Part One: The Sackler Family: America's Deadliest Drug Dealers

In Episode 56, Robert is joined by James Heaney (Alchemy This) to discuss the drug dealing family responsible for destroying America's Heartland. 

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hmm, what's wagon mattails? I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
the Bastards. Uh. Sophie is giving me the thumbs up
for that. Intro this podcast, we talked about all the
bad people, stuff you don't know about him, all that
good jazz. My guest with me is James Heeney, actor
comedian James. Welcome to the show. Hi, it's a super

(00:21):
big pleasure to come in here. I've listened to a
lot of episodes. I've spoken towards the speakers in my car.
This is the first time I'm gonna get responses. I'm
really happy about that. Well, I'm I'm glad to hear
that you you shout at my disembodied voice. I like
to imagine thousands of people doing that into their cars
every morning. Whenever I see somebody else talking to themselves

(00:41):
in the car, I imagine they're listening to Behind the Bastards.
So do I, So do I. It's narcissism in my case,
but it's very flattering in yours. Thank you. You know.
I don't want to blow too much time, but I
always start the first episode thinking to myself, Gosh, this
person could be me, and then the second episodes. I'm like,
thank God, there's some distant between myself and this monster. Well, James,

(01:04):
you get anything you want to plug in the p
zone would uh. I'm part of the same network alchemy
this it's twice a week Tuesdays and Thursdays Improv podcast
with Kevin Pollock. Yes, that Kevin Pollock, and specifically we
have a live show at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater on
May seven at eight pm. Gosh, it would be great

(01:24):
if everyone came. It would everyone book a ticket to
l a flood the theater. Do not let them not
see you demand to be let in, bring weaponry, um
force your way in riot. Well, well that might be
be just just crossing a threshold there. Yeah, you might
find yourself in the second episode of Behind the Bastards
with that attitude. We're we're gearing up for that. I

(01:46):
do like to urge crimes every every third or fourth episode,
just just just my little way of thumb in my
nose at the FTC because they can't they can't do
anything about podcasts. I didn't realize they had no control
over there. They don't not over podcasts. It's we're in
international waters of radio. Like it's the there's there's no
law here, there's no maps for these territories. Do you
worry of her that people are going to get your

(02:08):
your tricks? Like I heard some stash tricks about drugs
the other week, and I thought, maybe all the cops
know it now. Yeahs. See, that's part of what I
I worry about, which is why I don't tell my
good stash tricks on the air. But if they're listening,
they've got to be cool, right, Yeah, they've gotta be
cool cops. Threshold of cool that goes along with a
listener behind the past exactly. So we assume that like

(02:29):
those of the cops will let you slide for a
little bit of weed, quarter pound of math or you know,
just like little stuff, you know, okay, quarter pounds a
lot of not if you're not, if you're doing a
lot of maths, that just a couple of weeks. Yeah,
I guess so anyway, Uh, speaking actually of of of
drug dealers. Uh, we're talking about drug dealers today probably

(02:49):
the most successful, wealthiest, uh and deadliest drug dealers in
the history of the world. Have you ever heard of
the Sackler family. I have not heard of the Sackler family.
Have you ever heard of oxyconton? I have heard, Yeah,
I have heard. That's actually not I don't like oxycont
never done it, never done it. I'm free to say

(03:11):
I've done a lot of things, never touched oxyconton. See,
I really like pain killers, and I have messed around
with oxy a couple of times in the past, and
it's one of those things where I won't let myself
buy opiates because I know I would develop a problem,
Like fucking that, because I really enjoy them. I had
an injury when I was early in college and I
had like viking in or whatever, I don't know, maybe
it was coding whatever pill they gave me, but it

(03:32):
wasn't as good as acid, and it wasn't as good
as the other things I was doing, and I was
so worried that it would have a counter effect that
I ended up not taking them. And I think I've
really dodged the bullocks. I've gotten addictive personality. Yeah, it's
that's like one of the ones to really avoid because
that'll that'll fucking kill you pretty fast, which is so
upsetting because it's legal. Yeah, it's super legal, Uh, super

(03:54):
hard to control and really easy to go from, like like,
if you're just taking the pills, that's reasonably safe. It
The problem is people escalate and they start extracting the
oxy from the pills where they move up to fentnel
and then they they kill themselves, and it's like it's
just so hard to moderate, Like it's even alcohol, like
you know, probably on a societal level causes more problems,

(04:14):
but it's harder to kill yourself with um maybe not.
I guess that's you know, it's easier to kill other
people with that ball. So nobody's nobody's ramming a car
into somebody else while they're they're hopped up on oxy.
Probably probably, Actually I would say that. I wouldn't put
my seal of guarantee that people aren't driving on oxy.
Cotton definitely are driving on it. I just think they're
less dangerous. Probably, So if you're a drunk driver switched

(04:37):
to oxy, we should just roll right into the scow. Wow,
I'm sweating and you're talking, don't break the law. I
heard that whisper. I'm raper. Oh wait, that was the intro.
I'm just gonna start reading the episode now. In the
early before World War One, Sophie and Isaac Sackler immigrated

(04:58):
to the United States from Poland and Ukraine, respectively. They
were both Jewish, which you may recall was not a
great thing to be in Poland or Ukraine around the
turn of the twentieth century or a couple of decades
after the turn of the twentieth century, or like pretty
pretty rough. Now. I don't want to sound ignorant, but
I didn't realize that early on it was bad. I
thought it was towards like the twenties. No, I mean
that it was bad. It was got worse than but

(05:20):
like you know, the late eighteen hundreds, the Zelnisky massacre,
which was like a bunch of Cossacks killing it might
have been as many as half a million Jewish people,
the biggest program in Russian history, and that I think
was pretty close to Ukraine. It might have been in
some of what is I don't know the exact geographical area,
but like, yeah, it was pretty rough. A lot of
bad stuff happening. Um And I don't know if the

(05:40):
Sacklers fled Eastern Europe because of, you know, a desire
not to get murdered, or because of crushing poverty, but
it was probably like a mix of the two. Um
So these refugees established themselves in New York City. Isaac
became a grocer. He and his wife had two children,
the eldest of which was Arthur. Arthur grew up to
become a psychiatrist. His specialty was something called biological psychiatry.

(06:01):
He was the very first physician in the world to
use ultrasound for a diagnosis. He was a major critic
of electro convulsive therapy and was a significant figure in
the racial integration of New York City's blood donation. So
it's pretty good so far. Kind of a critic of
the electrotherapy myself, so I've kind of them on his side.
I believe they still use it sometimes there's certain things

(06:22):
that it really does help, because I know some people
who have found it very helpful. But I've heard the
same thing. It's so hard for me to believe. It
seems so barbaric. I think the problem was they used
to do it for like everything, like, oh you looking
at guys, let's shocker skull, Like there's a couple of
things that really does help with and now they pretty
much only do it for those things. And I thought
the over diagnosis of a d D was a problem.

