Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Sackler Family: America's Deadliest Drug Dealers

Episode Date: April 16, 2019

In Episode 56, Robert is joined by James Heaney (Alchemy This) to discuss the drug dealing family responsible for destroying America's Heartland.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science, and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated

two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's wagon Mattels? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards. Sophie is giving me the thumbs up for that intro. This podcast, talking about all the bad people, stuff you don't know about them, all that good jazz. My guest with me is James Heaney, actor, comedian James. Welcome to the show. Hi, it's a super big pleasure to come in here. I've listened

to a lot of episodes. I've spoken towards the speakers in my car. This is the first time I'm going to get responses. I'm really happy about that. Well, I'm glad to hear that you shout at my disembodied voice. I like to imagine thousands of people doing that into their cars every morning. Whenever I see somebody else talking to themselves in the car, I imagine they're listening to Behind the Bastards. So do I. So do I. It's narcissism in my case, but it's very flattering in yours. Thank you. You know, I don't want to blow too much time, but I always start the first episode thinking to myself, gosh, this person could be me. And then the second episode, I'm like, thank God, there's some distance between myself

and this monster. Well, James, you got anything you want to plug in the P-Zone before we drop in this episode? I'm part of the same network. Elchemy this. It's twice a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Improv podcast with Kevin Pollack. Yes, that Kevin Pollack. And specifically, we have a live show at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater on May 7th at 8 p.m. Gosh, it would be great if everyone came. Everyone? Book a ticket to L.A. Flood the theater. Do not let them not seat you. Demand to be let in. Bring weaponry. Force your way in. Riot. Oh, well, that might be just crossing a threshold there. You might find yourself in the second episode of Behind the Bastards with that attitude. We're gearing up for that. I do like to urge crimes

every third or fourth episode, just my little way of thumbing my nose at the FTC because they can't do anything about podcasts. I didn't realize they had no control over this. No, they don't, not over podcasts. We're in international waters of radio. There's no law here. There's no maps for these territories. Do you worry ever that people are going to get your tricks? I heard some stash tricks about drugs the other week and I thought maybe all the cops know it now. Yeah, see, that's part of what I worry about, which is why I don't tell my good stash tricks on the air. But if they're listening, they've got to be cool, right? Yeah, they've got to be cool cops. A certain threshold of coolness that goes along with a listener behind the

bastard. Exactly. So we assume that those of the cops will let you slide for a little bit of weed or a quarter pound of meth or just like little stuff, you know? Okay, a quarter pound's a lot. Not if you're doing a lot of meth. True. That's just a couple of weeks. Yeah, I guess so. Anyway, speaking actually of drug dealers, we're talking about drug dealers today, probably the most successful, wealthiest, and deadliest drug dealers in the history of the world. Have you ever heard of the Sackler family? I have not heard of the Sackler family. Have you ever heard of Oxycontin? I have heard of Oxycontin. Yeah, we have all heard of Oxycontin. I have heard. That's actually not, I don't like Oxycontin. Never done it, never done it.

I'm free to say I've done a lot of things, never touched Oxycontin. See, I really like painkillers and I have messed around with Oxy a couple of times in the past and it's one of those things where I won't let myself buy opiates because I know I would develop a problem like fucking that because I really enjoy them. I had an injury when I was early in college and I had like Vicodin or whatever, I don't know, maybe it was codeine or whatever pill they gave me, but it wasn't as good as acid and it wasn't as good as the other things I was doing and I was so worried that it would have a counter effect that I ended up not taking them and I think I've really dodged a bullet because I've gotten addictive personality. Yeah, it's, that's

like one of the ones to really avoid because that'll, that'll fucking kill you pretty fast. Which is so upsetting because it's legal. Yeah, it's super legal, super hard to control and really easy to go from like, like if you're just taking the pills, that's reasonably safe, but the problem is people escalate and they start extracting the oxy from the pills or they move up to fentanyl and then they're, they fucking kill themselves. Yeah. And it's like, it's just so hard to moderate. Like it's even alcohol, like, you know, probably on a societal level causes more problems, but it's harder to kill yourself with. Maybe not. I guess that, you know, it's easier to kill other people with alcohol. So nobody's, nobody's ramming a car

into somebody else while they're, they're hopped up on oxy probably. Probably. And actually, I would say that I, I wouldn't put my seal of guarantee that people aren't driving on oxy cotton. Definitely are driving on it. I just think they're less dangerous. Probably. So if you're a drunk driver, switch to oxy, we should just roll right into this episode. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I'm sweating and you're talking. Don't break the law. Break the law. I heard that whisper. I'm Robert. Oh, wait, that was the intro. I'm just going to start reading the episode now. In the early 1900s, before World War One, Sophie and Isaac Sackler immigrated to the United States from Poland and Ukraine respectively. They were both Jewish, which you may recall was not a great thing to be in

Poland or Ukraine around the turn of the 20th century, or a couple of decades after the turn of the 20th century, or like, pretty, pretty rough now. I don't want to sound ignorant, but I didn't realize that early on. It was bad. I thought it was towards like the 20s. No, I mean, it was bad. It was got worse than, but like, you know, the late 1800s, the Chelmnisky massacre, which was like a bunch of Cossacks killing, they might have been as many as half a million Jewish people. Wow. The biggest pogrom in Russian history. And that I think was pretty close to Ukraine. It might have been in some of what is, I don't know the exact geographical area, but like, yeah, it was pretty rough. A lot of bad stuff happening. And I don't know if the Sacklers

fled Eastern Europe because of, you know, a desire not to get murdered or because of crushing poverty, but it was probably like a mix of the two. So these refugees established themselves in New York City. Isaac became a grocer. He and his wife had two children, the eldest of which was Arthur. Arthur grew up to become a psychiatrist. His specialty was something called biological psychiatry. He was the very first physician in the world to use ultrasound for a diagnosis. He was a major critic of electroconvulsive therapy and was a significant figure in the racial integration of New York City's blood donation. So it's pretty good so far. I kind of am a critic of the electro therapy myself. So I kind of am on a side. I believe they still use it sometimes.

