By Janet Williams
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana has joined the legion of states suing opioid maker Purdue Pharma for promoting the drug while downplaying its risks to boost sales, leading to the opioid crisis plaguing the state today.

The 93-page lawsuit filed Wednesday in Marion Superior Court accuses the privately-held Stamford, Connecticut drug company of false and misleading marketing practices that minimized the risk of its principal product, OxyContin.

“Beginning in the 1990s and continuing to the present day, Purdue aggressively and successfully set out to change the perception of opioids and to increase medical professionals’ comfort with and patient demand for them,” the lawsuit says.

“Purdue proselytized a new narrative―that pain was drastically undertreated and pain treatment should be a higher priority of health care providers. This narrative paved the way for increased prescribing of opioids for chronic pain.”

Indiana Attorney General Curtis Hill said the lawsuit was filed after two years of investigation, which included taking depositions from former employees, interviewing prescribers across the state and a review of company documents.

The abuse of prescription drugs like OxyContin has helped fuel an addiction crisis across the nation and Indiana, prompting dozens of states to file similar lawsuits against drug makers.

Specifically, the complaint says Purdue Pharma violated Indiana’s Deceptive Consumer Sales Act, the Prescription Drug Discount and Benefit Cards Statute, the False Claims Act and the Medicaid False Claims Act.

The allegations against Purdue Pharma accuse the company of seeking to increase profits by promoting its opioids in Indiana, including by:

• minimizing or denying the risk of addiction;
• exaggerating the benefits of the use of opioids for the treatment of chronic pain;
• denying or failing to disclose the increased dangers of opioids at higher doses;
• targeting elderly and opioid-naïve patients to create a new market for long-term customers;
• spreading the above misrepresentations to Indiana’s medical community and to consumers; and
• engaging in an elaborate deception by enlisting what appeared to be independent entities carrying neutral information that was actually paid, funded or otherwise controlled by Purdue to publicize statements known to be unsupported by facts or scientific research.

In the lawsuit, the state says that in 2016, the last year for which data are available, more people died from an opioid overdose in Indiana than in car accidents and the addiction epidemic has led to an increase in robberies and other crime.

Indiana health care costs associated with the overprescribing of opioids are substantial — more than $101 million to Medicaid vendors since 2012 and more than $8 million in direct costs through state employee health plans, the lawsuit says.

“The cost and effort of remediating the opioid crisis in Indiana will require tremendous resources. The State has brought this lawsuit in part because the burden of those costs should be shared by Purdue,” the lawsuit says. “These costs should not, and cannot, be borne by the State and its citizens alone.”

Purdue Pharma spokesman Robert Josephson said in a statement that the company shares Indiana’s concern about the opioid crisis and vigorously denies the allegations.

“The state claims Purdue acted improperly by communicating with prescribers about scientific and medical information that FDA has expressly considered and continues to approve,” Josephson said.

“We believe it is inappropriate for the state to substitute its judgment for the judgment of the regulatory, scientific and medical experts at FDA,” he added. “We look forward to the opportunity to present our substantial defenses.”

The complaint seeks maximum penalties, triple damages, costs and an order directing Purdue Pharma to stop its unlawful conduct.

FOOTNOTE: Janet Williams is executive editor of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.