(06:42):
I guess we're I guess we're lucky. We're we're progressing. Yeah,
if they I mean, they just hit you back then,
were having a d D. And like the fifties, like
that was that was your riddle and it was getting
bunched better than the shock therapy. I think, I don't know.
Maybe depends on the hand fair enough. Yeah. Now, at
this point, the Sackler family seemed to be living the
epitome of the America can Dream. They'd gone from dirt
poor refugees, too well off, groundbreaking physicians in fifty years.

(07:04):
Pretty cool, I'm impressed. Pretty cool. But in nineteen fifty two,
Arthur made a fateful purchase that would decades later crippled
the United States and secure his family a place in
historical infamy for all time. He bought a company called
Perdue Frederick, a pharmaceutical drugmaker. Now Perdue Frederick had been
established in eighteen ninety two selling what we're called patent medicines,
essentially snakewi. Prior to Arthur's purchase, Produce Frederick's main product

(07:27):
had been Gray's Glycerin tonic, a broad application remedy sold
as a cure for basically everything. It was mostly wine.
It cures something like I've definitely had some things cured.
But when I have a nasty case of the sobriety,
I just break open a bottle of medicinal wine and
you know that's very very quickly. Yeah, yeah, very very fast.

(07:49):
Now Arthur put his brothers, Mortimer and Raymond in charge
of the company. Morty had been born in nineteen sixteen
and ray in nineteen twenty. Both brothers were also psychiatrist,
so the whole family goes into psychiatry, which you know,
good for the parents. Hyh even kids. Yeah, I mean
that's impressive. They're they're owning stores. I guess colleges were
different back then. I mean, how does all yeah like

(08:10):
yet you mowe a couple of lawns and you can
get your bachelor's back then. Oh man, yeah, yeah, it's
one of those things you look at, like even in
the seventies, you could work part time and pay off
college by the time you graduate. And it was like,
don't make me cry on on microphone right here. Now
it costs as much as two new trucks, and that's

(08:31):
not a great college. So all three kids were psychologists, psychiatrists,
they're able to like at that which makes sense, Perdue,
Perdue exactly. So Arthur put his brothers Mortimer, oh yeah,
he put them in charge of the company. So Arthur
was free to vote himself to what was increasingly his
passion marketing. I'm going to quote from a fantastic Esquire

(08:52):
article by Christopher Glazock. Quote Arthur intuitive that print ads
and medical journals could have a revolutionary effect on pharmaceutical sales.
Espec actually given the excitement surrounding the miracle drugs of
the nineteen fifties steroids, antibiotics, antihistamines, in psychotropics. In nineteen
fifty two, the same year that he and his brothers
acquired Perdue, Arthur became the first admin to convince the
Journal of the American Medical Association, one of the profession's

(09:14):
most of best publications, to include a color advertorial brochure.
So that's this guy's like, well, that's the fucking problem.
That's like, if you start marketing, if you start marketing drugs,
then that means you're spending money because you want to
make more money. And is that not the whole fucking sorry?
Are you? I don't know if there's a cursing on this.
There's plenty occurs, but it's just upsetting because that's the

(09:36):
root of the problem. It should never have been like, oh, marketings,
where we're going to really make our break. Your marketing
should be the doctor being like, you have this problem
in this medicine will help for That's the only marketing
drugs should have. You should be like, looking at color,
you have these spots all over your bodies, Well, how
about a measles vaccine? I need this? Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Like you know, nobody advertises like do you want polio?

(09:57):
Probably not, check out this new shot that'll take kid. No,
you should give people the polio effects. They don't get
sick now. Produced first big hit was Librium, which was
the first name Valium was marketed under. Arthur pitched Librium
as the key to treating psychic tension, a phrase he
invented because it sounded sexier than saying stress are They
suggested that psychic tension was the real cause of many maladies,

(10:18):
from heartburn to bad poops. The tactic worked like fucking gangbusters.
Valium became the most widely prescribed medication in the United States.
The first drug to break the one hundred million dollars
sales record. Arthur was quickly inducted into the Medical Advertising
Hall of Fame, a thing which should not exist. No,
I shouldn't know. Why why would you Why would you
be proud of that? Now, this might be outside of

(10:39):
your realm of thought. It was valium kind of the
trade off of what they used to do, lobotomies, Like,
wasn't it was? Is there? I don't. I think they
were still lobotomizing people the point, And this is like
the fifties, So if I'm not mistaken, this is when
um I think Rosemary Kennedy was her name, the JFK's
youngest sister, when they like scrambled her brains because she

(10:59):
liked boys. Um So I think they were still doing
that at this point. They were. But so it has
nothing because I thought that lobotomies and valium kind of
had a crossover. They might help been like it might
have Like, I just don't know that. I could see it.
I could see it helping with that. I've taken it
recreationally a couple of times when I was living in Guatemala.
You could just pick it up from the corner store.

(11:20):
So we would actually pick up valium and hide your
code own and it was like that was your that
was your like Thursday night or whatever it was. It
was fun. I meant this Irish biker who was like
traveling biking all the continents. Now, when you say biker,
I need to know the difference. Is it peddling biker
or motorcycle huge fucking motorcycles. Yeah, sure, he just he

(11:42):
spent like three weeks just doing all of the valume.
I've never seen anyone two more values. He's crushing it
up in railing three at a time. Yeah, that's just
never been my party truck. No, I'm not a huge
fan of it um, but yeah, it's sold very well
for for Arthur Sackling. So it was Arthur who began
the Sackler family tradition of donating huge sums of money

(12:02):
to museums. Some of this may have been honest generosity,
but a lot of it was also a tax thing.
When he created the Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, he gave it a huge collection of Chinese artifacts,
but he required the museum to sell him the artifacts.
He was giving them for a very low price. What
he paid originally in the nineteen twenties when he'd acquired them,
so he could then donate the artifacts back to the
museum but write them off at their nineteen sixties value,

(12:25):
so that he made net money donating these things to
the museum. It sounds like a scam. It's definitely the
only reason it's not a scam. It's because he has
enough lawyers to sue you for calling it. Oh, that's true.
It sounds like the art version of a shell company.
It's absolutely that, Like it's legally distinct from a scam
because he can afford to pay lawyers. Like, yeah, exactly,

(12:47):
but it's it's the same thing as like that guy
on the street corner putting like a dot or whatever
underneath a bunch of cups and ask you get a
bet on which, like it's it's a con for sure. Now,
Jillian Sackler, Arthur's third wife, does call this allegation fake news,
So that should tell you when that was recently to say,
that's a very new term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was. Yeah.

