

discussed a plan to pay newspaper op-ed writers to question the motives

of an Enron whistleblower. “We believe a winning outcome can only be

achieved by directly stopping your attackers,” Dezenhall Resources

states on its website.ProPublica

reviewed emails to Purdue officials in which Dezenhall and his

employees took credit for dissuading a national television news program

from pursuing a story about OxyContin; helping to quash a documentary

project on OxyContin abuse at a major cable network; forcing multiple

outlets to issue corrections related to OxyContin coverage; and gaining

coverage of sympathetic pain patients on a television news program and

in newspaper columns.
“Dezenhall

has been instrumental in helping with the placement of pain patient

advocacy stories over the last several years,” Dezenhall Executive Vice

President Sheila Hershow wrote in a 2006 email.
Eric Dezenhall told

ProPublica that he does not confirm or deny the identity of clients.

While declining to answer questions about Purdue, or comment on the

BusinessWeek article about him, he said that his company acts

appropriately and seeks fair and truthful coverage.
“We regularly

work with experts and journalists, including Pro Publica, to ensure

accuracy in reporting and persuade and dissuade them regarding various

storylines with facts and research,” he wrote. “Ultimately, these

journalists and experts decide how to use the information provided.”One of Dezenhall Resources’ first moves, after being hired by Purdue, was to cultivate Satel.

In July 2001, Hershow reported to Purdue officials that she and Eric

Dezenhall had lunch with Satel and the doctor was “eager to get

started.” Hershow said Satel had read a “debunking package” and was

“interested in doing an opinion piece on the medical needs of patients

being sacrificed to protect drug abusers.”
Satel said that the meeting with Dezenhall was not unusual, and that “I often talk to people who have interesting stories.”Satel

was raised in Queens and has an Ivy League pedigree. She attended

Cornell University as an undergraduate before going to medical school at

Brown University. She was a psychiatry professor at Yale University for

several years and then moved to Washington. For a little over a decade

beginning in 1997, she was a staff psychiatrist at a methadone clinic in

the city.
She has become an influential voice on opioids, addiction

and pain treatment. Her writings have been published in The Wall Street

Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, Slate, Health Affairs, Forbes,

Politico and elsewhere. She frequently appears on panels, television

shows and in newspaper articles as an expert on the opioid crisis and

pain prescribing guidelines. “We’ve entered a new era of opiophobia,”

she recently told The Washington Post.Satel

has been a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute since

Among the notable figures who have spent time at AEI are the late

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former Trump national security

adviser John Bolton. Current fellow Scott Gottlieb returned to AEI this

year after serving as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug

Administration, which approves and regulates prescription drugs like

OxyContin.
Purdue

said its annual payments of $50,000 to AEI were part of the institute’s

corporate program. That program offers corporations the opportunity to

“gain access to the leading scholars in the most important policy areas

for executive briefings and knowledge sharing,” according to the

institute’s website. Corporations can choose between three levels of

donations: At $50,000 a year, Purdue was in the middle level, the

“Executive Circle.” Besides the annual payments, Purdue has also paid a

total of $24,000 to attend two special events hosted by the institute,

according to a company spokesman.Internal

emails show the main Purdue contact with AEI was Rosen, the drugmaker’s

in-house lobbyist based in Washington. In one email, Rosen described

the leaders of the think tank as “very good friends” and also noted that

former FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan ascended to that job after a

