Malpractice for over prescribing Opioids needs serious attention!
Our New York City medical malpractice attorneys know all too well the damage that can be caused by over prescribing opoids. Opioids are commonly prescribed for pain. An estimated 20% of patients presenting to physician offices with noncancer pain symptoms or pain-related diagnoses (including acute and chronic pain) receive an opioid prescription. In 2012, health care providers wrote 259 million prescriptions for opioid pain medication, enough for every adult in the United States to have a bottle of pills. Opioid prescriptions per capita increased 7.3% from 2007 to 2012, with opioid prescribing rates increasing more for family practice, general practice, and internal medicine compared with other specialties. Rates of opioid prescribing vary greatly across states in ways that cannot be explained by the underlying health status of the population, highlighting the lack of consensus among clinicians on how to use opioid pain medication.
As OxyContin addiction spurred a national nightmare, a member of the family that has reaped billions of dollars from the painkiller boasted that sales exceeded his “fondest dreams,” according to a secret court document. In May 1997, the year after Purdue Pharma launched OxyContin, its head of sales and marketing sought input on a key decision from Dr. Richard Sackler, a member of the billionaire family that founded and controls the company.
Ten years later, Purdue pleaded guilty in federal court to understating the risk of addiction to OxyContin, including failing to alert doctors that it was a stronger painkiller than morphine, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties. But Sackler’s support of the decision to conceal OxyContin’s strength from doctors — in email exchanges both with Friedman and another company executive — was not made public.
Purdue has fought a three-year legal battle to keep the deposition and hundreds of other documents secret, a Boston-based health and medicine news organization; the matter is currently before the Kentucky Supreme Court. Meanwhile, interest in the deposition’s contents has intensified, as hundreds of cities, counties, states and tribes have sued Purdue and other opioid manufacturers and distributors. A House committee requested the document from Purdue last summer as part of an investigation of drug company marketing practices. Still, Purdue acknowledged, it had made a “determination to avoid emphasizing OxyContin as a powerful cancer pain drug,” out of “a concern that non-cancer patients would be reluctant to take a cancer drug.”
During the deposition, Sackler was confronted with his email exchanges with company executives about Purdue’s decision not to correct the misperception among many doctors that OxyContin was weaker than morphine. The company viewed this as good news because the softer image of the drug was helping drive sales in the lucrative market for treating conditions like back pain and arthritis, records produced at the deposition show. Designed to gradually release medicine into the bloodstream, OxyContin allows patients to take fewer pills than they would with other, quicker-acting pain medicines, and its effect lasts longer. But to accomplish these goals, more narcotic is packed into an OxyContin pill than competing products. Abusers quickly figured out how to crush the pills and extract the large amount of narcotic. They would typically snort it or dissolve it into liquid form to inject. Opioids typically should be prescribed for short duration to control acute pain but are generally not recommended for long term pain control use, unless under the supervision of a pain management program
The Kentucky deposition’s contents will likely fuel the growing protests against the Sacklers, including pressure to strip the family’s name from cultural and educational institutions to which it has donated. The family has been active in philanthropy for decades, giving away hundreds of millions of dollars. But the source of its wealth received little attention until recent years, in part due to a lack of public information about what the family knew about Purdue’s improper marketing of OxyContin and false claims about the drug’s addictive nature. Although Purdue has been sued hundreds of times over OxyContin’s marketing, the company has settled many of these cases, and almost never gone to trial. As a condition of settlement, Purdue has often required a confidentiality agreement, shielding millions of records from public view.
The deposition also reveals that Sackler pushed company officials to find out if German officials could be persuaded to loosen restrictions on the selling of OxyContin. In most countries, narcotic pain relievers are regulated as “controlled” substances because of the potential for abuse. Sackler and other Purdue executives discussed the possibility of persuading German officials to classify OxyContin as an uncontrolled drug, which would likely allow doctors to prescribe the drug more readily — for instance, without seeing a patient. Fewer rules were expected to translate into more sales, according to company documents disclosed at the deposition.
Drug overdose deaths continue to increase in the United States.
- From 1999 to 2017, more than 700,000 people have died from a drug overdose.
- Around 68% of the more than 70,200 drug overdose deaths in 2017 involved an opioid.
- In 2017, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids (including prescription opioids and illegal opioids like heroin and illicitly manufactured fentanyl) was 6 times higher than in 1999.
- On average, 130 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose
Opioid pain medication use presents serious risks, including overdose and opioid use disorder. From 1999 to 2014, more than 165,000 persons died from overdose related to opioid pain medication in the United States. In the past decade, while the death rates for the top leading causes of death such as heart disease and cancer have decreased substantially, the death rate associated with opioid pain medication has increased markedly.
Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) developed guidelines that provide recommendations for the prescribing of opioid pain medication by primary care clinicians for chronic pain (i.e., pain conditions that typically last >3 months or past the time of normal tissue healing) in outpatient settings outside of active cancer treatment, palliative care, and end-of-life care. Our New York trial Attorney believe that although the guideline does not focus broadly on pain management, appropriate use of long-term opioid therapy, it must be considered within the context of all pain management strategies (including nonopioid pain medications and nonpharmacologic treatments). CDC’s recommendations are made on the basis of a systematic review of the best available evidence, along with input from experts, and further review and deliberation by a federally chartered advisory committee. The guideline is intended to ensure that clinicians and patients consider safer and more effective treatment, improve patient outcomes such as reduced pain and improved function, and reduce the number of persons who develop opioid use disorder, overdose, or experience other adverse events related to these drugs. Clinical decision making should be based on a relationship between the clinician and patient, and an understanding of the patient’s clinical situation, functioning, and life context. The recommendations in the guideline are voluntary, rather than prescriptive standards. They are based on emerging evidence, including observational studies or randomized clinical trials with notable limitations. Clinicians should consider the circumstances and unique needs of each patient when providing care.