(13:09):
He had to re up a couple of times. Yeah,
I think they all did. In general, the Sackler brothers
seemed to have been the kind of rich people I
would not have gotten along with. Mortimer threw a fit
on his seventy birthday when the met agreed to let
him throw his birthday party there, but they wouldn't let
him redecorate an ancient shrine that he wanted as the
centerpiece to his party. So he got very angry at them,
like that's the attitude this family has. So that said,

(13:31):
there was nothing super evil about this generation of the Sacklers.
They were questionable, Okay, go ahead, yeah, yeah there was. Yeah,
they were questionable, but they weren't like mustache twirling villains.
They also weren't that rich by rich people standards. They
were multimillionaires, but not billionaires or multibillionaires. Raymond and Mortimer
had paid attention to their brother's success with valium. They
realized that if you could just take a powerfully addictive

(13:52):
substance and then marketed as a cure all for a
bunch of different things, well that was incredibly profitable. So
they started looking for another drug that they could basically
apply the valiums ategy too. In nineteen seventy two, a
London doctor had developed a special slow release medicine technology.
In nineteen eighty one, MS content entered the UK market,
was a timed release morphine pill designed to hopefully be

(14:12):
less addictive than traditional morphine. In nine seven, Produce Pharmaceutical
brought MS content to the US market. Now the drug
was a big hit for cancer patients, and Perdue made
a tidy sum helping suffering sick people into their mortal illnesses.
Whenever I hear something, I gotta ask them a questioner.
So when they think it's gonna be less addictive, to
think it's going to be less addictive because it's something

(14:33):
that is not creating a habitual use, because it's slow release.
That's exactly like, it's not like they're One of the
big things you're trying to avoid is the euphoria, because
like taking pain killers, it gives you this like feeling
of euphoria when you first come up, and that's one
of the things it's most addictive about it. So the
idea was that if it's slow release, people won't get
hooked as easily. It will be less pleasurable, but it
will fight pain more effectively. So number one, you'll have

(14:55):
to take fewer pills um and number two, you're less
likely to develop a habit just like show someone up
with heroin, you know, like one of the There was
a big stigma against opiates at this point in the
United States and like the seventies and eighties because a
bunch of young men had been given morphine basically UM
in Vietnam, Like they get shot and they get shot
up with morphine and then they wound up horribly addicted

(15:16):
to morphine and so like, there was a real stigma
against taking any kind of opiate pain killer in the
US for like during this period. So MS content was
really only used by cancer patients, Like it was the
only people who would get prescribed in this kind of
medicine where people who were like dying essentially um. So,
you know, Purdue made a decent amount of money off
of it, but it was impossible to make a lot

(15:37):
of money off of it because it wasn't being prescribed
for anything but mortal illnesses. MS content was unlikely to
ever become a valium level seller, and that was a
problem for Purdue Pharmaceuticals, fortunately for the Sackler family and
unfortunately for the entirety of rural America. In nine six,
two doctors published an article in a medical journal that suggested,
based on a thirty eight patient study that long term

(15:58):
opiate use was safe for patients out a history of
drug abuse. This, combined with a widespread, completely fallacious belief
that the rate of addiction for long term opiate use
was less than one percent, helped convince the leadership at
Purdue that opiates for the future of their company. It
was a future Arthur Sackler would not live to see.
He died in nineteen eighties seven. His last words to
his family were reportedly, leave the world a better place

(16:21):
than when you entered it. Those are great words of wisdom,
great words of wisdom. You know it, you hear about
His family didn't do any of that. From this point on.
Richard Sackler, Raymond's son and Arthur's nephew, would grow to
become the head of the family and eventually the company.
Here's how Esquire described him quote, perhaps the most private
member of a generally secretive family. Richard appears nowhere on

(16:42):
produced website from public records and conversations with former employees,
though a rough portrait emerges of a testy, eccentric with
ardent relentless ambitions. Born in nineteen forty five, he holds
degrees from Columbia University and n y U Medical School,
according to a bio on the website of the Coke
Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at m i T, where
Richard serves on the advisory board. He started working at
Perdue as his father's assistant at age twenty six, before

(17:04):
eventually leading the firm's R and D division and separately
it's sales and marketing division. So like Arthur, he's not
just a doctor who likes research. He's really into marketing
and advertisement. Maybe he should have just done that, like
she could have been making ads. And there's a lot
of money in advertisement. Yeah, I mean, he makes a
lot of money in advertisement. It's just forty it's not

(17:26):
the thing you want to advertise it now. Raymond took
a step back during this period, presumably to allow his
son to shine. One of Richard's colleagues during this time,
who lived through the transition, recalled that the new boss
brought a new intensity to the job. Richard really wanted
Perdue to be big, I mean really big. The best
opportunity for that was, of course, a new drug based
on the content system. The patent for m S content

(17:47):
was about to run out but produce. Scientists were developing
a similar drug, basically a time release version of an
old opiate called oxycodon. Now in the nineteen thirties, oxycodon's
most popular formation was scope at all, a mix of
ox e cod own, scope, lamine, and aphedron. Was basically
an early speedball. The Wehrmacht loved it. It It was like
one of the most popular Nazi drugs of the whole

(18:07):
Nazi era. During Operation to Himmler, when the German staged
a false flag attack on themselves to justify the invasion
of Poland, the prisoners they dressed as Polish soldiers were
all killed via massive injections of Scope at all. So
oxycodone as a fun history before it became oxy content,
and Perdue was about to add a new chapter to
that history. Esquire talked to Peter Lacoutree uh, a senior

(18:28):
director of clinical research at Perdue from two thousand one,
and he explained how the idea evolved. At all the meetings.
That was a constant source of discussion. What else can
we use the content system for? And that's where Richard
would fire some ideas, maybe antibiotics, maybe chemotherapy. He was
always out there digging. So Sally Allen, a former executive
director for Product Management, added that Richard was very interested
in the commercial side and also very interested in marketing approaches.

(18:51):
He didn't always wait for the research results. So by
nine there was ample evidence that MS content had a
dangerous potential for abuse. It had already become one of
the most used prescription opioids in the United States, but that,
of course did not make Richard any less likely to
think it was a good product to market. You know,
they kind of ignored the fact that there were already
signs that time release morphine was no less addictive than

(19:14):
regular morphine and just sort of made time release oxycodon't
assumed it would work. Wouldn't the world be a better
place if they were, like, we really should do time
released antibiotics. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they decided not to do. No.
I mean, I think they probably made those at some
point too, But antibiotics. Nobody's gonna want to take a
shipload of antibiotics. What about with the right advertising, You

(19:34):
don't think with the right pitch, don't you won't die? Yeah?
I don't even sure how you advertise that stuff. Yeah,
I guess you're right, yeah, oxyconton You just have a
picture of some guy sitting out at like a beach
and looks like he's an old guy surgery scar in
his arm, but he's smiling, and it's just like freedom. Oxycontent. Yeah,
it's kind of good name too. I hate to say it,

(19:56):
but it's an exciting name to just say. Yeah, and
it's got one of those names that sure it's well
to a street drug. You got any oxy bro like
you know? MS content like you? No one's gonna be
like you got any MS content, I guess, but yeah, anyway,
we're gonna find out what happens next with Richard Sackler,
the other Sacklers and Oxycontent. But first some ads for
products that hopefully aren't produced pharmaceuticals that that that might be.

