Cadden used high risk to live high life
Tainted drugs killed 25
As the portraits of dead grandmothers and grandfathers, housewives and smiling retirees floated across the giant TV screen, I kept staring at Barry Cadden, calmly seated between his defense lawyers.
He looked more like a guy who’d sell you a Subaru over a cup of coffee than, say, Whitey Bulger.
Perhaps it was Cadden’s nicely tailored business suit, or his general sponginess that only added to the irony that this guy was being charged with causing the deaths of 25 people … six more than Whitey’s body count.
Folks like Douglas Wingate and Godwin Mitchell went to clinics in Virginia and Florida seeking relief from back pain. They expected the steroid injections they received would bring relief.
What those steroid injections brought to these two grandfathers and dozens of other victims across the country was a gruesome death of bacterial meningitis.
It was Barry Cadden’s company, New England Compounding Center, that shipped out batches of drugs tainted with mold to various clinics across the country.
Federal prosecutor George Varghese yesterday told the jury that NECC, under Cadden and his partner, Glenn Chin, specialized in what’s known as “highrisk compounding” or “injectables” designed to be delivered directly into the epidural space at the base of the spinal column.
“Finding mold in your cleaning room is like a fire alarm. You need to act,” he added. “Barry Cadden didn’t act.
“He was making millions of dollars off it (high-risk compounding), but he couldn’t be bothered by it. He couldn’t be bothered by the patients who used those drugs.”
Varghese’s opening was supplemented by rather slick visuals designed to deconstruct the biology involved into a case of multiple second-degree murders. And it was effective.
The essence of the government’s case lies in the contention that Cadden ran NECC as a pharmacy rather than as a manufacturer, which allowed him to skirt much stricter government regulations and oversight.
Cadden’s lawyer, Bruce Singal, told the jury that the sins of NECC could not be laid at the feet of his client. “He cannot be held responsible for all the corporate wrongs,” Singal said.
But Varghese countered by portraying NECC as “Barry Cadden’s baby. He was NECC.”
Cadden is the son of a pharmacist who worked in Walgreens filling prescriptions, until he and his wife realized there was far more money to be made producing batches of painkillers.
By the time people like Douglas Wingate and Godwin Mitchell began dying from those tainted drugs produced in Barry Cadden’s “high-risk” compounding in 2012, Cadden and his wife were living the high life.
It might have been enough to make Whitey Bulger jealous.