Ed Bisch Fights to Hold Sacklers Accountable for Opioid Epidemic 22 Years After Son Died of Overdose

this is democracy now democracynow.org I mean Goodman we turn now to the opioid epidemic which has killed over half a million people in the United States over the last 20 years last week a federal appeals court granted members of the billionaire Sackler family immunity from all current and future civil litigation related to their role in creating and fueling the opioid epidemic the sacklers are the owners of Purdue Pharma which makes Oxycontin the drug many say help fuel the opioid epidemic in exchange for civil liability the sacklers have agreed to pay a 6 billion dollar settlement out over some 18 years but due to the terms of settlement the sackles are expected to keep much of their Fortune we turn now to part two of our conversation with Ed Bish the founder of rap relatives against Purdue Pharma he formed the group after his 18 year old son Eddie died of an oxycontin related overdose in 2001. but first we go to investigative reporter Christopher glazick he wrote the first article in 2017 documenting how the sacklers were profiting from the highly addictive drug I asked Christopher glazick to talk more about who the sacklers are the sacklers you know have been one of the richest families in the United States for decades uh you know they first got super rich in the 60s actually with a different drug with Valium and uh you know they're they're they're billions and billions came in the 90s with Oxycontin and what the sacreds have always been really really good at is selling a highly addictive drug often a deadly drug in the case of Oxycontin and they've been really really good at at getting doctors to prescribe this addictive drug for an enormous Universe of patience so originally they had this other drug basically the same as Oxycontin instead except it was morphine instead of Oxycodone and that originally was just for cancer patients and that was in the 80s and people kind of figured okay if you're if you have terminally terminal cancer who cares if you get addicted you're gonna die we don't really care what happens in the last year of your life well what the sacklers did when that drug ran out of patent they said what if we took basically the same drug and instead of targeting it targeting it at cancer patients we target it at any patient who had any kind of pain it could be a toothache it could be menstrual pain it could be back pain it could be a headache and what if we said this isn't something just for terminally ill patients or for something for temporary pain this is for Life someone could be on oxycontin for the rest of their life because they deal with some kind of chronic pain and then the problem as it turned out was that you build tolerance to Oxycontin so in order to get the same effect you have to increase your dose more and more each time we have evidence of the sacklers and board meetings saying we need to make sure doctors are prescribing the highest possible Doses and they wanted to do that because that was how they made the most money they made money per volume and so we see the sacklers as individuals repeatedly over years saying we need to increase the doses we need to increase the doses now of course they could say well it's doctors who are prescribing this drug we simply make the drug why are we responsible explain how the whole system worked and how the pr and the lobbying fit together with the science and the making of the drug it's it's very interesting the sacklers were real Pioneers in the field of pharmaceutical advertising and the patriarch of the family is actually the first inductee in what is called the pharmaceutical advertising Hall of Fame and what he learned is that doctors like Ordinary People are very susceptible to forms of advertising the first Insight he had is if you take out an ad in a prestigious medical journal like a print ad that and you have it right next to these you know academic studies that people take that ad really seriously but doctors think that it counts for something but that wasn't the only thing they did they also effectively bribed doctors they had these organizations that would fly doctors out to Pebble Beach or fancy Beach locations and maybe the doctor would give a talk and they'd give them a thousand bucks and this free trip they had this really elaborate complicated system of kickbacks that targeted every Link in the chain government Regulators pharmacies patients got rebates on their first prescription which is kind of like a drug dealer giving you a freebie that gets you hooked and then the doctors themselves had all kinds of incentives that were thrown their way so the sacraments have been very very Adept from the beginning at targeting every person in the chain that gets from you know Factory to patient and making sure that they all get their Kickback which keeps the system and the cycle I'd like to go back to 1998 Purdue Pharma marketing video once you've found the right doctor and have told him or her about your pain don't be afraid to take what they give you often it will be an opioid medication some patients may be afraid of taking opioids because they're perceived as too strong or addictive but that is far from actual fact less than one percent of patients taking opioids actually become addicted and any drowsiness that might occur when you start to take the medication will soon wear off in most patients this was procured by