(20:19):
There's there's no knowing. It's randomly slotted in, so uh
hopefully not. We're back so Due Pharmaceutical convened a series
of focus groups with physicians trying to decide if they'd
be willing to prescribe oxycontent, the company's new drug for

(20:42):
non cancer pain. Most doctors were unwilling to do this.
They worried about getting their patients horribly addicted. To a
dangerous drug and perhaps igniting an opioid epidemic. Pretty learned
that physicians did want a long lasting pain reliever that
was less addictive than morphineous, considered kind of like the
holy grail of medicine at that point. Now they didn't
have such a drug. Oxycontent was just as it active
as the old bills, perhaps even more addictive. But the

(21:02):
focus groups taught them that there was an incredible potential
in selling such a product, whether or not they actually
had one. Pharmaceutical released oxycontent onto the open market that
the company launch party for the new drug, Richard Sackler
compared the launch of oxycontent to a natural disaster, asking
the audience to imagine a blizzard or a hurricane, and saying,
the launch of oxycontent tablets will be followed by a
blizzard of prescriptions that will bury the competition. The prescription

(21:25):
blizzard will be so deep, dense and white. Oh wow, Richard, No,
don't like you know what you're doing. Like he must
have suspected it sounds it sounds like he was thinking
money was more important than people. It sounds like that
might have been his only motivating factor. Yeah, the predecessor

(21:46):
drug MS content had a reputation from being very prone
to abuse. Many patients had figured out how to crush
it and extract pure oxy code on, thus getting past
that nasty time release thing and giving them a much
more addictive drub. So PERTTU instructed at sales staff to
light to doctors and say that this could not be
done oxy content, even though their own internal studies showed
that it was actually super easy to do with oxy content. Well,
I mean, I might be wrong. I grew up in

(22:08):
the nineties, But was it a new invention crushing pills,
because that's always been like, oh, you want to just
crush it up? They they didn't think that was part
of well they did abuse strategy. They did. They knew
it could be done. They done studies showing that it
was really easy to extract pureoxy code on from oxycontent.
They just lied to doctors and said it couldn't be done,
like trick, you know exactly. It was like, it's really

(22:29):
hard to make a pill people can't crush and then
purifying store, Why don't we just lie? This pill is
fortified with iron? Who can bend iron? Superman, Superman? This
pills they have like one trial pill that's just made
out of steel, and they're like, look, you can't crush it.
Don't try the others. Don't try the other not now.

(22:52):
As a pending Massachusetts lawsuit against the company alleges quote
doctors had the crucial misconception that oxycontent was weaker than morphine,
which led them to pursue iboxy content much more often.
Michael Colon, a Pretty executive, wrote this letter to Richard Sackler.
Since oxycodone is perceived as being weaker a weaker opioid
than morphine, it has results of oxy contin being used
much earlier for non cancer pain. Physicians are positioning this

(23:15):
product where perkose at hydrocdone and tailan al with codeine
have traditionally been used. It is important that we be
careful not to change the perception of physicians towards oxycodone
when developing promotional pieces, symposia, review studies, articles, etcetera. Sackler's
response to this was short and sweet. I think that
you have this issue well in hand. Again, they think
it's not addictive. Don't tell them the truth. Yeah, they

(23:37):
know what they're doing. That same year, Michael Friedman, the
company head of sales, emailed his boss with similar concerns.
Correcting the false impression that doctors had about oxy would
be bad for business. Quote, it would be extremely dangerous
at this early stage in the life of the product
to make physicians think the drug is stronger or equal
to morphine. We are well aware of the view held
by many physicians that oxycodon is weaker than morphine. I
do not plan to do anything about it. Again, Richard's

(24:00):
actually replied, I agree with you. He then asked, is
there a general agreement or are there some holdouts? Everybody
on board about lieing to doctors. We all in the
same the same boat here. Yeah, it's it's it's pretty
blatant criming. I mean, and there's a paper trail for this.
It seems like like thousands of emails. And it's unless
I'm wrong, they're still selling oxyconton today, right, Oh, I

(24:22):
mean yeah, I mean unless it was this morning that
there was a breaking news I missed. You're not gonna
stop selling and this is all like that. You don't
have exclusive access to this information. No, no, no, no no.
There's been a number of big stories. We'll get to
that in a little bit. How this all came out. Sorry, sorry, no,
it's all good. Now. All this was to volage of
the result of a lawsuit followed by the state of
Kentucky against Perdue in two thousand fifteen. As you'd expect,

(24:45):
the company had already explanationist what Sackler and his executives
did was not fraud. Here's pro publica quote Sackler, it said,
supports that the company accurately discloses the potency of oxycontent
to healthcare providers. He takes great care to explain that
the drugs label made it clear that oxycontent is to
wise is potent as morphine produced set Still, Perdu acknowledged
it had made a determination to avoid emphasizing oxycontent as

(25:06):
a powerful cancer pain drug out of a concern that
non cancer patients would be reluctant to take a cancer drug.
So we, in light of doctors, we just didn't emphasize
the truth so that people would keep taking the pills.
Since that's different from a lie. Yeah, it's a it's
not really that different. It's it's not really it's kind
of just a lie. It's it's a lie. Yeah, it's

(25:26):
kind of just a lie. No documents released from the
Kentucky suit as well as a lawsuit in Massachusetts paint
a picture that puts Richard Sackler square in the middle
of produced strategy to silly shipload of oxycontent by lying
about how strong it was. Seven other Sackler family members
were also implicated. The strategy worked like gangbusters, ending the
company forty eight million dollars in the first full year
of sales. In an email to the company, Richard noted, clearly,

(25:47):
this strategy has outperformed our expectations, market research, and fondest dreams.
So forty eight million dollars. This is back in the nineties.
This is I think. Yeah, that's the first year. Three
years later, after tens of millions more in sale. He
emailed this to an executive a perdue quote. You won't
believe how committed I am to make OxyContin a huge success.
It is almost that I dedicated my life to it.