There's certain things that it really does help because I know some people who have found it very helpful, but I've heard the same thing. It's so hard for me to believe it seems so barbaric. I think the problem was they used to do it for like everything. Like, oh, your daughter's looking at guys. Let's shock her skull. There's a couple of things it really does help with and now they pretty much only do it for those things. I thought the overdiagnosis of ADD was a problem. I guess we're lucky we're progressing. Yeah. I mean, they just hit you back then for having ADD in the 50s. That was your riddle and was getting punched. A little better than the shock therapy, I think. I don't know. Maybe it depends on the hand. Fair enough. Yeah. Now, at this point,

the Sackler family seemed to be living the epitome of the American dream. They'd gone from dirt poor refugees to well-off groundbreaking physicians in 50 years. Pretty cool. I'm impressed. Pretty cool. But in 1952, Arthur made a fateful purchase that would, decades later, cripple the United States and secure his family a place in historical infamy for all time. He bought a company called Purdue Frederick, a pharmaceutical drug maker. Now, Purdue Frederick had been established in 1892, selling what were called patent medicines, essentially snake oil. Prior to Arthur's purchase, Purdue Frederick's main product had been Gray's Glycerin tonic, a broad application remedy sold as a cure for basically everything. It was mostly wine. It cures some things. It does cure

some things. I've definitely had some things cured. But when I have a nasty case of the sobriety, I just break open a bottle of medicinal wine. That solves it immediately. Very quickly. Yeah. Very, very fast. Now, Arthur put his brothers, Mortimer and Raymond, in charge of the company. Morty had been born in 1916 and Ray in 1920. Both brothers were also psychiatrists. The whole family goes into psychiatry, which, you know, good for the parents, even kids. Yeah. I mean, that's impressive. They're owning stores. I guess colleges were different back then. Yeah. I mean, it costs like $20. Yeah. You had, you mow a couple of lawns and you could get your bachelors back then. Wow. Oh, man. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of those things. You look at, like,

even in the 70s, you could work part-time and pay off college by the time you graduate. And it was like... Don't make me cry on microphone right here. Now it costs as much as two new trucks. And that's not a great college. So all three kids were psychiatrists. Psychiatrists. They're able to, like, they're actual doctors. Which makes sense. Perdue. Perdue. Exactly. So Arthur put his brothers, Mortimer, oh yeah, he put them in charge of the company. So Arthur was free to devote himself to what was increasingly his passion, marketing. I'm going to quote from a fantastic Esquire article by Christopher Glazik. Quote, Arthur intuited that print ads in medical journals could have a revolutionary effect on

pharmaceutical sales, especially given the excitement surrounding the miracle drugs of the 1950s, steroids, antibiotics, antihistamines, and psychotropics. In 1952, the same year that he and his brothers acquired Perdue, Arthur became the first ad man to convince the Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the profession's most august publications, to include a color advertorial brochure. So that's this guy's like. Well, that's the fucking problem. That's like if you start marketing, if you start marketing drugs, then that means you're spending money because you want to make more money. And is that not the whole fucking, sorry, are you, I don't know if there's a cursing on this? Yeah, there's plenty of cursing.

Yeah, but it's just upsetting because that's the root of the problem. It should never have been like, oh, marketing's where we're going to really make our break. Your marketing should be the doctor being like, you have this problem and this medicine will help for it. That's the only marketing drug should happen. You shouldn't be like looking at color. Do you have these spots all over your bodies? Well, how about a measles vaccine? Maybe I need this. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, nobody advertises like, do you want polio? Probably not. Check out this new shot that'll take it. No, you just give people the polio vaccine so they don't get sick. Now Perdue's first big hit was Librium, which was the first name Valium was marketed under.

Arthur pitched Librium as the key to treating psychic tension, a phrase he invented because it sounded sexier than saying stress. Arthur suggested that psychic tension was the real cause of many maladies, from heartburn to bad poops. The tactic worked like fucking gangbusters. Valium became the most widely prescribed medication in the United States, the first drug to break the $100 million sales record. Arthur was quickly inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame, a thing which should not exist. No, it shouldn't exist. No, why would you be proud of that? This might be outside of your realm of thought, but was Valium kind of the trade off of what they used to do lobotomies? I think they were still lobotomizing people

at this point. This is like the 50s. So if I'm not mistaken, this is when I think Rosemary Kennedy was her name, JFK's youngest sister, when they scrambled her brains because she liked boys. So I think they were still doing that at this point. They were. So it has nothing because I thought that lobotomies and Valium kind of had a crossover. They might have been. I just don't know that. I could see it helping with that. I've taken it recreationally a couple of times. I haven't. When I was living in Guatemala, you could just pick it up from the corner store. So we would actually pick up Valium and Hydrocodone and it was like Thursday night or whatever. It was fun. I met this Irish biker who was traveling

biking all the continents. Now, when you say biker, I need to know the difference. Is it paddling biker or motorcycle? No, it's a huge fucking motorcycle. Makes sense, having drugs. Yeah, sure. He spent like three weeks just doing all of the Valium. I've never seen anyone do more fucking Valium. Oh my God. He's crushing it up and railing three at a time. Yeah, that's just never been my party drug. No, I'm not a huge fan of it. But yeah, it sold very well for Arthur Sackler. So it was Arthur who began the Sackler family tradition of donating huge sums of money to museums. Some of this may have been honest generosity, but a lot of it was also a tax thing. When he created the Sackler

Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he gave it a huge collection of Chinese artifacts, but he required the museum to sell him the artifacts he was giving them for a very low price, what he'd paid originally in the 1920s when he'd acquired them. So he could then donate the artifacts back to the museum, but write them off at their 1960s value so that he made net money donating these things to the museum. It sounds like a scam. Is that a scam? Definitely. The only reason it's not a scam is because he has enough lawyers to sue you for calling it a scam. Oh, that's true. It sounds like the art version of a shell company. It's absolutely that. It's legally distinct from a scam because he can afford to pay lawyers. Yeah, exactly. But it's the same thing

as that guy on the street corner putting a dot or whatever underneath a bunch of cups and asking you to bet on which. Like, it's a con for sure. Now, Jillian Sackler, Arthur's third wife does call this allegation fake news. So that should tell you. When was that? That was recently. Oh, I was going to say, that's a very new term. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that also makes sense. Third wife. He had to re-up a couple of times. Yeah, I think they all did. In general, the Sackler brothers seem to have been the kind of rich people I would not have gotten along with. Mortimer threw a fit on his 70th birthday when the Met agreed to let him throw his birthday party there, but they wouldn't let him redecorate an ancient shrine that he wanted as the centerpiece to his

