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Last modified: Thursday, September 24, 2009 3:23 PM CDT
Purdue Pharma moves in right direction
by Jennifer Johnson
A move by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to lessen the painkiller OxyContin's capabilities to be easily dissolved is a positive step in the right direction.
The revised version is designed to be harder to crush and more difficult to dissolve, a method drug abusers use in order to inject or snort it for a euphoric high, according to Dow Jones Newswires.
A report of the new version broke Tuesday evening, right on the heels of a related presentation earlier that day by Jay Jaffee, chemical health coordinator at the Minnesota Department of Health.
Jaffee outlined the problems of prescription drug abuse and referred to the effective marketing job by Purdue Pharma, the drug's manufacturer. The company introduced OxyContin in 1996 and gradually upped its sales force, creating a bonus system for its employees and distributing 34,000 "starter" coupons to the public. It even branded promotional items for physicians, such as fishing hats, stuffed toys and music CDs. By 2001, the company had spent $200 million to market and promote the drug, and its sales had grown to $1.1 billion.
So effective was Purdue Pharma in underplaying the risk of addiction, OxyContin had become a top choice by U.S. drug abusers in 2004. Jaffee said "the number of patients treated for opioid abuse in the state of Maine increased by 460 percent" from 1995 to 2001.
But three years later, an affiliate of the company, Purdue Frederick Company, Inc., had to pay $635 million to settle federal charges for downplaying the drug's abuse potential. Retribution finally occurred, but at what cost?
In 2004, Jaffee said that 495,732 visits to the emergency room were due to pharmaceutical misuse. Residents in the United States more than tripled their spending on prescription painkillers for outpatient use from $4.2 billion in 1996 to $13.2 billion in 2006, according to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
The makers of OxyContin certainly played a hand in this uptick. Drugs such as marijuana, alcohol and tobacco traditionally get more coverage, but prescription drug abuse is unquestionably on the rise. As it's unlikely abusers will actively educate themselves on their drug of choice, manufacturers clearly have to get more involved in the safety of the product.
JENNIFER JOHNSON can be reached at jenj@wahpetondailynews.com.
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