The Purdue Plea Deal: Power Gets Its Way

The Purdue Plea Deal: Power Gets Its Way; by Siobhan Reynolds; War on Doctors/Pain Crisis blog of the Pain Relief Network; 2007-07-25.

Purdue Pharma was coerced, under threat of destruction by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), into pleading guilty to charges that their drug was “more addictive” than they had claimed, the government alleging that the company failed to inform both doctors and the public of this information when it came available.

The problem for Americans in pain is that this private deal creates, if you will, a “fact” on the public record that is not factual, a “fact” that severely prejudices the interests of patients in pain.

Whether Purdue is in reality guilty of misinforming the public as to the “abusablity” of the medicine is not in serious dispute. Indeed they seem to have promoted the drug as less abusable than other opioid medicines, even when they had evidence that recreational users had figured out how to defeat the time release mechanism. Opioid drugs are all abusable. Purdue’s attempt to stand out from other opioid pain medicines in this manner was certainly ill-advised.

The lawlessness that we should be concerned about, however, is not Purdue’s but rather the United States Department of Justices’, whose character has changed much for the worse in recent years.

One need only look at what happened to the Arthur Andersen corporation in 2005 to understand the overwhelming force exerted by the United States DOJ. When it seeks to get its way, the law be damned. See:

ARTHUR ANDERSEN LLP v. UNITED STATES ¹

While Arthur Andersen was ultimately exonerated by the Supreme Court, and more to the point, while the US DOJ was caught and exposed for procuring a criminal conviction without any showing of mens rea, Arthur Anderson was, nevertheless, destroyed as an institution.

Purdue would have faced the same fate if they’d taken the government on. But in rolling over as they have, Purdue caved into the government’s desire to create facts through the application of power.

The US DOJ has engaged in a brutal and systematic campaign to intimidate medical practitioners out of prescribing opioid medications, supposedly legal medications when prescribed by a licensed clinician. This has caused a society-wide breach of the duty of care owed patients by physicians and represents a wholesale attack on the doctor/patient relationship, severely impinging on the due process rights of Americans in pain. Many people in severe pain, especially those with high dose requirements, have been maimed or killed as a result.

In coercing this plea deal, the US government effectively dissuades pharmaceutical companies from manufacturing better opioid pain drugs, drugs that are badly needed by the estimated [10 million Americans suffering in out-of-control pain][rsw99]. ² As the US Government does not keep suicide statistics of deaths that result from untreated pain, the worst effects of the DOJ ’s policy and actions are not being reckoned with, either in the press, or in the Congress, or by the public at large.

Nevertheless, patients, innocent ill Americans are dying in droves. In addition to suicide, they develop deadly conditions secondary to the stress of the barriers to relief they daily endure, often dying of conditions such as heart disease and stroke that arise as a result of the sedentary life style imposed on them by their easily treatable but untreated pain.

Opioid medications have been a Godsend to man for over two thousand years, but now, in America under the Bush Administration, American men and women, even veterans and little children, are unable to access dosages that provide relief. The overarching goal of the government’s campaign appears to be the maintenance of the widespread and highly prejudicial (to patients in pain) confusion over the very real difference between the phenomenon of addiction and the phenomenon of physical dependence. While addiction is a terrible problem for that minority who suffer its ravages, it is indeed an affliction only rarely caused by exposure to opioid analgesics for pain. This was quite definitively demonstrated by studies done by the US Government itself on data compiled on soldiers returning from Vietnam. Physical dependence is merely a phenomenon that arises from ongoing use. Addiction is a poorly understood, far less common, disorder that appears to have environmental and genetic causes. Diabetics are dependent on insulin yet no one would assert that diabetics are addicted to insulin.

Because of the Federal imperative to manifest a “drug free America,” which fuels the explosive growth of both Federal law enforcement apparatus and the addiction treatment industry, the simple, scientific truth that opioids are safe, and effective, and lack inherent ‘addictiveness’ poses a grave threat to the Federal bureaucracy. Hence the government’s ongoing attempt to confuse the population about the prevalence, natural history, and social cost of drug addiction.

The Justice Department uses the Federal court system to coerce agreements out of people and companies so as to generate false evidence of a large drug addiction problem. The attorneys at the DOJ and the members of the Executive branch ultimately responsible for this effort are using their power to suppress science, undermining the public health. In doing so they act as domestic enemies of our Republic.

We abhor this outrageous misuse of public trust, public moneys and goodwill, and denounce it in the strongest possible terms.

– Siobhan Reynolds, Pain Relief Network

References:

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ARTHUR ANDERSEN LLP v. UNITED STATES. Certiorari to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit; No. 04-368. Argued April 27, 2005 - Decided May 31, 2005. Available. ↩
Roper Starch Worldwide. Chronic Pain in America: Roadblocks to Relief. Report to the American Pain Society, Glenville, IL, 1999. Available ). ↩