party. So he got very angry at them. Like, that's the attitude this family has. So that said, there was nothing super evil about this generation of the Sacklers. They were questionable. Oh, okay, go ahead. Yeah, they were sorry. Yeah, they were questionable, but they weren't like mustache twirling villains. They also weren't that rich by rich people standards. They were multimillionaires, but not billionaires or multi-billionaires. Raymond and Mortimer had paid attention to their brother's success with Valium. They realized that if you could just take a powerfully addictive substance and then market it as a cure-all for a bunch of different things, well, that was incredibly profitable. So they started looking for another drug that they could

basically apply the Valium strategy to. In 1972, a London doctor had developed a special slow release medicine technology. In 1981, MS. Conten entered the UK market. It was a timed release morphine pill designed to hopefully be less addictive than traditional morphine. In 1987, Purdue Pharmaceutical brought MS. Conten to the US market. Now, the drug was a big hit for cancer patients, and Purdue made a tidy sum helping suffering sick people endure their mortal illnesses. Whenever I hear something, I got to ask them a questioner. So when they think it's going to be less addictive, do they think it's going to be less addictive because it's something that is not creating a habitual use because it's slow release? That's exactly. One of the big things you're trying

to avoid is the euphoria, because taking painkillers gives you this feeling of euphoria when you first come up, and that's one of the things that's most addictive about it. So the idea was that if it's slow release, people won't get hooked as easily. It will be less pleasurable, but it will fight pain more effectively. So number one, you'll have to take fewer pills. And number two, you're less likely to develop a habit. It's like shooting someone up with heroin. There was a big stigma against opiates at this point in the United States in the 70s and 80s because a bunch of young men had been given morphine basically in Vietnam. They get shot and they get shot up with morphine, and then they wound up horribly addicted to morphine. And so there was a real stigma against

taking any kind of opiate painkiller in the US during this period. So MS content was really only used by cancer patients. It was the only people who would get prescribed this kind of medicine were people who were dying essentially. So Purdue made a decent amount of money off of it, but it was impossible to make a lot of money off of it because it wasn't being prescribed for anything but mortal illnesses. MS content was unlikely to ever become a valium level seller, and that was a problem for Purdue pharmaceuticals. Fortunately for the Sackler family, and unfortunately for the entirety of rural America, in 1986 two doctors published an article in a medical journal that suggested based on a 38 patient study that long-term opiate use was safe for patients without a history

of drug abuse. This combined with a widespread completely fallacious belief that the rate of addiction for long-term opiate use was less than 1% helped convince the leadership at Purdue that opiates were the future of their company. It was a future Arthur Sackler would not live to see. He died in 1987. His last words to his family were, reportedly, leave the world a better place than when you entered it. Those are great words of wisdom. Great words of wisdom. Can you hear about how his family didn't do any of that? From this point on, Richard Sackler, Raymond's son, and Arthur's nephew would grow to become the head of the family and eventually the company. Here's how Esquire described him, quote,

Perhaps the most private member of a generally secretive family, Richard appears nowhere on Purdue's website. From public records and conversations with former employees, though, a rough portrait emerges of a testy eccentric with ardent relentless ambitions. Born in 1945, he holds degrees from Columbia University and NYU Medical School. According to a bio on the website of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT, where Richard serves on the advisory board, he started working at Purdue as his father's assistant at age 26 before eventually leading the firm's R&D division, and separately, its sales and marketing division. So like Arthur, he's not just a doctor who likes research, he's really into marketing and advertising.

Maybe he should have just done that. Like, she could have been making ads and there's a lot of money in advertisement. Yeah, I mean, he makes a lot of money in advertisement. It's just for Oxycontin. It's not the thing you want him advertising. Now, Raymond took a step back during this period, presumably to allow his son to shine. One of Richard's colleagues during this time who lived through the transition recalled that the new boss brought a new intensity to the job. Richard really wanted Purdue to be big. I mean, really big. The best opportunity for that was, of course, a new drug based on the content system. The patent for MS content was about to run out, but Purdue scientists were developing a similar drug, basically a time release version of an old

opiate called oxycodone. Now, in the 1930s, oxycodone's most popular formation was scofadol, a mix of oxycodone, scoplamine, and ephedrine. It was basically an early speedball. The Wehrmacht loved it. It was like one of the most popular Nazi drugs of the whole Nazi era. During Operation Himmler, when the Germans staged a false flag attack on themselves to justify the invasion of Poland, the prisoners they dressed as Polish soldiers were all killed via massive injections of scopadol. So oxycodone has a fun history before it became oxycontin. And Purdue was about to add a new chapter to that history. Esquire talked to Peter LeCoutre, a senior director of clinical research at Purdue from 91 to 2001, and he explained how the idea evolved. At all the meetings,

that was a constant source of discussion. What else can we use the content system for? And that's where Richard would fire some ideas, maybe antibiotics, maybe chemotherapy. He was always out there digging. So Sally Allen, a former executive director for product management, added that Richard was very interested in the commercial side and also very interested in marketing approaches. He didn't always wait for the research results. So by 1990, there was ample evidence that MS content had a dangerous potential for abuse. It had already become one of the most abused prescription opioids in the United States. But that, of course, did not make Richard any less likely to think it was a good product to market. You know, they kind of ignored the fact

that there were already signs that time release morphine was no less addictive than regular morphine and just sort of made time release oxycodone. I assumed it would work. Wouldn't the world be a better place if they were like, we really should do time released antibiotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they decided not to do that. I mean, I think they probably made those at some point too. But antibiotics, nobody's going to want to take a shitload of antibiotics. What about with the right advertising? You don't think with the right pitch, don't you won't die? Yeah, I'm not even sure how you advertise that stuff. Yeah, I guess you're right. Yeah, oxycontin, you just have a picture of some guy sitting out at like a beach and looks like he's an old guy with a surgery scar on his

arm, but he's smiling and this is like freedom oxycontin. Yeah, it's got a good name too. I hate to say it, but it's an exciting name to just say. Yeah, and it's got one of those names that shortens well to a street drug. You got any oxy, bro? Like, you know, mscontin, you know, he's gonna be like, you got any mscontin, I guess. But yeah, anyway, we're gonna find out what happens next with Richard Sackler, the other Sacklers and oxycontin. But first, some ads for products that hopefully aren't Purdue pharmaceuticals that might be. There's no knowing it's randomly slotted in. So hopefully not. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were

right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not on the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know