stint at AEI as a scholar. Rosen also organized a group of pain reliever

manufacturers and industry funded groups into an organization called

the Pain Care Forum. It met to share information on government

efforts to restrict opioid prescribing, according to records produced in

litigation against Purdue.
Veronique Rodman, a spokeswoman for AEI,

said the institute does not publicly discuss donors. She said that the

institute does not accept research contracts, and that its researchers

come to their own conclusions. “It makes sense” that Satel would be

unaware of AEI funders, she said.Dezenhall’s

courting of Satel soon paid off. A month after the lunch with Dezenhall

and Hershow, Satel defended Purdue’s flagship drug in an article for

the opinion page of The Boston Globe.
“Something must be done to keep

OxyContin out of the wrong hands, but the true public health tragedy

will be depriving patients who need it to survive in relative comfort

day to day,” she wrote.
In February 2002, AEI held a panel discussion

at its headquarters to answer the question, “Who is responsible for the

abuse of OxyContin?” The panel of experts included Satel, a Purdue

executive and a Purdue lawyer. Covering the event, Reuters Health

reported that the panel “mostly agreed that Purdue Pharma should not be

viewed as the culprit in the problem of the abuse of its long-acting

painkiller OxyContin.”
Two months later, Purdue approved spending

$2,000 to pay for Satel to speak to the staff of a New Orleans hospital

about addiction, according to internal company records. Satel said she

had “absolutely no memory of speaking at a hospital in New Orleans.” The

physician who organized the planned event said he doesn’t recall if it

took place, and the hospital no longer has records of medical staff

talks from that period.In 2003, a Dezenhall staffer recommended Satel as a guest to a producer for “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR.

The firm and Purdue executives, including Vice President David Haddox,

helped prep Satel for the appearance. Haddox passed along what he called

“interesting intel for Sally” that Rehm’s mother suffered from chronic

headaches. “Thanks for helping us get her up to speed for the show,”

Hershow replied.
A spokeswoman for WAMU, the NPR station in

Washington that produced the Rehm show, said there was no policy to ask

guests about funding of their organizations, or if there was a financial

connection to the show’s topic. “For most segments, the producers would

try to bring as many perspectives to the table as possible so that

listeners would be better able to make their own informed judgment of

the topic at hand,” wrote the spokeswoman, Julia Slattery.
ProPublica was unable to reach Haddox for comment.Also

that year, when conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh revealed

that he was addicted to prescription painkillers, Purdue declined a

request from CNN for a company representative to discuss the news on the

air. Instead, Purdue recommended Satel, who assured viewers that

OxyContin was a “very effective and actually safe drug, if taken as

prescribed.” Dezenhall’s Hershow told Purdue executives in an email that

she was “very glad Sally went on.” Hershow, a former investigative

producer at ABC News, declined comment for this article.In

September 2004, Forbes magazine published a Satel article under the

headline, “OxyContin doesn’t cause addiction. Its abusers are already

addicts.”
“I am happy this morning!” Purdue’s then general

counsel, Howard Udell, emailed other company executives and Eric

Dezenhall with the subject line “RE: Forbes Article.” Three years later,

Udell and two other Purdue executives would plead guilty in federal

court to a misdemeanor criminal charge related to misleading patients

and doctors about the addictive nature of OxyContin.
As part of that

2007 settlement, Purdue admitted to acting “with the intent to defraud

or mislead” when it promoted OxyContin as less addictive and less

subject to abuse than other painkillers.

In an article for The Wall Street Journal headlined “Oxy Morons,” Satel

defended the company. “The real public-health damage here comes from

the pitched campaign conducted by zealous prosecutors and

public-interest advocates to demonize the drug itself,” she wrote.After

Purdue and Dezenhall launched their “anti-story,” media reports of

OxyContin addiction and abuse declined for several years. In 2001, there

were 1,204 stories that included the words “OxyContin,” “abuse” and

“Purdue” published in media outlets archived on the Nexis database. The

number plummeted to 361 in 2002 and to 150 in 2006.
Purdue’s counterattack against an ambitious investigative series about OxyContin abuse may have contributed to that drop.