(26:07):
After the initial launce phase, I will have to catch
up with my private life again. Just working too hard.
Line to doctors, poor guy, it sounds like he's got
psychic stress or psychic You should try try some liberal here.
It's great for psychic stress. It's so liberating. It's liberating.
It wasn't psychic stress. What's it called psychic I think
that was the word psychic stress. Yeah, I think that

(26:28):
was the term he used. Yeah. Now, when he was
deposed to Massachusetts, Richard Sackler denied that he had participated
in any kind of gigantic lie to trick doctors and
over prescribing oxycontent. According to pro Publica, he quote offered
benign interpretations of emails that appeared to show perdue executives
or sales representatives minimizing the risks of OxyContin and its
euphoric effects. He denied that there was any effort to

(26:48):
deceive doctors about the potency of oxycontent, and argued that
lawyers for Kentucky were misconstruing words such as stronger and
weaker used in email threads. The term stronger in Freedman's email,
Sackler said, meant more threating, more frightening. There is no
way that this intended or had the effect of causing
physicians to overlook the fact that it was twice as potent.
We went saying it's not stronger. We're saying it's not

(27:09):
more threatening than morphine. It's just a little pill. It's
not scary. Morphine comes in a needle. Sometimes that's scary. Well,
I guess, I mean, I am not defending them already,
think that a bunch of ship backs. But honestly, there
should be more questions about this. Why did they not ask? Okay,
strength is one thing. The potency seems like a very
scientific question to ask. Yeah, I mean it does. It's

(27:31):
it seems like a lot of doctors fell down on
the job here. We'll get into y in a little bit,
because they they they they there's some doctors being shady
as fucking this in this story too. Actually quite a
lot of not surprising at all, not surprising at all.
Hey man, you got a lot of fucking student loans
to pay back. I get that m D Like if
you write some pill prescriptions, that makes that sh it easier.

(27:52):
It's like all those doctors in l A, you rememberhen
it like medical marijuana was like the thing, and there
would be all those like old doctors who was just
like signing pop your scripture retirement plan. Yeah. That was
for a long time before Obamacare. My only doctor that
was one doctor appointment. I get the only doctor scary
when he'd give me advice of like, oh it's pretty high,
Oh my god, the pot doctor wants me to cool off.

(28:14):
When the pot doctor gives you real medical advice, should
go see someone like, no way, you're scaring me, sir.
I remember my first pot doctor. It was near Venice Beach,
and I like walk into this shady, dirty office and
there's like, as I'm standing outside his office, there's a
poster of it's like a fake painting of the Mona Lisa,
but she's got a blunt and like, and then I

(28:35):
go to the office and the guy's wearing a lab
coat and I'm like, dude, you don't you don't need
to buy a lab coat. You got them from the
costume shot. I think we went to is it was.
He a really old guy with accent, very thick accent.
I think that he was a hot doctor back in
the I don't know what he's doing today. I hope
he made enough to retire, because he should not be

(28:56):
practicing medicine. I'm just crossing my fingers. There's never an
EP episode two about him. And Behind the Bastards. I mean, yeah,
I don't even remember that guy's name, but I'm sure
he did something terrible but wind up being a pot doctor.
I guess so so produced bald face lying to patients
and doctors was enabled by the f D. A. Curtis Right,
the FDA examiner who approved Oxycontin's initial application, allowed the

(29:17):
company to include this note on the package. The late
absorption is provided by oxyconton tablets is believed to reduce
the abuse liability of a drug. Wow, that word believed.
That word is doing a lot of weightlifting there carrying
the others. Really, I mean, I'm a critical thinker, but
when I see a word like believe, the first thing
I do is stop believing and start like looking things up. Yeah,

(29:41):
looking things up, seeing maybe believe. There's nine times out
of ten clue that you shouldn't. You don't want to
hear that from a doctor like you have. We believe
this will help, Like, oh, I feel like you should
know a little better. I mean, I know a medicine
sometimes it's a crapshoot, but it's not not comfort to
hear that. In the year after oxy Content's release, Curtis

(30:04):
Right quit the f DA. He was hired by another
pharmaceutical company for a short while, and then hired by
Perdue Pharmaceuticals. Esquire talked to him years later, and he
offered this defense quote. At the time, it was believed
that extended release formulations were intrinsically less abusable. It came
as rather a big shock to everybody, the government and
Purdue that people found ways to grind up, chew up, snort,
dissolve and in check the pills. We didn't we know

(30:26):
people would do the thing that they do with every drug,
like every every single drug. It's like, of course they
predicted people would be booping and putting it in their
crushing the crushing. God, where did they think. We'd never
heard of this drug we made in the eighties, We
had never heard of people railing drugs. Who would I
guess that? Come on, come on, dude, I mean people

(30:49):
are going to find a way to get high off
of a drug like this is this is people we're
talking about. You can get high on holding your breath. Yeah,
you can get and we do. Oh boy. Like I'm
sure after that video of the dolphins passing pupper fish
around went viral, there's people that are trying to figure out.
But I haven't seen it yet. I think you're going
to have like a scuba club that all dies. I

(31:11):
want to do it, but could I get high on
puffer fish. I don't know. You know, I know a guy.
He's a dolphin, but I know a dolphin. Okay, we'll
talk after him, we'll talk afterwards. I don't want to.
I don't want to get the d a on my
asked for selling dolphin drugs. Uh. Yeah. So a major
part of oxycoton success was produced novel strategy of declaring

(31:31):
a war on pain. Over the course of late nineteen nineties,
they poured millions and millions of dollars into backing doctors
who supported opioid treatment for chronic pain. These doctors formed
advocacy groups like the American Pain Society, the American Academy
of Pain Medicine, and produce own lobbying organization Partners against Pain,
Partners You Me and this Crippling pill Addiction Partners against Pain.

(31:54):
Did they really call it a war on pain? Yeah?
And that was again I'm not great at history, but
that's the same time the war on drugs was going on. Yeah.
That's like a gorilla like like clandescent war that we
were running. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's like it's like the
war in Nicaragua where Yeah, so that's kind of similar.
If we have a war on drugs and a war
on pain using oxycon using oxyconton, which is different from

(32:17):
a drug for reasons. It's supplying arms to the talent band. Okay,
that's that's a different story, but it would be. It's
like when we sold missiles to Iran while giving missiles
to Iraq to fight Iran. That's it's the v of drugs.
That's the lines I'm making. Yeah, yeah, yeah. These groups,
which many consider to just be fronts for big pharma

(32:39):
operated by crooked doctors, pushed regulators to treat pain like
the fifth vital sign. They advocated for a ten point
pain scale, which doctors should ask patients about during every visit.
An internal produced strategy document explained that the goal of
this was to quote attach an emotional aspect to non
cancer pain. This would hopefully cause doctors to treat it
more seriously and aggressively a k A with a C content. Now,

(33:01):
until that point, pain had, to a certain extent, been
something chronic suffers just dealt with. Uh. There were obviously
attempts to mitigate it as best as possible, but complete
cessation of pain was seen as simply unrealistic and the
risk of giving chronic pain sufferers, morphine was considered too high.
With OxyContin produce changed all that. The ironic thing is
it wasn't actually super effective against chronic pain. It was

(33:22):
marked as lasting twelve hours, so patients could sleep through
a night free of agony, but most patients only got
about six to eight hours of relief. This meant they
took more oxycontent, which meant they ran through their prescriptions faster,
which led them to calling doctors in agony. When doctor's
questions sales reps about this cycle, Perdue advised them to
increase the dose rather than the dosing frequency, which guaranteed
that the cycle would keep on keeping on and also

(33:43):
increased produce profits. Now, doctors aren't dumb, and many of
them were hesitant about some of the claims Perdue was making.
They were particularly considering a moment now when when I
like everything with oxycotton right now, I understand that's its
own beast, But the whole one to ten scale of pain,
I'm a little confused and how authentic that is? Is
that really a scientific method? Because I've heard that before,

