Sackler foreign firm caught up in opioid probe
PARMA, Italy — The police huddled for hours each day, headphones on, eavesdropping on the doctor. They’d tapped his cell phone, bugged his office, planted a camera in a trattoria.
They heard him boast about his power to help Big Pharma make millions pushing painkillers, and about all the money they say he was paid in exchange.
Now Dr. Guido Fanelli is at the center of a sprawling corruption case alleging he took kickbacks from an alliance of pharmaceutical executives he nicknamed “The Pain League.” Its members, police say, included managers with Mundipharma — the international arm of Purdue Pharma, which is facing some 2,000 lawsuits in the United States over its role in the opioid crisis that has claimed 400,000 lives in two decades.
This is the first known case outside the U.S. where employees of the pharmaceutical empire owned by the Sackler family have been criminally implicated, more than a decade after Purdue executives were convicted over misleading the American public about the addictiveness of OxyContin.
Hundreds of pages of investigative files obtained by The Associated Press detail how Fanelli helped executives from Mundipharma’s Italian branch and other companies promote painkillers by writing papers, organizing conferences and working to counter government warnings that opioid consumption was spiking and that physicians should be cautious. The message trumpeted, the AP found, was that there is an epidemic of chronic pain, addiction fears are exaggerated and not prescribing opioids can amount to neglecting the suffering of patients.
Those are the same practices, experts say, that the pharmaceutical industry employed in the U.S. beginning in the 1990s that helped pave the road to disaster.
What Italian police overheard on their wiretaps offers a look at how pharmaceutical executives still pushed opioids abroad even after the cause and consequence of the American epidemic had become apparent.
As the U.S. market contracts, opioid consumption is climbing overseas. Canada and Australia are already following America’s catastrophic course, with rising rates of addiction and death. Others may be on the cusp of crisis: Researchers in Brazil report that prescription opioid sales have skyrocketed 465% in six years. Overdose deaths are going up in Sweden, Norway, Ireland and England, fueled by prescription painkillers and the illicit drug trade.
Opioid consumption has increased in Italy, too, though authorities say widespread addiction has not taken root in this country with historically strict regulations.