stat the medical publication showing that ad um so we could see how Purdue Pharma marketed themselves only one percent or they say less than one percent of patients get addicted Chris can you talk about that so that is nonsense um and is is built on these faulty studies many of which aren't even studies I mean one of the things the saplers would cite there was like a letter to the editor in a journal like you know that that you know suggested in some very weird group of popular of patients that the rate of addiction was super low but it's total nonsense it's a lie um and the the sacklers lied about how addictive the drug was in order to uh convince doctors and patients that it wasn't dangerous because there was actually a lot of fear of opioids in the 90s you know coming out of the heroin epidemic in the 70s and 80s and the sacklers set out to change the brand of opioids and they they undertook this really uh concerted elaborate process they created these kind of astro turf kind of fake patient groups to launch what was called the pain movement and they essentially rebranded opioids and Pain Relief as a kind of sacred human rights that that everyone should have access to now people should have access to pain relief and I I wouldn't contest that but the sacklers what they really wanted to do is they wanted to get rid of this fear of opioids they called it opiophobia um and then they called the you know the addiction threat pseudoaddiction and they were actually very effective at getting people to kind of break down their fear uh of over what opioids could do of course as it turns out those fears were really really well founded and what we now know after a couple Studies have been done people ask okay well how important were the sacklers really this was one company didn't other pharmaceutical companies get involved and it's really important to understand that Purdue Pharma and the sacklers built this market and we can see even today their Studies have gone back and seen the places in the country where the sacklers put the most marketing dollars and we can see that 20 years later those places still have more deaths more addiction than you know neighboring states which previously had been you know maybe the same but we see that once the sacklers got to town and deployed their armies of sales reps that those places even 20 years later have much higher rates of addiction and death brings us to Ed Bish I just showed that Purdue Pharma marketing video from 1998. that was three years before Eddie your 18 year old son died in 2001. can you tell us Eddie's story uh yes so Eddie was in he was a high school senior normal kid the first time I heard the word Oxycontin my son was in his bed dead that's the very first time I heard the word Oxycontin okay that was in February of 01. in August of 01 was the very first congressional hearing on oxycontin I went to that hearing not not really knowing you know Purdue story and at that hearing the congressman grilled the Purdue exact and he said uh well this was in Philadelphia and there was a pill Mill doctor flood in Philadelphia with pills and they he told the Purdue exact you knew exactly through IMS data how how many pills this doctor was putting on the street why didn't you contact authorities well he started mumbling something then his lawyer jumped in and he gave some legalese answer but not really a valid answer and that's when I first started having a bad feeling because up until that point my mission was just to warn kids about Oxycontin but as I slowly learn more through newspaper articles and talking to patients who got addicted or talking to family members whose relative died after they were prescribed it 2003 there were so many parents I was talking to where we guys do something and I saw a picture in the paper of three moms stood outside of Purdue Foreman with posters of their dead kids and I said that's a great idea I went out my way I contacted one of the moms I said okay we got a tip Purdue was having a seminar in Florida Orlando Florida a lavish Resort and about 20 of us parents all over the country we decided to do something and he said we got to give ourselves a name while we go and call ourselves came up with rap relatives against Purdue form so we held the second protest this was in 2003. so nothing much changed except the death count kept on going up as more and more oxy sales went up more and more deaths 2001 there was 14 000 deaths last year there was over a hundred thousand deaths I watched a sting mushroom 2007 I was allowed to give a victim statement at the Purdue form a trial we didn't know and the judge the judge was apologetic to us that he wanted to give him jail time but he says the guidelines I have to go by the guidelines what he didn't know there was a 120 page prosecution memo calling for felony charges that the very top of the doj sat on 120 pages there's a six page summary summarizing that that 120 page memo is still under seal painkiller comes out August 10th this was also covered in dope sickle and Hulu but painkiller I have high hopes and I know it's going to be good and so that's 2007 if that memo was in Buried we would we wouldn't have a hundred thousand deaths is the pills that are fueling the opioid epidemic which is now a fentanyl poison epidemic but kids you know like uh Chris said they changed medical thinking there were so many pills on the street kids are kids Unfortunately they experiment and they try this oxy and makes