me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man Sergei Krekalev is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you

get your podcasts. We're back. So in 1995, Purdue Pharmaceutical convened a series of focus groups with physicians trying to decide if they'd be willing to prescribe oxycontin, the company's new drug, for non-cancer pain. Most doctors were unwilling to do this. They worried about getting their patients hardly addicted to a dangerous drug and perhaps igniting an opioid epidemic. Purdue learned that physicians did want a long-lasting pain reliever that was less addictive than morphine. It was considered the holy grail of medicine at that point. Now, they didn't have such a drug. Oxycontin was just as addictive as the old pills, perhaps even more addictive. But the focus groups taught them that there was an incredible potential in selling such a product,

whether or not they actually had one. In 1995, Purdue Pharmaceutical released oxycontin onto the open market. At the company launch party for the new drug, Richard Sackler compared the launch of oxycontin to a natural disaster. Asking the audience to imagine a blizzard or a hurricane and saying, the launch of oxycontin tablets will be followed by a blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription blizzard will be so deep, dense and white. Oh, wow. Richard, no, don't, like, you know what you're doing. Like, you know. He must have suspected. It sounds like he was thinking money was more important than people. Sounds like that might have been his only motivating factor. Yeah. The predecessor drug, MS

Contin, had a reputation for being very prone to abuse. Many patients had figured out how to crush it and extract pure oxycodone, thus getting past that nasty time release thing and giving them a much more addictive drug. So Purdue instructed its sales staff to lie to doctors and say that this could not be done with oxycontin, even though their own internal studies showed that it was actually super easy to do with oxycontin. Well, I mean, I might be wrong. I grew up in the 90s. But was it a new invention, crushing pills? Because that's always been like, oh, you want that? Just crush it up. They didn't think that was part of an abuse strategy. They did. They knew it could be done. They done studies showing that it was really easy to extract

pure oxycodone from oxycontin. They just lied to doctors and said that it couldn't be done. Well, that'll do the trick. Exactly. It was like, oh, it's really hard to make a pill people can't crush and then purify and store. Why don't we just lie? This pill is fortified with iron. Who can bend iron? Superman? Superman? Yeah, you can't crush this pill. They have like one trial pill that's just made out of steel and they're like, look, you can't crush it. Don't try the others. Don't try the others. And don't use that ginsu knife. Now, as appending Massachusetts lawsuit against the company alleges, quote, doctors had the crucial misconception that oxycontin was weaker than morphine, which led

them to prescribe oxycontin much more often. In 1997, Michael Cullen, a Purdue executive, wrote this letter to Richard Sackler. Since oxycodone is perceived as being a weaker opioid than morphine, it has resulted in oxycontin being used much earlier for non-cancer pain. Physicians are positioning this product where Percocet, hydrocodone, and Tylenol with codeine have traditionally been used. It is important that we be careful not to change the perception of physicians towards oxycodone when developing promotional pieces, symposia, review studies, articles, etc. Sackler's response to this was short and sweet. I think that you have this issue well in hand. Again, they think it's not addictive. They know what they're doing.

That same year, Michael Friedman, the company head of sales, emailed his boss with similar concerns, correcting the false impression that doctors had about oxy would be bad for business. Quote, it would be extremely dangerous at this early stage in the life of the product to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal to morphine. We are well aware of the view held by many physicians that oxycodone is weaker than morphine. I do not plan to do anything about it. Again, Richard Sackler replied, I agree with you. He then asked, is there a general agreement, or are there some holdouts? Everybody on the board about lying to doctors? We all in the same boat here? Yeah, it's pretty blatant,

climbing. I mean, and there's a paper trail for this. It seems like thousands of emails. Unless I'm wrong, they're still selling oxycodone today, right? Oh, I mean, yeah. I mean, unless it was this morning that there was a breaking news I missed. You're not going to stop selling oxycodone. And this is all like you don't have exclusive access to this information? No, no, no, no. There's been a number of big stories. We'll get to that in a little bit, how this all came out. All right, sorry, sorry. No, it's all good. Now, all this was divulged as a result of a lawsuit filed by the state of Kentucky against Purdue in 2015. As you'd expect, the company had a ready explanation as to what Sackler and his executives did was not fraud.

Here's ProPublica. Quote, Sackler had said, supports that the company accurately disclosed the potency of oxycontin to healthcare providers. He takes great care to explain that the drug's label made it clear that oxycontin is twice as potent as morphine, Purdue said. 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. So we didn't lie to doctors. We just didn't emphasize the truth so that people would keep taking the pills. So that's different from a lie. Yeah, it's not really that different from a lie. It's not really, it's kind of just a lie.

It's a lie. Yeah, it's kind of just a lie. Now, documents released from the Kentucky suit as well as a lawsuit in Massachusetts paint a picture that put Richard Sackler square in the middle of Purdue's strategy to sell a shitload of oxycontin by lying about how strong it was. Seven other Sackler family members were also implicated. The strategy worked by gangbusters, netting the company $48 million in the first full year of sales. In an email to the company, Richard noted, clearly this strategy has outperformed our expectations, market research, and fondest dreams. So $48 million. This is back in the 90s. This is 1996, I think. Yeah, yeah, that's the first year.

Three years later, after tens of millions more in sales, he emailed this to an executive at Purdue, quote, you won't believe how committed I am to make oxycontin a huge success. It is almost that I dedicated my life to it. After the initial launch phase, I will have to catch up with my private life again. Just working too hard lying to doctors. Poor guy. It sounds like he's got psychic stress. Or psychic. He should try some Liberia. Yeah, try some Liberia. I hear it's great for psychic stress. It's so liberating. It's liberating. It wasn't psychic stress. What's it called? Psychic. No, I think that's the term. That was the word. Okay. Psychic stress. Yeah, I think that was the term he used. Yeah. Now, when he was deposed in Massachusetts,