(34:05):
But what's to stop somebody? And I'm not telling anyone
that their pain is not the number, they say, yea,
but what's to stop someone from saying their pain is
something higher than it is nothing? Okay, I just want
to make sure that there wasn't something I was missing. No,
there's no way to, like, you can't there's not like
an objective measurement of pain, Like you know, I know
people who have chronic pain conditions, for whom like you know,

(34:29):
they'll get hurt like in a way that would like
fuck me up for a day or two, and they
just like sort of grin and bear it because they're
so used to dealing with pain. So yeah, like there's
no way to objectively measure pain. And I'm not saying
like a tin point pain scale is necessarily a bad idea,
but Purdue introduced it specifically so that because it would
make it easier for people to get prescribed introduced. Ye

(34:51):
I didn't realize that it was doctors and stuff that
they were fun that they were like it was it
was a thing there. I know, the marionette man controls
all the puppets exactly, a fool. They were like, if
we have this, if this is the way people do
this stuff, it'll be a lot easier to sell a
shipload of Oxyconton, and it was speaking of selling a
shipload of things that aren't oxyconton unless the ad that

(35:13):
gets randomly slotted in is for oxycon. God, I hope not.
It might be. There's no way to know. We've been
having Koke Brothers ads. You know, I'm sure a Blackwater
ad will wind up soon. Like the Koke Brothers are
avid listeners. Oh yeah, and they are, and you know what,
in fairness to them, an awful lot of behind the
bastards listeners need a lot of oil refined. I mean
I get that. I get a fan email in me
every week saying like, I have all this crude oil

(35:36):
and no way to refine it. Do you know where
I can do that in such a way that it
pollutes the Bay of Galveston beyond ecological salvage. And I'd
say the Koke Brothers, Oh wow, yeah, yeah, that's great
for that. So if you need your crude oil refined,
check out the Koke Brothers refineries. And if you need
anything else that we advertise products, we're back. So as

(36:05):
I was saying, doctors are not dumb, and many of
them were hesitant about some of the claims Perdue was
making They were particularly concerned about whether or not oxycontent
caused euphoria. If you've never taken opiates recreationally, you should
know that they have a strong mood altering component. Pain
Killers work on your emotions too. You feel very happy,
especially when coming up. It's kind of incredible. Of course,
this is something that concerns doctors because euphoria is the

(36:26):
most addictive thing in the world. Like if OxyContin caused it,
then that that might make it too dangerous to prescribe.
All willie nilly. Thankfully Perdue was there to lie to
doctors and say their pills did not cause euphoria. Sometimes
they'd admit that it could, but that it did so
less than other opiates, which of course there was no
evidence for. During the deposition, Richard Sackler was confronted with

(36:47):
a nineteen ninety note from a company salesman admitting that
he quote talked of less euphoria when selling the drug
to a doctor. Sackler argued in court that this was
fine because nine was before there was quote an agreed
statement of facts now in legally's an agreed statement of
facts is a list of facts both parties in a
lawsuit agree on and submit to a judge at the
start of a case. So, if I understand right, Richard

(37:08):
Sackley was saying it was fine for his employees to
light at doctors about the fact that his pain medicine
didn't cause euphoria because the company hadn't been sued yet
and so there wasn't an agreed upon statement of facts
like that. I think that's the argument he was making.
I'm not a lawyer. I'm not a murderer because I
haven't been I haven't been caught. You have you seen
me kill anyone in this courtroom today? I rest my case.

(37:32):
Ignore the blood on my shirt. Now. When the lawyer
for the state asked, what difference does that make if
it's improper in two thousand seven, wouldn't it be improper
in exactly, replied not necessarily. That's it. So you got
a say in court? Yeah. I always pictured court much
different than that. The state did present him with more memos,
and Sackly defended himself by saying that the claim of

(37:53):
less euphoria could be true and I don't see the
harm m I'm gonna quote from pro public again. The
same issue came up regarding a note written by a
produced sales representative about one doctor got to convince him
to counsel patients that they won't get buzzed as they
will with short acting opioid pain killers. Sackly defended these
comments as well, Well, what it says there is that
they won't get a buzz, and I don't think that
telling a patient I don't think you'll get a buzz

(38:15):
is harmful, he said. Sackler added that the comments from
the representative to the doctor actually could be helpful because
maybe patients won't get a buzz, and if you would
like to know if they do. He might have had
a good medical reason for wanting to know that, maybe
because he want to know if they were gonna get
addicted or not telling them won't get a buzz will
cause you to prescribe an addictive drug to people about
thinking we'll get them addictive, because if you're not getting

(38:35):
a buzz, then why would you do it addictive? Exactly
if it's not going to give you a buzz. Once
they develop a pain killer that doesn't get you high,
that's great, Like I mean, and I say, this is
the guy who loves getting high on pain killers. That's
like one of the best medicines you could possibly invent
is something that just stops pain and doesn't have an
abuse potential, which is what they were saying oxy content was.

(38:56):
But you know, drive through the Midwest you will see
that it is not. It causes so much pain. Yeah,
it really does. It's a nightmarish Now, between two thousand
and one, the number of oxy content prescriptions in the
US went from three hundred thousand to six million. Now
this might sound to you if your podcast, Alchemy this
went from three hundred thousand downloads in a week to

(39:17):
six million. I assume everybody at Alchemy this would be happy.
I know I'd be happy. I mean, so if he
we'd be super psyched. Richard Sackler was not happy with this.
In one employee, Michael Friedman told him that Perdue was
now making more than twenty million dollars a week. Sackler
replied instantly to his email after midnight that sales were,
in his opinion, not so great. After all, if we
are to do nine million this year, we should be

(39:38):
running at seventy million a month, So it looks like
this month it could be eighty or ninety million. Blah humbug, yawn.
Where was I wow, only twenty million a week. Man,
you can take it with you. It's you can't take
it with you at a certain point everyone, as far
as I know, unless Perdue is figured out a cure,
you're gonna have to leave it all behind. Yeah, you

(40:00):
can't spend all that, But I'd sure like to be
challenged to. I mean, I feel like if I made
twenty million dollars in a lifetime, that would allow me
to live beyond my wildest dreams. That's enough money, for example,
three months rent in the bank today. I wouldn't be
crying myself home. This is one of those things I
don't tend to. I think it's actually dangerous to like

(40:22):
talk jokingly too much about like guillotines and stuff. But
like when you look at people living this way and
then you realize that, like some like Americans have listened
a thousand dollars in the bank, it's like, what do
you think this is going to end? Buddy? Like you're
selling poison to people and you're not happy at twenty
million a week, And there's people like worried that they
have to choose between insulin and food for the month, Like,
what do you think the long term is on this

