Dreamland: Part 2: The Criminal Case Summary & Analysis

In October 2006, four years after he ordered an investigation into Purdue Pharma, John Brownlee, the U.S. Attorney in Western Virginia, receives a call on behalf of the drug company. By 2006, Brownlee believed he had enough proof to testify against Purdue for criminal misbranding. Despite never providing the FDA with supporting studies, Purdue had for years claimed that OxyContin was nonaddictive. The company produced graphs that supposedly showed that the pill’s “timed-release formula” resulted in fewer highs and lows; federal investigations, however, would suggest that these graphs were erroneous and exaggerated. Similarly, Purdue claimed that patients on smaller doses of the drug could stop without experiencing withdrawal; this, too, proved to be false.

In 2005, Hershel Jick was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury at a federal prosecution against Purdue. Meanwhile, in Abingdon, John Brownlee’s case against Purdue moves forward, and the company pleads guilty to felony misbranding of OxyContin and “pa[ys] a $634.5 million fine,” of which $34.5 million is paid by Purdue executives. Each executive also pleads guilty to one count of misdemeanor misbranding, and each is placed on probation and assigned community service hours. When the Purdue executives are sentenced in federal court in 2007, a mother whose son had died of an overdose says, “You are […] nothing more than a large corporate drug cartel.”

Meanwhile, Dr. Phillip Prior of Southern Ohio moves from family medicine to specializing in addiction at the Veterans Administration hospital in Chillicothe, where he is shocked to see that heroin has arrived in Southern Ohio, peddled easily to “a region where OxyContin had already tenderized a generation of folks to opiate use.”