Purdue opioids taking fatal toll in Mass., court filing says
STAMFORD — More than 800 people in Massachusetts have died from opioidrelated overdoses since January 2009, after filling prescriptions in that period for Purdue Pharma’s OxyContin, according to a bankruptcy court filing this week by a 24state group that includes Massachusetts and Connecticut.
The states argued that their findings from the state’s Prescription Monitoring Program — which showed at least 53 people who had taken OxyContin in the past decade had died in the first half of 2019 — confirmed the dangers of Purdue’s topselling drug, while company officials disputed those conclusions about the opioid. Citing widespread evidence showing that prescriptionopioid addiction increases the risk of death from those drugs or illicit opioids, lawsuits from those states and nearly 2,700 others against Purdue that are being handled in federal bankruptcy court have argued that deceptive marketing of OxyContin has contributed to many thousands of fatal overdoses nationwide in recent years.
“People are still dying and suffering, and Purdue has yet to do all it can to address the ongoing consequences of illegal actions,” Connecticut Attorney General William Tong said in a statement. “It has a moral and legal obligation during this bankruptcy proceeding to protect patients through provision of Naloxone, providing support for treatment and assisting in transitions to safer pain management, among other necessary steps.”
In a statement, Purdue responded that “the supposedly new information cited by the dissenters about the risks of OxyContin is highly misleading. They attribute deaths to OxyContin no matter how many years had passed since
a patient had been prescribed OxyContin or what other factors or drugs contributed to their deaths.”
But those 24 states — which have not agreed to settlement terms with Purdue — said they are adamant about their findings, including their data on patients taking OxyContin’s maximumstrength of 80 milligrams.
From January 2009 to November 2019, 7,437 patients in Massachusetts filled prescriptions for 80milligram OxyContin, those states said in the filing. At least 140 of those patients — equal to about 2 percent — have died of opioidinvolved overdoses, they found.
The fatality rate rose to nearly 4 percent for the hundreds of patients who were prescribed 80milligram OxyContin by the 100 Massachusetts prescribers whom Purdue sales representatives visited most frequently, the states said.
“The evidence demonstrates that specific patients are at the greatest risk of fatal overdoses: those who have taken Purdue opioids at the highest doses for
the longest time,” their filing said. “The data indicate that, unless effective measures are taken, thousands of Purdue patients will die of overdoses during this case.”
Massachusetts’ fatal opioid overdoses included scores of patients who died within weeks of filling their last OxyContin prescription, as well as individuals who died months or years after their prescriptions ended, the states also found.
Among the 17 OxyContin patients in Massachusetts who have died from opioids in 2019, six of them received their last prescription of the drug five or more years ago, and the two who received prescriptions in 2019 took “low doses” of 10 milligrams or 20 milligrams, Purdue said of the states’ data.
Connecticut’s lawsuit does not outline how many OxyContin patients in Connecticut have died from opioids. “There are no plans at this time” to release such data, Elizabeth Tong, a spokeswoman for Tong, said Wednesday.
Alleged marketing impact
As the lawsuits mounted, Purdue ended its opioid marketing in February 2018 and disbanded its sales force four
months later.
When it made those moves, it “knew that its past marketing would continue to drive OxyContin prescriptions in the future,” the filing said. In November 2017, the company determined that OxyContin sales were “mainly from carryover” that reflected patients who had continued taking the drug and the marketing’s longterm impact, the states said.
Related to their findings, the states asked in their filing several questions tied to measures that they said would help prevent opioidrelated injuries and deaths. Those queries included whether Purdue should support the distribution of the overdosereversing drug Naloxone to patients who have taken OxyContin at high doses or long periods and whether the company should retract, disclaim or undo any of its past marketing.
Tong and other attorneys general representing the nonconsenting states have criticized Purdue’s settlement offer for, in their view, not going far enough to tackle the opioid crisis.
Purdue has stood by its proposal, which it values at more than $10 billion. That total would include “millions of doses of lifesaving opioidoverdosereversal medicines,” the company said.
Connecticut and the other nonconsenting states also raised the questions of whether Purdue should stop selling 80milligram OxyContin and whether it should ask the U.S. Food & Drug Administration to add warnings or restrictions to OxyContin’s package labeling.
“The lawyers for the dissenting states are attempting to substitute their judgment for the scientific experts at the FDA,” Purdue’s statement said. “Each and every dosage form of OxyContin is a lawful prescription medication approved by the FDA and relied upon by patients for the treatment of longterm, severe pain.”
At the same time, the company said it was supporting an FDA review of the safety of highdose opioids that was launched in response to a citizens’ petition and that it would “abide by any determination the agency makes.”
An FDA spokesman said Wednesday that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.