(40:44):
like it's frustrating. It's like and that's the nicest way
you could put it. That's the nicest, very frustrating. Now,
by two thoe Perdu held more than half of the
market share for long acting opioids. That year was also
the first year annual sales of oxycontent broke one billion dollars,
So in the span of five years, oxyconton sales went

(41:04):
from forty eight million in a year to one billion
in a year. The New York Times article that announced
this noted that these sales were quote even more than viagra.
If you have found a way to sell people something
that they want more than erections, you're selling a drug,
like a dangerous druke. Like I feel like that's across
the board true now. That New York Times report also
noted that the drug had been involved in the deaths

(41:27):
of at least a hundred and twenty people. In the
year two thousand, the Sackler family was warned that a
journalist was quote sniffing around the oxycontent abuse story. The
family discussed this threat during their next board meeting in
CREDI this is only the year two thousand, We're just
up to two thousands I had, I had, I knew
somebody that died of oxycotton before the year two thousand.
How is there only a hundred and twenty people cases

(41:49):
of people dead? Oh, there were more, but like that,
this is just what they confirmed. Like we're talking about
how journalists digging into it before this was common knowledge.
So they had found a hundred and twenty cases, but like,
obviously they were probably thousands at that point. Yeah, that's
crazy that they're only starting to discover. I guess in
my world, I thought that that was something not to
go to. It's not my therapy session. But when I
was younger, people were taking oxy cotton and it was

(42:13):
not that bad. Like everybody's like, oh, this is just
ability to give from the doctor's office. And they abused
the ship out of it, and it's like, well, at
least it's not Heroin. But then then obviously the next
step is Heroine. The next step is Heroin. Then you
wind up in that finton All ship and then you die.
I don't think fenton All is around when I was
that's now, yeah, they were just moving to Heroin. God. Yeah, sorry.

(42:33):
When I hear them say people dead in two thousand
I'm like, that can't be. That was just like who
the New York Times could confirm. It's like, I assume
it was a lot of leg work behind. Probably I
wouldn't be surprised if maybe the pharmaceutical company was trying
to hide it. That's exactly what we're about to get to.
So the family discussed this threat during their next board
meeting and crafted a response that was their Their goal

(42:54):
was that the response quote deflects attention away from the
company owners. So the Sacklers made up the majority of
the Purdue board. When you hear their journals is sniffing around,
it's like, okay, well, they're gonna probably figure out that
a lot of people are dying on oxy But we
gotta keep our names out of this ship. We don't
want to hurt the family sound a little bit like
the mob. Shortly thereafter, Time put together an article on

(43:14):
OxyContin deaths. Concerned Purdue employees asked Richard Sackler, then the CEO,
about this. He wrote that the Times coverage was not
quote balanced, blamed the deaths on drug addicts, and assured
them we intend to stay the course and speak out
for people in pain who far outnumber the drug addicts
abusing our product. Wow, that sounds like such a familiar tone. Yeah,
I don't know. It's reminiscent of arguments have heard from

(43:36):
idiots to yeah, unnamed idiots. Yeah. In two thousand one,
there were about eight drug overdose deaths for every hundred
thousand Americans. By two thousand ten, that number had almost
doubled to fifteen deaths per hundred thousand. On a national scale,
this equated to tens of thousands of new dead people,
and most of them were dying from opiate pain killers,
including OxyContin. Now, many of them were actually oding on heroin,

(43:59):
but it just so happened that most of those deaths were,
of course, folks who got hooked initially on an opiate
pain killer like our good friend OxyContin. In January of
two thousand one, Richard Sackler received a request for help
from a produced sales associate. The rep had been to
a community meeting at a local high school convened by
a group of mothers whose kids had all overdosed and
died on OxyContin. Quote statements were made that OxyContin sales

(44:20):
were at the expense of dead children, and the only
difference between heroine and OxyContin is that you can get
oxycontent from a doctor. The very next month, a story
dropped that fifty nine people had died in a single
month from OxyContin in the state of Massachusetts. Richard's response
was this quote, this is not too bad. It could
have been worse. Yeah, it could have been more bable
it will be soon. Very next week, a mother wrote

(44:40):
a letter to Perdue Pharmaceutical stating quote, my son was
only twenty eight years old when he died from OxyContin
on New Year's Day. We all miss him very much,
his wife, especially on Valentine's Day. Why would a company
make a product that strong eighty and hundred and sixty
milgram when they know it will kill young people. My
son had a bad back and could have taken motrin,
but his doctor started him on vicodin, then ox content
than OxyContin s R. Now he is dead. A produced

(45:04):
staff member responded to this by saying, simply, I see
a liability issue here, any suggestions that was like the
company responses like other moms, we might. We might get
sued over this, like no other concerns. Later that month,
Richard Sackler finally came up with a solution to this problem,
so many people were whining about for some reason, He
wrote in a confidential company email quote, we have to

(45:25):
hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are
the culprits and the problem. They are reckless animals. According
to a State of Massachusetts lawsuit filed like this year quote,
Richard followed that strategy for the rest of his career,
collect millions from selling addictive drugs, and blame the terrible
consequences on the people who became addicted by their misconduct.
The Sacklers have hammered Massachusetts families in every way possible,

(45:46):
and the stigma they used as a weapon made the
crisis worse. So get people addicted to a drug, then
encourage the criminalization of that abuse, and attack the users themselves,
which will of course make people less likely to get help,
which will make them more likely to when you're actually
a victim, keeps you buying. The only thing that would
make it worse is if the Sackler family started investing

(46:08):
in privatized prisons. They didn't. I mean, actually they may
have a lot of their money is dark, but we
will get to what they spend their money off a
little bit later. Yeah, I don't tell me it's pretty bad.
This strategy worked for a little while, but by two
thousand ten, the nation has started to wake up to
the dangerous of boxy content, and Purdue was forced to
carry out what Esquire describes as a breathtaking pivot quote

(46:29):
Embracing the arguments critics have been making for years about
oxycontinent susceptibility to abuse, the company released a new formulation
of the medication that was harder to snort or inject.
Produce sees the occasion to rebrand itself as an industry
leader in abuse to turrent technology. The change of heart
coincided with two developments. First, an increasing number of addicts
unable to afford Oxycontinent's high street price. We're turning this

(46:49):
cheaper alternatives like heroin. Second, oxycontent was nearing the end
of its patents. Produced suddenly argued that the drug it
had been selling for nearly fifteen years was so prone
to abuse the generic manufacturers should not be allowed to
copy it. Three years later, on April sixteenth, two thousand thirteen,
the day several OxyContin patents were set to expire, the
FDA gave Purdue what they wanted, banning anyone else from

(47:11):
selling generic oxy content produce basically extended the profitability of
their chief cash cow by arguing that it was too
dangerous to let anyone else sell. And did that stand. Yeah,
So now have mixed feelings. I think it's awful and
there should not be generic versions of oxycotton out there.
Uh so less it's better no matter how if you
don't want to just give more weapons to people just