Richard Sackler denied that he had participated in any kind of gigantic lie to trick doctors into overprescribing oxycontin. According to ProPublica, he, quote, offered benign interpretations of emails that appeared to show Purdue executives or sales representatives minimizing their risks of oxycontin and its euphoric effects. He denied that there was any effort to deceive doctors about the potency of oxycontin and argued that lawyers for Kentucky were misconstruing words such as stronger and weaker used in email threads. The term stronger in Friedman's email, Sackler said, meant more threatening, more frightening. There is no way that this intended or had the effect of causing physicians to overlook the fact that it was

twice as potent. We weren't saying it's not stronger. We're saying it's not more threatening than morphine. It's just a little pill. It's not scary. Morphine comes in a needle sometimes. That's scary. Well, I guess, I mean, I am not defending them. I already think they're a bunch of shit bags, but honestly, there should be more questions about this. Why did they not ask, okay, strength is one thing. The potency seems like a very scientific question to ask. Yeah, I mean, it does. It seems like a lot of doctors fell down on the job here. We'll get into why in a little bit because there's some doctors being shady as fuck in this story too. Actually, quite a lot of them. Not surprising at all. Not surprising at all. Hey, man, you got a lot of

fucking student loans to pay back to get that MD. If you write some bill prescriptions, that makes that shit easier. It's like all those doctors in LA. You remember when medical marijuana was the thing and there would be all those old doctors who was just signing pot prescriptions as a retirement plan. Yeah, that was for a long time before Obamacare, my only doctor. That was like the one doctor appointment I'd get a year. That's the only doctor appointment I had. It got scary when he'd give me advice of like, oh, your blood pressure is pretty high. Oh my god, the pot doctor wants me to cool off on coffee. When the pot doctor gives you real medical advice, that's not a great moment. You really should go see someone. I'm like, no way, you're scaring me,

sir. I remember my first pot doctor. It was near Venice Beach and I like walk into this shady, dirty office and there's like, as I'm standing outside his office, there's a poster of, it's like a fake painting of the Mona Lisa, but she's got a blunt and like, and then I go into the office and the guy's wearing a lab coat and I'm like, dude, you don't, you don't need to buy a lab coat. You got that from the costume shop, didn't you? This is LA. We know what's happening here. I think we went to, was he a really old guy with a really thick accent? Very thick accent. Yeah, I think that, I mean, he was a hot doctor back in the, I don't know what he's doing today. I hope he made enough to retire because he should not be practicing medicine. I'm just

crossing my fingers. There's never an episode two about him and behind the bastards. I mean, yeah, I don't even remember that guy's name, but I'm sure he did something terrible to wind up being a pot doctor. I guess so. So produced bald face lying to patients and doctors was enabled by the FDA. Curtis Wright, the FDA examiner who approved OxyContin's initial application, allowed the company to include this note on the package. Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug. Wow, that word believed. That word is doing a lot of weightlifting there. It's carrying the others really. I mean, I'm a critical thinker, but when I see a word like believe, the first thing I do is stop believing and start like

looking things up. Yeah, looking things up, seeing maybe, is it hard? The word believe is nine times out of 10, a clue that you shouldn't. Yeah, you don't want to hear that from a doctor like, yeah, we believe this will help. Yeah. Like, oh, I feel like you should know a little better. I mean, I own medicine. Sometimes it's a crap shoot, but it's not comforting to hear that. In 1996, the year after OxyContin's release, Curtis Wright quit the FDA. He was hired by another pharmaceutical company for a short while and then hired by Purdue Pharmaceuticals. Esquire talked to him years later and he offered this defense, quote, at the time, it was believed that extended release formulations were intrinsically less

abusable. It came as rather a big shock to everybody, the government and Purdue, that people found ways to grind up, chew up, snort, dissolve and inject the pills. We didn't, we didn't know people would do the thing that they do with every drug, like every single drug. Of course they predicted people would be booping and putting it in their butts, but crushing them? Oh my God, where did they think? We'd never heard of this drug we made in the 80s. We had never heard of people railing drugs. No. Who would have guessed that? I think, come on, come on, dude. You think people aren't going to find a way to get high off of a drug? This is people we're talking about here. You can get high on holding your breath?

Yeah, you can get, we do. Oh boy, I'm sure after that video of the dolphins passing puffer fish around went viral, there's people that are trying to figure out how to get wasted on that shit. I have not seen it yet. I think you're going to have like a scuba club that all dies doing that. Not that I want to do it, but could I get high on puffer fish? I don't know, you know, I know a guy, he's a dolphin. Oh. But I know a dolphin. Okay, we'll talk afterwards. We'll talk afterwards. I don't want to, I don't want to get the DEA on my ass for selling dolphin drugs. Yeah, so a major part of Oxycontin's success was Purdue's novel strategy of declaring a war on pain. Over the course of the late 1990s, they poured millions and millions of dollars into

backing doctors who supported opioid treatment for chronic pain. These doctors formed advocacy groups like the American Pain Society, the American Academy of Pain Medicine, and Purdue's own lobbying organization, Partners Against Pain. Partners, you, me, and this crippling pill addiction. Did they really call it a war on pain? Yeah. And that was, again, I'm not great at history, but that's the same time the war on drugs was going on. Yeah. Is that like a gorilla, like clandestine war that we were running? Yeah. Yeah, it's like the war in Nicaragua where that's, yeah. Yeah, so that's kind of similar if we have a war on drugs and a war on pain using Oxycontin. Yeah, using Oxycontin, which is different from a drug for reasons.

It's supplying arms to the Taliban. Okay, that's, that's a different story, but it seems like that's what the war on drugs would be. It's like when we sold missiles to Iran while giving missiles to Iraq to fight Iran. It's the that of drugs. That's the lines I'm making. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These groups, which many consider to just be fronts for big pharma, operated by crooked doctors, pushed regulators to treat pain like the fifth vital sign. They advocated for a 10-point pain scale, which doctors should ask patients about during every visit. An internal Purdue strategy document explained that the goal of this was to, quote, attach an emotional aspect to non-cancer pain. This would hopefully cause doctors to treat it more seriously and aggressively, a.k.a.