them feel good they don't know the hell that they're going to face and some of them don't face hell they just die and that's what happened to my son but if if that 120 page memo was inspiring so they pleaded guilty to a felony in 2007 in 2020 they pleaded guilty to three more felonies for almost the exact same thing again they just pay a fine you know fines without any prosecutions there is no deterrent they look at it as the cost of doing business punishable why fine means legal for a price I mean so and the sad thing is other companies saw what Purdue got away with and they emulated them and you clearly have had an enormous effect um New York Times article I'm looking at headline the four ordinary people who took on big Pharma and in that it talks about how uh first you wanted to believe the excuses um uh produce excuses you were even persuaded to change the name of your message board to oxy-abuse kills explain what that was all about you used to call it oxy kills and then the offer that Purdue Pharma made to you and your group rap relatives against Purdue Pharma okay so so um my son died on a Monday that Sunday I was on the TV show talk show in Philadelphia where I'm at now and after the show I had three people before that I had started a little message board after the show three people offered to build me a website I took the first caller up on them and I called it oxy kills all of a sudden I'm getting all these emails from irate pain patients telling me some of them are nasty saying my son deserved to die and people like my son are stopping them from getting the medicine they need and I was shocked and I would you know try to reason with some of them and you know explain look I just want to warn kids not to abuse this drug because it'll kill them about three weeks in I get an email from someone at Purdue Pharma and it was very cordial and they said we we want you to know our drugs great if properly used I had no reason to doubt that it's FDA approved right so you know we went back and forth and it was very cordial but they were very defensive anytime I would bring up any new story or I heard from this patient who got addicted you know they told me less than one percent of people get addicted I heard all their lines and uh you know it wasn't until August when I went to that Congressional hearing I started to sense something but at the time you know I was getting flooded with these emails from chronic pain patients so anyway Purdue made me an offer they said if you ever want to do anything with prescription drug abuse let us know because they know they knew I was going around with the Philadelphia Police Department and talking at high schools and I told that my son's High School and uh you know so I decided I said okay I said I'll change they did you know it was my idea because I didn't know exactly why all these people were so irate here I found out a lot of the pain organizations that Purdue funded actually got their members fired up and you know that was causing a lot of this trouble you know and the story that patients couldn't get their drugs well sales kept on going up and up so uh make a long story short I went out to Purdue form and I met with the medical director Jay David Haddix and you know I said okay I'm going to change my um you know for a small donation I'm going to which which will help me buy a laptop which was very expensive back then and and software to give presentations on my own because uh the Philadelphia police would give me five minutes to talk about pills and pills were the latest thing and that's what killed my son so I wanted to talk a lot more about them so anyway so when I went up there I said the only thing that's bothering me is I'm getting a lot of emails from people who got prescribed oxy and then got addicted or I'm hearing from their relatives and they're dead after being prescribed and he said to me he looked at me right in my face and he says he says well less than one percent of people get addicted so they must have been doing something wrong he says and all these stories are really really stopping patience from getting the pills you know the drug that they need I said oh so sales are down he looked at me in the face he says yes a lot so I went away and I started my program and I felt really uneasy then three months later I almost fell off my chair headline in the paper Oxycontin sails up 24 in the last year I I knew right then and there that I was being played and the country was being played and then I really started to investigate and like I said you know that's it that was around 2003 and you know we formed right and we did that first protest which was the second one against them we went to FDA hearings we went to trials we did a couple more protests a lot of rap members got to speak at the 2007 hearing or not hearing sentencing and like I said we didn't know we didn't know about that 120 page memo we really didn't know about the sacklers because they hid themselves it wasn't until Chris came out with his article that the world really realized how Hands-On and involved The sackler's Wire and um you know it's just I don't have regrets about that but I'm sure I pray that people who sat on that memo and didn't allow Justice back in 2007. because there's so many more people now addicted or dead who should never have been dead and like I said a lot of mistakes were made in the past but the doj can make amends by doing the right thing just follow the money follow