Rising Painkiller Addiction Shows Damage From Drugmakers’ Role in Shaping Medical Opinion
Rising Painkiller Addiction Shows Damage From Drugmakers’ Role in Shaping Medical Opinion
A closer look at the opioid painkiller binge — retail prescriptions have roughly tripled in the past 20 years — shows that the rising sales and addictions were catalyzed by a massive effort by pharmaceutical companies to shape medical opinion and practice.
Opioids are a class of powerful drugs, often used for pain, that includes morphine, heroin and brand names such as OxyContin, Vicodin and Percocet.
For years, doctors had been cautious about prescribing opioids to anyone except patients with cancer or in acute pain.
But drug manufacturers and some pain specialists helped create a body of scientific research assuaging the long-standing worries about opioids and pushed to expand the use of the drugs in people with chronic pain — bad backs, arthritis, sore knees.
Their studies reported minimal risks of addiction and dependence. These, in turn, were accepted by the FDA and the nation’s medical journals. State medical boards made their rules for prescribing opioids more liberal. Academic and industry articles dismissed the old fears as “opiophobia.”
These reports reached doctors through marketing efforts and told them that there were few risks in using opioids to treat chronic pain.
But according to a Washington Post examination of key scientific papers, a court document and FDA records, many of those claims were developed in studies supported by Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, or other drug manufacturers. In addition, the conclusions they reached were sometimes unsupported by the data, and when the FDA was struggling to come up with an opioid policy, it turned to a panel populated by doctors who had financial relationships with Purdue and other drugmakers.