with Oxycontin. Now, up until that point, pain had, to a certain extent, been something chronic sufferers just dealt with. There were obviously attempts to mitigate it as best as possible, but complete cessation of pain was seen as simply unrealistic, and the risk of giving chronic pain sufferers morphine was considered too high. With Oxycontin, Purdue changed all that. The ironic thing is, it wasn't actually super effective against chronic pain. It was marked as lasting 12 hours so patients could sleep through a night free of agony, but most patients only got about 6-8 hours of relief. This meant they took more Oxycontin, which meant they ran through their prescriptions faster, which led them to calling doctors in agony. When doctors questioned sales

reps about this cycle, Purdue advised them to increase the dose, rather than the dosing frequency, which guaranteed that the cycle would keep on keeping on, and also increased Purdue's profits. Now, doctors aren't dumb, and many of them were hesitant about some of the claims Purdue was making. They were particularly concerned. Can I pause you? Just for a moment. Now, when I, like, everything with Oxycontin right now, I understand that's its own beast, but the whole 1-10 scale of pain, I'm a little confused on how authentic that is. Is that really a scientific method? Because I've heard that before, but what's to stop somebody, and I'm not telling anyone, that their pain is not the number they say, but what's to stop someone from saying their pain

is something higher than it is? Nothing! Okay, I just want to make sure that there wasn't something I was missing. No, there's no way to, like, you can't, there's not, like, an objective measurement of pain. Like, you know, I know people who have chronic pain conditions for whom, like, you know, they'll get hurt, like, in a way that would, like, fuck me up for a day or two, and they just, like, sort of grin and bear it, because they're so used to dealing with pain. So, yeah, like, there's no way to objectively measure pain. And I'm not saying, like, a 10-point pain scale is necessarily a bad idea, but Purdue introduced it specifically so that, because it would make it easier for people to get prescribed OxyContin. Purdue introduced this?

Yes. Oh my god, I didn't realize they produced that state. I mean, it was doctors and stuff that they were funding, but like, it was, it was a thing they wanted. I know the marionette man controls all the puppets. Exactly. Not a fool. They were like, if we, if this is the way people do this stuff, it'll be a lot easier to sell a shitload of OxyContin. And it was. Speaking of selling a shitload of things that aren't OxyContin, unless the ad that gets randomly slotted in is for OxyContin, it might be. There's no way to know. We've been having Coke Brothers ads, you know, I'm sure a Blackwater ad will wind up soon. Well, the Coke Brothers are avid listeners. Oh yeah, and they are. And you know what,

in fairness to them, an awful lot of behind-the-basters listeners need a lot of oil refined. I mean, I get that, I get a fan emailing me every week saying like, I have all this crude oil and no way to refine it. Do you know where I can do that in such a way that it pollutes the Bay of Galveston beyond ecological salvage? And I say the Coke Brothers. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. That's nice for that. So if you need your crude oil refined, check out the Coke Brothers refineries. And if you need anything else that we advertise, products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson,

and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI sometimes, you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark, and not in the gun badass way. He's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band

called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergey Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you

get your podcasts. We're back. So as I was saying, doctors are not dumb and many of them were hesitant about some of the claims Purdue was making. They were particularly concerned about whether or not oxy content caused euphoria. If you've never taken opiates recreationally, you should know that they have a strong mood altering component. Pain killers work on your emotions too. You feel very happy, especially when coming up. It's kind of incredible. Of course, this is something that concerns doctors because euphoria is the most addictive thing in the world. If oxy content caused it, then that might make it too dangerous to prescribe all willy nilly. Thankfully, Purdue was there to lie to doctors and say their pills did not cause euphoria. Sometimes they'd admit that it could, but that

it did so less than other opiates, which of course there was no evidence for. During the deposition, Richard Sackler was confronted with a 1998 note from a company salesman, admitting that he, quote, talked of less euphoria when selling the drug to a doctor. Sackler argued in court that this was fine because 1998 was before there was, quote, an agreed statement of facts. Now, in legalese, an agreed statement of facts is a list of facts both parties in a lawsuit agree on and submit to a judge at the start of a case. So if I understand right, Richard Sackler was saying it was fine for his employees to lie to doctors about the fact that his pain medicine didn't cause euphoria because the company hadn't been sued yet. And so there wasn't an agreed upon

statement of facts. Like that, I think that's the argument he was making. I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a murderer because I haven't been, haven't been caught yet. Have you seen me kill anyone in this courtroom today? I rest my case. Ignore the blood on my shirt. Now, when the lawyer for the state asked, what difference does that make if it's improper in 2007? Wouldn't it be improper in 1998? Sackler replied, not necessarily. That's it. So you got to say in court. Wow. Yeah. I always pictured court much different than that. Yeah. The state did present him with more memos and Sackler defended himself by saying that the claim of less euphoria could be true and I don't see the harm. I'm going to quote from ProPublica again. The same issue came up regarding a note

written by a Purdue sales representative about one doctor got to convince him to counsel patients that they won't get buzzed as they will with short-acting opioid painkillers. Sackler defended these comments as well. Well, what it says there is that they won't get a buzz and I don't think that telling a patient, I don't think you'll get a buzz is harmful, he said. Sackler added that the comments from the representative to the doctor actually could be helpful because maybe patients won't get a buzz and if you would like to know if they do, he might have had a good medical reason for wanting to know that. Maybe because he wanted to know if they were going to get addicted or not telling them won't get a buzz will cause you to prescribe an addictive drug to people without

thinking it will get them addicted. Yeah, because if you're not getting a buzz, then why would you do it addicted? Yeah, exactly. If it's not going to give you a buzz, once they develop a painkiller that doesn't get you high, that's great. Like, I mean, I say this as a guy who loves getting high on painkillers. That's like one of the best medicines you could possibly invent is something that just stops pain and doesn't have an abuse potential, which is what they were saying, actually content was. But, you know, drive through the Midwest, you will see that it is not. Oh, it causes so much pain. Yeah, it really does. It's a nightmarish. Now, between 1996 and 2001, the number of OxyContin prescriptions in the US went from 300,000 to 6 million. Now, this might sound to you

if your podcast, Valkyrie Me This, went from 300,000 downloads in a week to 6 million, I assume everybody at Valkyrie Me This would be happy. I know I'd be happy. I mean, Sophie, we'd be super psyched. Richard Sackler was not happy with this. In 1999, when employee Michael Friedman told him that Purdue was now making more than $20 million a week, Sackler replied instantly to his email after midnight that sales were, in his opinion, not so great. After all, if we are to do 900 million this year, we should be running at 75 million a month. So it looks like this month, it could be 80 or 90 million. Blah, humbug, yawn, where was I? Wow. Only 20 million a week, man. Has he seen the play you cannot take it with you?

