How Big Pharma Gets Away with Marketing Murder

That was before the FDA, you say — back when you could literally order Heroin-laced children’s cough syrup through the Sears catalog.

But the 1990s might as well be the 1890s when it comes to OxyContin — marketed to teenage athletes/arthritic grandmas alike as safe and non-addictive pain relief, a miracle drug.

OxyContin was supposedly longer-lasting and less addictive than existing pain medications. According to the PR sales pitch, there was no need to keep popping pills — just one Oxy down the hatch and you’d be good to go, fit as a fiddle.

But that 12-hour pain relief turned out to be an exaggerated stretch — an awkward marketing problem. Doctors started to figure out the new opiate didn’t last much longer than existing pain meds. Oxy risked losing its market edge and the very justification for its existence.

So Purdue Pharma pushed stronger, more potent scripts — leading to an addiction epidemic and a spiraling typhoon of overdoses: more than 72,000 opioid deaths in 2017, roughly 15,000 more dead Americans in a single year than were killed during the entire Vietnam War.

In a marketing push to brand OxyContin as “non-addictive,” Purdue Pharma actually gave away Oxy Teddy Bears — so cute you’d drool like a baby.

They even handed out shitty jazz CDs titled “Get in the Swing with OxyContin.”

Charlie Parker must be twitching in his grave.

She Swalled a Spider to Catch the…

Some of the world’s most addictive drugs are rooted in nature — but then synthesized, manufactured and marketed by big drug companies.

Like we said, Heroin is derived from morphine. And morphine is a chemical derivative of the poppy plant. It’s all fly, spider, horse down the gateway hatch.

But what exactly drove Purdue Pharma to synthesize OxyContin? Addiction to profits & patent law — that’s what.

In the early ‘90s, Purdue Pharma was about to lose their patent on MS Contin — a powerful pain opioid for cancer patients. They took the chemical compounds of that drug (essentially the rearranged chemical makeup of poppy seeds) and put it through the blender of chemistry. Presto! A brand new pain drug they could sell to just about anyone with a pulse.

Addiction’s a sad and deadly disease — and a highly profitable business. What starts as a new miracle cure becomes the next pandemic — dollars in the bank, bodies in the wake.

Binge Between the Lines — the Origins of Cocaine & Speed

The history of pharmacy lines up like a mirror on a coffee table at 3 in the morning. And speaking of cocaine — that actually first began as nature repackaged for convenience, marketed as medicine.

In the 1880s, pharma company Parke-Davis figured out how to extract coca leaves onsite in South America to be shippable and importable in an age before refrigeration. That neat lab trick gave birth to cocaine — which was soon prescribed in drugstores throughout America for everything from back pain to toothache. Kids loved it!

Then there’s all the fun of Dilaudid — “five times as potent as morphine, as harmless as water,” the ads read — and so addictive, it beats breathing. And don’t forget Fentanyl, Quaaludes, and gold old crystal meth. Toxin Rid 10 Day Detox Reviews

Hard drugs are rooted in nature — corrupted by chemistry — sold by Big Pharma M.D. on Wall St. for $1.99.

Profit Pandemic — Murder M.D. @ Your Local Walgreens

We are currently living through the deadliest drug epidemic in American history — in a country that once prescribed Heroin to pregnant mothers and babies.

And it’s not like you can blame the addicts — one Walgreens Pharmacy in Port Richey, Fla. got caught handing out 3,271 bottles of Oxycodone every month. That town’s population? 2,831.

In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to misbranding in its Oxy marketing. They earned $35 billion dollars in revenue but paid only $600 million in fines — the cost of doing business, kinda like paying Square’s surcharge of 2.75%.

And now nobody knows where to put all the bodies — literally:

• One Ohio morgue had to order a mobile freezer for its parking lot to handle the overflow of its dead.
• Overdoses are now the leading cause of death for people under 50 — more than guns and car accidents, killing at a rate faster than HIV at its peak.
• Today, the annual death toll from opioids is 10 times higher than it was in 2000 when Oxy first started making waves.

Big Pharma’s dope history is a pretty wild ride — like Leo in that Lamborghini blitzed out of his mind. And just when you think you’ve hit rock bottom, you realize — The Wolf of Wall St. is actually a freaking long movie and the real shit is only starting to hit the fan.