An October 2003 series in the Orlando Sentinel, “OxyContin Under Fire,”

found that Purdue’s aggressive marketing combined with weak regulation

had contributed to “a wave of death and destruction.”The

series, however, was marred by several errors that were detailed in a

front-page correction nearly four months later. The reporter resigned,

and two editors on the series were reassigned. While acknowledging the

mistakes, the newspaper did not retract the series, and its review

upheld the conclusion that oxycodone was involved in a large number of

the overdoses in Florida.
Dezenhall Resources, in an email, took

credit for forcing the newspaper to issue the corrections. “Dezenhall’s

efforts resulted in a complete front-page retraction of the erroneous

5-day, 19-part, front-page Orlando Sentinel series,” Hershow wrote in a

2006 email summarizing Dezenhall’s work for Purdue under the subject

line “Success in Fighting Negative Coverage.”
Purdue officials and

the company’s public relations agencies came up with a 13-point plan to

generate media coverage of the errors. It included getting a doctor to

talk about how the series “frightened and mislead (sic) the people of

Florida” and having a pain patient write a newspaper opinion column on

the subject. The Sentinel series, one Purdue official wrote to other

company executives and Dezenhall’s Hershow, was an opportunity to let

the country know about “all of the sensational reporting on OxyContin

abuse over the past 4 years. The conclusion: this is the most overblown

health story in the last decade!”
In the six years after Purdue

challenged the Sentinel’s findings, the death rate from prescription

drugs increased 84.2% in Florida. The biggest rise, 264.6%, came from

deaths involving oxycodone. The state became a hotbed for inappropriate

opioid prescribing as unscrupulous pain clinics attracted out of state

drug seekers. The route traveled by many from small towns in Appalachia

to the Florida clinics was nicknamed the “Oxycontin Express.”In

2017, 14 years after the Sentinel series was published, the Columbia

Journalism Review described it as “right too soon” and said it “eerily

prefigured today’s opioid epidemic.”
Purdue couldn’t hold off

restrictions on opioid prescribing forever. Since 2011, a growing number

of states, insurers and federal health agencies have adopted policies

that have led to annual declines in prescribing. Advocates for pain

treatment have complained that this turnabout has gone too far, and the

CDC recently advised doctors against suddenly discontinuing opioids.

Still, the U.S. remains far and away the world leader in per capita

opioid prescriptions.Under

increasing pressure, Purdue enlisted other public relations firms known

for aggressively helping corporations in crisis. Burson-Marsteller,

which after a merger last year is now known as BCW, signed an agreement

in 2011 to provide Purdue “strategic counsel.” Burson-Marsteller

represented Johnson & Johnson as it responded to the Tylenol

poisoning case and Union Carbide after the deadly Bhopal explosion in

India. According to documents, it helped Purdue identify and counter

“potential threats,” such as congressional investigators and the group

Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. A 2013 proposed work plan

between the companies called on Burson to perform as much as $2.7

million of work for Purdue. BCW did not respond to requests for comment.Purdue also employed the services of Purple Strategies,

a Washington-area firm that reportedly represented BP after the

Deepwater Horizon disaster. Purdue paid $621,653 to Purple Strategies in

the 90 days prior to the drugmaker’s Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing and

owes it an additional $207,625, according to court filings. Purple

Strategies did not respond to requests for comment.
Purdue also added

Stu Loeser to its stable. The head of an eponymous media strategy

company, Loeser was press secretary for Michael Bloomberg when he was

mayor of New York City, and he is now a spokesman for Bloomberg’s

possible presidential bid.Soon

after Loeser began representing Purdue, Satel wrote in a 2018 piece for

Politico headlined, “The Myth of What’s Driving the Opioid Crisis,”

about “a false narrative” that the opioid epidemic “is driven by

patients becoming addicted to doctor-prescribed opioids.”Loeser

told Purdue executives in an email that “we are going to work with AEI

to ‘promote’ this so it comes across as what it is: their thoughtful

response to other writing.” His team was working to target the Satel

story “to land in social media feeds of people who have searched for

opioid issues and potentially even people who have read specific stories

online,” he added.
Loeser said in an interview that he didn’t end up working with AEI to promote the story. He said Purdue is no longer a client.
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