Purdue Pharma to end Oxy promotion

New strategy cuts salesforce by more than 50 percent

STAMFORD — Purdue Pharma, the maker of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, will no longer market its opioids to doctors, a major change for a company frequently accused of deceptively promoting its drugs.

“We have restructured and significantly reduced our commercial operation and will no longer be promoting opioids to prescribers,” the company said in a statement.

The new strategy cuts the Stamford-based company’s salesforce by more than 50 percent, to a total of about 200. Purdue also plans to send a letter Monday to prescribers to announce its sales personnel will no longer come to their offices to discuss the company’s opioids. Prescribers’ questions and requests for information about opioids such as OxyContin will now be handled by Purdue’s medical affairs department.

Remaining sales representatives will focus on Symproic, which treats opioidinduced constipation in adult patients with noncancer chronic pain, and other potential non-opioid drugs.

Among earlier measures aimed at tackling the opioid crisis, Purdue said it has directed prescribers for the past two years to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain. The company said it has referred prescribers to an open letter from Dr. Vivek Murthy, published when he was the U.S. surgeon general, urging medical professionals to join him in tackling the epidemic of opioid abuse.

The salesforce overhaul follows a torrent of lawsuits in the past year that have accused Purdue of falsely marketing its opioids. OxyContin is its top-selling drug, bringing in billions of dollars in annual revenues.

Prosecutors who have sued Purdue say the marketing and proliferation of OxyContin have fueled opioid abuse and overdoses in their cities and states. Among the most recent complaints, Alabama sued last week and New York City filed litigation last month.

The company has denied the lawsuits’ allegations.

From 1999 to 2016, more than 200,000 people in the U.S. died from overdoses related to prescription opioids, according to the CDC. Overdose deaths involving prescription opioids were five times higher in 2016 than in 1999, while sales of those drugs quadrupled, the CDC said.

Toby Talbot / Associated Press Stamford-based Purdue Pharma manufactures OxyContin, an opioid that makes billions of dollars for the company, but also is the subject of lawsuits against the company from across the U.S.