It's you can't take it with you. Yeah. At a certain point, everyone, as far as I know, unless Purdue is figured out a cure, you're going to have to leave it all behind. You can't spend all that, Richard. But I'd sure like to be challenged, too. I mean, I feel like if I made $20 million in a lifetime, that would allow me to live beyond my wildest dreams. That's enough money, for example. If I had three months rent in the bank today, I wouldn't be crying myself home. This is one of those things. I don't tend to, I think it's actually dangerous to talk jokingly too much about guillotines and stuff. But when you look at people living this way, and then you realize that 70% of Americans have less than $1,000 in the bank, it's like, what do you think this is

going to end, buddy? You're selling poison to people and you're not happy at 20 million a week, and there's people worried that they have to choose between insulin and food for the month. What do you think the long term is on this? It's frustrating. And that's the nicest way you could put it. It's very frustrating. Now, by 2001, Purdue held more than half of the market share for long-acting opioids. That year was also the first year annual sales of OxyContin broke $1 billion. So in the span of five years, OxyContin sales went from $48 million in a year to $1 billion in a year. The New York Times article that announced this noted that these sales were, quote, even more than Viagra. If you have found a way to sell people

something that they want more than erections, you're selling a drug, like a dangerous drug. Like I feel like that's across the board, true. Now, that New York Times report also noted that the drug had been involved in the deaths of at least 120 people. In the year 2000, the Sackler family was warned that a journalist was, quote, sniffing around the OxyContin abuse story. The family discussed this threat during their next board meeting in Crafterry. Wait, this is only the year 2000? We're just up to 2000. I knew somebody that died of OxyContin before the year 2000. How was there only 120 cases of people dead then? Oh, there were more, but this is just what they'd confirmed. We're talking about journalists digging into it before

this was common knowledge. So they had found 120 cases, but obviously there were probably thousands at that point. Yeah, that's crazy that they're only starting to discover. I guess in my world, I thought that that was something not to go to, it's not my therapy session, but when I was younger, people were taking OxyContin and it was not that bad. Like everybody was like, oh, this is just a pill that you give from the doctor's office and they'd abuse the shit out of it. It's like, well, at least it's not heroin, but then obviously the next step is heroin. Yeah, the next step is heroin, then you wind up in that fentanyl shit and then you die. I don't think fentanyl is around when I was a kid. No, fentanyl, that's now. Yeah, they were just moving to heroin.

Thank God. Yeah. Geez, sorry, sorry. That's scary stuff. When I hear them say 120 people dead in 2000, I'm like, that can't be true. No, that was just like who the New York Times could confirm. It's like, I mean, I assume there was a lot of legwork behind that. Probably. I wouldn't be surprised if maybe the pharmaceutical company was trying to hide it. That's exactly what we're about to get to. So the family discussed this threat during their next board meeting and crafted a response that was, their goal was that the response, quote, deflects attention away from the company owners. So the, the, the Sacklers who made up the majority of the Purdue board, when they hear that a journalist is sniffing around is like, okay, well,

they're going to probably figure out that a lot of people are dying on Oxy, but we got to keep our names out of this shit. We don't want to hurt the family. Sounds a little bit like the mob. Shortly thereafter, Time put together an article on Oxycontin deaths. Concerned Purdue employees asked Richard Sackler, then the CEO, about this. He wrote that the Times coverage was not, quote, balanced. Blame the deaths on drug addicts and assured them, we intend to stay the course and speak out for people in pain who far outnumber the drug addicts abusing our product. Wow. That sounds like such a familiar tone. Yeah. I don't know. It's reminiscent of, of arguments I've heard from idiots to this day. Yeah. Unnamed idiots. Yeah. In 2001, there were about eight

drug overdose deaths for every hundred thousand Americans. By 2010, that number had almost doubled to 15 deaths per hundred thousand on a national scale. This equated to tens of thousands of new dead people. And most of them were dying from opiate painkillers, including Oxycontin. Now, many of them were actually ODing on heroin, but it just so happened that most of those deaths were, of course, folks who got hooked initially on an opiate painkiller, like our good friend Oxycontin. In January of 2001, Richard Sackler received a request for help from a Purdue sales associate. The rep had been to a community meeting at a local high school, convened by a group of mothers whose kids had all overdosed and died on Oxycontin. Quote, statements were made that Oxycontin sales

were at the expense of dead children. And the only difference between heroin and Oxycontin is that you can get Oxycontin from a doctor. The very next month, a story dropped that 59 people had died in a single month from Oxycontin in the state of Massachusetts. Richard's response was this, quote, this is not too bad. It could have been worse. Yeah, could have been more people. It will be soon. Very next week, a mother wrote a letter to Purdue Pharmaceutical stating, quote, my son was only 28 years old when he died from Oxycontin on New Year's Day. We all miss him very much, his wife, especially on Valentine's Day. Why would a company make a product that strong, 80 and 160 milligram when they know it will kill young people? My son had a bad back and

could have taken Motrin, but his doctor started him on Vicodin, then Oxycontin, then Oxycontin SR. Now he is dead. A Purdue staff member responded to this by saying simply, I see a liability issue here. Any suggestions? That was like the company responses. Like, oh, there's moms. We might get sued over this. Like, no other concerns. Later that month, Richard Sackler finally came up with the solution to this problem so many people were whining about for some reason. He wrote in a confidential company email, quote, we have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless animals. According to a state of Massachusetts lawsuit filed like this year, quote, Richard followed that strategy for the

rest of his career, collect millions from selling addictive drugs and blame the terrible consequences on the people who became addicted. By their misconduct, the Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible. And the stigma they used as a weapon made the crisis worse. So get people addicted to a drug, then encourage the criminalization of that abuse and attack the users themselves, which will of course make people less likely to get help, which will make them more likely to buy more of your drug. Because then you're a villain when you're actually a victim. Keeps you by an oxy. The only thing that would make it worse is if the Sackler family started investing in privatized prisons. Tell me they didn't. No, I mean, actually, they may have.

A lot of their money is dark, but we will get to what they spend their money on a little bit later. Oh, no. Don't tell me. It's pretty bad. This strategy worked for a little while. But by 2010, the nation had started to wake up to the dangers of oxy content and Purdue was forced to carry out what Esquire describes as a breathtaking pivot, quote, embracing the arguments critics had been making for years about oxy contents, susceptibility to abuse, the company released a new formulation of the medication that was harder to snort or inject. Purdue seized the occasion to rebrand itself as an industry leader in abuse deterrent technology. The change of heart coincided with two developments. First, an increasing number of addicts and able to afford oxy contents high

street price were turning to cheaper alternatives like heroin. Second, oxy content was nearing the end of its patents. Purdue suddenly argued that the drug it had been selling for nearly 15 years was so prone to abuse that generic manufacturers should not be allowed to copy it. Three years later, on April 16, 2013, the day several oxy content patents were set to expire, the FDA gave Purdue what they wanted, banning anyone else from selling generic oxy content. Purdue basically extended the profitability of their chief cash cow by arguing that it was too dangerous to let anyone else sell. And did that stand? Yeah, yeah. So now I have mixed feelings. I think it's awful. And there should not be generic versions of oxy content out there.

