CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Purdue Pharma Bites the Dust: Can We Learn Anything?

Purdue Pharma building in Stamford CT. Photograph Source: WikileaksIntern – CC0

Suppose there was an explosion at an oil refinery that killed hundreds of people. Presumably, there would be a major investigation to determine what went wrong and how to prevent a similar accident in the future.

But it’s different with the pharmaceutical industry. Purdue Pharma, one of the drug companies at the center of the opioid crisis, was finally put to death as the result of lawsuits over its pushing of OxyContin. The allegation is that the company misrepresented the addictiveness of the drug in order to have it promoted more widely.

The money paid to the families of victims cannot compensate for the deaths of loved ones, but the other part of the story is that no one is asking how to make sure this sort of disaster does not happen again. And unlike the example I gave of an exploding oil refinery, we are talking about the death of hundreds of thousands, not hundreds.

The key issue is the incentives the government gave to Purdue Pharma and the other opioid manufacturers. It gave them patent monopolies that allowed them to markup the price of their drugs by several thousand percent, selling them at prices that were twenty or thirty times what they would sell for in a........

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