(47:33):
because one person has it. Do you think, And it's
probably impossible to say that lives were saved by not
giving that patent generic like options. I doubt it. I
seriously doubt it. I like, I don't think it did
anything but allow Perdue to keep profiting from it. Like
if there was any reducing loss of life from that,

(47:54):
it was canceled out from the fact that they were
marketing this and pushing it so heavily to doctors and
continuing to do so and continuing to try to get
it on the market because like it was. I wouldn't
give them any credit for that. I can't give them
credit because it's just out of greed. But I just
wonder what would have happened if it was opened up
to generic markets. You don't have been even more abused.
You could argue that it might have made the situation

(48:16):
better because yeah, it's cheaper, but also that means that
addicts aren't gonna bankrupt themselves doing it. They're not going
to have to steal ship in order to afford it.
And like, you know, you do find that when there's
places I think Denmarks one of them, more they'll give
heroin addicts free heroin, like the government will, and you, like,
you go to a government clinic and they'll they'll give
you the heroine to inject and stuff, and they find

(48:39):
out that number one, it doesn't create more addicts. In
number two, the government saves money because they're not out
committing crimes. They're not breaking into houses and stealing ship
in order to like, So you could argue that it
again made things worse on the addicts by they're not
being a generic available even though it's not great for
people to be addicted oxy it's one of those hard
questions that is above my brain scale. And you also
might argue that it killed more people because the content

(49:00):
is safer than heroin, and if you can't afford OxyContin,
you're just gonna go to heroin or fentonylum so that's true. Yeah,
you could argue, if there was a cheap oxy maybe
we'd have a few more addicts, but we'd have less overdoses.
So yeah, I think they might have killed more people
that way. Now. Richard Sackler's personal attitude towards the harm
his drug was doing is illustrated by the case of
Purdue Germany. According to pro Publica quote, Sackler pushed company

(49:24):
officials to find out if German officials could be persuaded
to loosen restrictions on the selling of OxyContin. In most countries,
narcotic pain relievers are regulated as controlled substances because of
the potential for abuse. Sackler and other Purdue executives discussed
the possibility of persuading German officials to classify oxycontent as
an uncontrolled drug, which would likely allow doctors to prescribe
the drug more readily, for instance, without seeing a patient.

(49:45):
Fewer rules were expected to translate into more sales, according
to company documents disclosed at the deposition. In other words,
in Germany and all across the EU, Richard Sackler's goal
was to be able to sell oxycontent not as a
prescription medication, but as an uncontrolled pain killer, and that's
not the same as over the counter. I think it's
a little different to have somebody tell you to get it,
but you don't necessarily have to go through a doctor visit. Yeah, yeah,

(50:08):
I think that's what that means. Like you don't have
to go to a like like a dot like. Yeah,
you can't like just pick it up, like you can't
and go out of mall for example. Um, but you
can you can get it without there being any of
the controls that we put on. Like was their argument
later that they were just simply into saying no Germany,
we were saying it was out of control. At least
out of control. They were the ones who made it.

(50:28):
I'm kind of surprised they didn't take that. Yeah. Robert Keiko,
one of the men who had actually developed oxycontent, warned
Richard Sackler when he learned this plan, quote, if oxy
content is uncontrolled in Germany, it is highly likely that
it will eventually be abused there and then controlled. Richard's
response to Keiko showed zero concern about the impact of
releasing an addictive drug uncontrolled onto an entire continent. How

(50:49):
substantially would it improve your sales? A lot, Yeah, a lot.
When the German government ruled that OxyContin would be treated
like any other addictive narcotic, Richard asked if it was
possible to appeal. A German produce executive told him that
this was not possible, and Sackler wrote back tersely, when
we are next together, we should talk about how this
idea was raised and why it failed to be realized.
I thought it was a good idea if it could

(51:10):
be done. How I'm sorry, what what year was this?
Just generally, is this more recent that this is like
in the late tooth that this is pretty recently? Yeah. So,
And I don't know a lot about Germany. You've never
been there, but I've worked in video games, and I
know that Germany has some strict rules on video games,
and people are bringing video games from outside so they

(51:31):
can get past, you know, certain readings. Now, I would
imagine that that means if these are uncontrolled substances, doesn't
that affect all the countries that are around Germany that
they would be flooded with oxycott? Sure it could have borders. Yeah,
Thankfully the Germans were like, took one look at the
U S and We're like, I don't think we want
that here. Yeah, yeah, we already we already had enough

(51:54):
of a problem with with with opiates in our past.
We're good, We're good. So that's what we got today.
When we come back on Thursday, we're gonna talk about,
among other things, the court case in two thousand and
seven against Produce Pharmaceutical, uh, the ongoing legal stuff now,
and of course we're gonna get a lot into the
marketing of oxy content, which we haven't really talked about

(52:15):
that much this episode, but there is quite a lot
to say. But that's all next Thursday. Do you want
to plug your plugables before? I mean, if you're still
if you didn't hear at the beginning because you were
fast forward and here it is Alchemy. This releases every
Tuesday and Thursday. It is funny. We get suggestions from
the audience and we make an improv show up. It's
with Kevin Pollock. Yes, that Kevin Pollock, and we have

(52:37):
a live show May seventh at the Dynasty Typewriter Theater
in Los Angeles. Please come so check it out Dynasty
Typewriter Theater, May seventh. James Heeney, you want to plug
any of your your social media Oh yeah, you can
find me at the heen t H H E A M.
That's on Twitter. Uh. And a great way to find
me is Brief newsbrief dot com and has all the
different ways to get ahold of me awesome. Well, check

(53:00):
out James Heeney on the internet and check out this
podcast on the web and Behind the Bastards dot com. Um,
check us out on Twitter and the Graham at Bastards
pod and buy a shirt. You could buy a cup holder. Uh,
you could buy an SPG nine recoilist rifle branded with
Behind the Bastard's logo and uh, and equipment in case

(53:22):
you've got to take out of T seventy two. You know,
like like we all find ourselves needing to do at
some point. So what else? What else we doing? Is
that all the plugs? Oh? I have another show called
it Could Happen Here. It could happen in your been
listening to the ads for It's not out yet, is it? Oh?
It is? Oh my gosh, I'm super excited about the
Civil War could happen here in the station and uh

(53:43):
spoiler you don't want it to know, I'm not it
wouldn't be good. I actually I'm really excited to listen
to it. I'm still I'm embarrassed. I'm still finishing up
End of the World. But once I'm done with that,
that's my next one. Well, uh, make it your next one, listener,
because it will make you sad and scared, and we
all want to be sad and scared, don't we. All right, well,

(54:04):
we'll be back Thursday. I'm very hungover right now. So
this has been a little bit of a scattered scattered
brain episode. Sophie's saying she's very aware of this fact. Yeah, yeah,
all right, Well this is at the end of the episode.
Daniel's looking at me like when, when then are you
gonna stop? And uh, it's now right now, right this
moment now, m