Another Day, another Battle in the War on Overprescribing Opiates
Wednesday, May 28, 2014 | 1
Fresh off Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's donnybrook with Zogenix, maker of Zohydro ER, district attorneys from Orange and Santa Clara Counties in California have filed a consumer protection lawsuit against five opioid manufacturers, charging they conducted a more than decade-long massive and deceptive marketing campaign to mislead doctors about the risks of long-term use of the drugs and to encourage their use for minor aches and pain.
The suit, filed in Superior Court by Orange County DA Tony Rackauckas and Santa Clara Counsel Orry P. Korb, names as defendants:
- Purdue Pharma
- Teva Pharmaceutical Industries' Cephalon, Inc. (Teva purchased Cephalon in a hostile takeover in 2011)
- Janssen Pharmaceuticals (owned by Johnson & Johnson since 1961)
- Endo Health Solutions
- Actavis
The 100-page suit paints an ugly picture of a huge conspiracy to co-opt "chronic pain advocacy and research groups" and charges that the five firms "directly and through their front organizations made and caused their misrepresentations to be made and broadly disseminated." It names the American Pain Foundation, the American Academy of Pain Medicine and the American Geriatric Society as co-opt targets.
The suit also names Key Opinion Leaders, KOLs, who the defendants "rely on ... to promote the use of opioids for the treatment of chronic pain." These are doctors who are considered thought leaders in the management of pain and hold lofty positions at important medical institutions. The suit alleges that some of them have been promoting widespread use of opioids since the mid-1990s.
I found fascinating one particular footnote, located on page 37 of the lawsuit. It reads:
"Opioid makers were not the first to mask their deceptive marketing efforts in purported science. The tobacco industry also used key opinion leaders in its effort to persuade the public and regulators that tobacco use was not addictive or dangerous. For example, the tobacco companies funded a research program at Harvard and chose as its chief researcher a doctor who had expressed views in line with industry views. He was dropped when he criticized low-tar cigarettes as potentially more dangerous, and later described himself as a pawn in the industry's campaign."
Hmmmm. Linking what the counties allege is a more than decade-long opioid overprescribing conspiracy to a proven decades-long tobacco conspiracy. Now that's brilliant.
This could get very interesting.
Tom Lynch is a principal with Lynch Ryan & Associates, a Massachusetts employer-consulting firm. This column was reprinted with the firm's permission from its Workers' Comp Insider blog.
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