#Searing industries full

Its marketing research department had come up with an interesting point – that many American doctors considered oxycodone to be a weak opioid. But Purdue planned to push Ox圜ontin to the untapped market for other kinds of pain as well. Opioid painkillers were traditionally reserved to help cancer patients manage their pain. The book chronicles in painstaking detail how far this claim was from the truth. Purdue’s contribution, which allowed the company to bestow the brand name Ox圜ontin, was to invent a controlled-released version of the drug – a feature that they advertised as being safer and less addictive. The German chemists who first synthesised it in 1917 gave it the non-proprietary name oxycodone. Ox圜ontin is a powerful painkiller with a high abuse potential. Keefe’s book asserts that it was Arthur’s template for aggressive and often misleading drug-marketing techniques that his brothers and heirs carried on, through a company called Purdue Pharma, which would patent Ox圜ontin. But he successfully parried these and other investigations. as targets for the salespersons to sway and persuade. His techniques later came under scrutiny, after an internal Pfizer document in 1954 referred to doctors as ‘prey’, i.e.

#Searing industries full

His seminal contribution was bringing the full power of advertising and promotion to pharmaceutical marketing”. The Medical Advertising Hall of Fame would eulogise Arthur’s legacy thus: “no single individual did more to shape the character of medical advertising than the multi-talented Dr Arthur Sackler. And its makers, the Swiss healthcare company Roche, reaped billions of dollars in revenue.Īll of this was achieved through a blitzkrieg of revolutionary marketing techniques, creative advertisements and an army of salespersons. It would become the first $100 million drug. His biggest success came through marketing Valium. He helped Pfizer transform itself from a supplier of chemicals to a major player in the pharmaceutical business. Arthur, the family patriarch and son of Jewish immigrants, popularised drugs such as Terramycin and Betadine in the 1950s through an ad agency called William Douglas McAdams. Part-biography, part-investigation, the book chronicles the lives of Arthur Sackler – a pioneer of medical advertising – and his two brothers, Raymond and Mortimer, all of them doctors. The drug in question, Ox圜ontin, and its makers, an elusive billionaire family called the Sacklers, are the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, An Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. This has to be medicine’s biggest irony: a drug made and marketed for alleviating pain ultimately became the cause of much pain and sorrow for millions of Americans.