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Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, may have been the prime mover in the Big Bang of opioids in the 1990s, when doctors were aggressively treating pain and OxyContin was pushed as a non-addictive medication. But Purdue didn’t act alone.
In August, Johnson & Johnson was fined $572 million for its role in Oklahoma’s opioid crisis; Purdue settled with Oklahoma in March for $270 million. Beyond the cases in Oklahoma, there are now 2,000 lawsuits against opioid manufacturers and distributors. But rather than bringing a few bad players to justice for criminal behavior, these lawsuits are exposing a massive conspiracy 20 years in the making, along with a government database to prove it.
The opioid crisis is a manufactured (and profitable!) public health emergency that has killed more than 400,000 Americans since 2000. It’s the perfect storm of gross negligence of regulators, lawmakers, and law enforcement, coupled with predatory tactics of lobbyists, drug manufacturers, distributors, doctors, and management consulting firms. Drug companies pushed opioids as a non-addictive pain medication while simultaneously releasing a deluge of 76 billion oxycodone and hydrocodone pain pills from 2006 through 2012. This is demonstrated by the data in the Drug Enforcement Agency’s Automation of Reports and Consolidated Order System, known as ARCOS.
In small towns like Kermit, West Virginia, (population 392), one pharmacy received 5.7 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills between 2005 and 2011 from McKesson, which shipped over 100 million pills into the state during that time. McKesson settled in May for $37 million, a fraction of the estimated $8.8 billion annual cost of the opioid crisis in West Virginia.
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