So less is better, no matter how you put it. You don't want to just give more weapons to people just because one person has it. Do you think it's probably impossible to say that lives were saved by not giving that patent generic options? I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. I don't think it did anything but allow Purdue to keep profiting from it. If there was any reduce in loss of life from that, it was canceled out from the fact that they were marketing this and pushing it so heavily to doctors and continuing to do so and continuing to try to get it on the market. I wouldn't give them any credit for that. Yeah, I can't give them credit because it's just out of greed. But I just wonder what would have

happened if it was opened up to generic markets. Purdue would have been even more abused. You could argue that it might have made the situation better because yeah, it's cheaper, but also that means that addicts aren't going to bankrupt themselves doing it. They're not going to have to steal shit in order to afford it. You do find that when there's places, I think Denmark's one of them, where they'll give heroin addicts free heroin, like the government will. You go to a government clinic and they'll give you the heroin to inject and stuff. They find out that number one, it doesn't create more addicts. Number two, the government saves money because they're not out committing crimes. They're not breaking into houses and

stealing shit in order to... You could argue that it again made things worse on the addicts by there not being a generic available, even though it's not great for people to be addicted to oxy. It's one of those hard questions that is above my brain scale. You also might argue that it killed more people because oxycontin is safer than heroin. And if you can't afford oxycontin, you're just going to go to heroin or fentanyl. Yeah, actually, that's true. Yeah, you could argue that if there was just cheap oxy, maybe we'd have a few more addicts, but we'd have less overdoses. So yeah, I think they might have killed more people that way. Now, Richard Sackler's personal attitude towards the harm his drug was doing is illustrated by the case of Purdue,

Germany. According to ProPublica, quote, 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. In other words, in Germany and all across the EU, Richard Sackler's goal was to be able to sell oxycontin not as a

prescription medication, but as an uncontrolled painkiller. And that's not the same as over the counter? I think it's a little different. It's a little different. You have to have somebody tell you to get it, but you don't necessarily have to go through a doctor visit. Yeah, yeah, I think that's what that means. Like, you don't have to go to a, like a dot, like, yeah, you can't like just pick it up like you can and go out of mall, for example. But you can, you can get it without there being any of the controls that we put on. And was there argument later that they were just simply to saying, no, Germany, we were saying it was out of control. These drugs are out of control. They were the ones who made it. I'm kind of surprised they didn't take that argument.

Yeah. Robert Keiko, one of the men who had actually developed oxycontin, warned Richard Sackler when he learned of this plan, quote, if oxycontin is uncontrolled in Germany, it is highly likely that it will eventually be abused there and then controlled. Richard's response to Keiko showed zero concern about the impact of releasing an addictive drug uncontrolled onto an entire continent. How substantially would it improve your sales? A lot. Yeah. A lot. When the German government ruled that oxycontin would be treated like any other addictive narcotic, Richard asked if it was possible to appeal. A German Purdue executive told him that this was not possible. And Sackler wrote back, Tursley, when we are next together, we should talk about

how this idea was raised and why it failed to be realized. I thought it was a good idea if it could be done. I'm sorry. What year was this just generally? Is this more recent? Yeah. This is like in the late 2000s. This is pretty recently. Yeah. And I don't know a lot about Germany and I've never been there. But I've worked in video games and I know that Germany has some strict rules on video games and people are bringing video games from outside so they can get past certain ratings. Now, I would imagine that that means if these are uncontrolled substances, doesn't that affect all the countries that are around Germany that they'd be flooded with oxycontin? Yeah. It sure it could have caused the nightmare epidemic.

Yeah. Wow. Thankfully, the Germans were like, took one look at the US and were like, I don't think we want that here. Yeah. Yeah. We already had enough of a problem with obiates in our past. We're good. We're good. So that's what we got today. When we come back on Thursday, we're going to talk about, among other things, the court case in 2007 against Purdue Pharmaceutical, the ongoing legal stuff now. And of course, we're going to get a lot into the marketing of oxycontin, which we haven't really talked about that much this episode, but there is quite a lot to say. But that's all next Thursday. Do you want to plug your plugables before we roll out? I mean, if you're still, if you didn't hear at the beginning, because you were fast forwarding,

here it is. Alchemy, this releases every Tuesday and Thursday. It is funny. We get suggestions from the audience and we make an improv show up. It's with Kevin Pollack. Yes. That Kevin Pollack. And we have a live show May 7th at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater in Los Angeles. Please come. So check it out. Dynasty Typewriter Theater May 7th. James Heaney, you want to plug in of your social media? Oh, yeah. You can find me at theheen. That's on Twitter. And a great way to find me is briefnewsbrief.com. It has all the different ways to get ahold of me. Awesome. Well, check out James Heaney on the internet and check out this podcast on the web at behindthebastards.com. Check us out on Twitter and the Graham at At Bastards Pod and buy a shirt. You can buy a cup holder.

You could buy an SBG9 Recoilous Rifle branded with the Behind the Bastards logo and equipment in case you've got to take out a T72. Like we all find ourselves needing to do at some point. So what else, what else are we doing? Is that all the plugs? Oh, I have another show called It Could Happen Here. It could happen in your ear. I've been listening to the ads for it. It's not out yet, is it? Oh, it is. Oh my gosh. I'm super excited about the civil war could happen here in the States. It sure could. And spoiler, you don't want it to. No, I'm not surprised. It wouldn't be good. I actually am really excited to listen to it. I'm still I'm embarrassed. I'm still finishing up End of the World. But once I've done with that, that's my next one. Well, make it your next one,

listener, because it will make you sad and scared. And we all want to be sad and scared, don't we? All right. Well, we'll be back Thursday. I'm very hungover right now. So this has been a little bit of a scattered, scattered brain episode. Sophie is saying she's very aware of this fact. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, this is the end of the episode. Dan'll is looking at me like when the fuck are you going to stop? And it's now, right now, right this moment now. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup. Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for

this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price? Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to

go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.