Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

In Arizona in January 1996, Richard Cackler and the staff at Purdue celebrated the official launch of OxyContin as a “new era” (207). The success of OxyContin would come to depend on the charisma and personal dedication if its sales representatives. The representatives were given scripts to encourage the use of OxyContin for many prolonged pain episodes, and they were armed with statistics about the drug’s nonaddictive nature. These scripts selectively cherry picked existing research, for instance, citing a doctor’s letter to the New England Journal of Medicine as if it were a peer reviewed study. This letter was useful because its author had noted that his patients showed no evidence of dependence on OxyContin. Other testimonials came from doctors who worked closely with Purdue and received money in exchange. Purdue also used traditional advertising and marketing tactics used by all pharmaceutical companies, like sponsoring meals for doctors—with an extensive marketing budget explicitly for this. Such appeals depended on the emotional side of medicine, the “‘hope’ in a bottle” of making patients better (211).

Purdue’s sales representatives received extensive bonuses for surpassing targets. Arthur Sackler himself had supported such incentive structures at McAdams. Another arm of the Sackler empire, IMS, gathered reams of market research data, so sales reps could target their visits most effectively.