the evidence you have in your possession there's been over 10 books written about this 2003 painkillers the very first Book 2003 2001 the very first hearing Congressional hearing on oxy deaths the evidence is there just use it do your job so I want to turn well I pray for I want to turn to the level of activism that has really turned this story around or I should say exposed it that you were a part of Ed Bish let's turn to the trailer of the documentary film directed by Laura poitras called all the Beauty and the bloodshed the film follows the renowned artist Nan golden and her activism to hold the Sackler family accountable for their role in fueling the opioid crisis family of the art world the museum world and philanthropy and then there's the big Pharma marketing and addiction and death my anger at the Sackler family it's personal when you think of the prophet of people's pain you can only be furious Madison I think we should take these people down but do you think my career will implode and I said probably we need to demand that the Met Museum Duluth the take to refuse donations from the cyclists and take down their name so that's a clip from all the Beauty and the Bloodshed um I wanted to bring Christopher glazick back into this conversation as you talked about activism turning this around talk about who Nan golden is and the impact not only of Nan and Ed Bish but so many thousands of people who decided that the courts were not enough that the legal system wasn't going to do it and what they did yeah so I mean it's really interesting um in particular what Nan golden was able to accomplish in the art world so Nan is a legendary photographer from the 70s and 80s she herself developed an addiction to opioids um which really put a stop to her career for a while um and you know she basically read my article that was in Esquire and then another article in the New Yorker that came out a couple weeks later and she gotten sensed she had never heard of the sacklers she had heard a little bit about Purdue and she knew that Oxycontin was the thing that hooked her but she didn't know that there was actually a single family behind it so you know at that time in late 2017 there was a lot of media attention around this but as I said uh you know that burst of media attention did not convince the major museums or institutions to cut links with the sacklers they all said this isn't really our business we don't know where the money comes from uh you know the sackler's never told us where it came from and you know we would prefer to stay out of this well then Nan starts doing these really high profile uh actions in museums like she went to the Met to the Temple of Denver had hundreds of people come throwing prescription bottles with messages on them she did another action in the Guggenheim you know and she had experience also you know from from AIDS activism taking cues from act up she knew how to make a media spectacle and she got a lot of people's attention in the art world that way and because Nan herself was a famous artist she was also able to threaten to pull out of shows remove her work from museums and she really forced to those Museum directors to get serious about starting to take down the name which was hard for them because they had contracts with the sacklers it wasn't like so straightforward to take down the name but she really held their their feet to the fire um you know there's been activism obviously you know from from families and individuals stretching back to the early 2000s Ed was a part of that and you know what that you know and that activism did result in something it resulted in this you know prosecution in 2007 where Executives at the company three of them did actually have to plead guilty to misdemeanor charges but out of The Fall Guys you know the the name that never came up anywhere in that trial and as Ed has said he wasn't even really aware of was the name Sackler because the sacklers made sure that their name was scrubbed there was this you know other kind of side deal agreement a non-prosecution agreement from 2007 in which the sacklers were Exempted from any kind of prosecution so which is important to point out also with this question now could this acros be prosecuted well they can't be prosecuted for anything before 2007 because the government already agreed to make them immune for that so it would have to be something later than 2007 although there's plenty of crimes since then Nan started this Groundswell in the art world and you kind of you know over time started to see The Dominoes falling the Louvre in Paris the Guggenheim the Met uh you know in the UK it's taken a little bit longer but now we've started to see action there also the academy really was a lot slower and something that just interested in me that surprised me we never had a nan golden medical Professor you know there's all these medical schools all over the world that have Sackler in their name whether it's the whole school or an Institute or an endowed chair and you never had any of these professors raise a stink about hey what you know should we really you know we're professional healers should we really be taking the Sackler money and I think that what Nan Golden's example you know teaches us is that it really just takes one person with influence in a professional world and they can really accomplish a lot um just you know her example is so inspirational the movie that just came out is is amazing amazing all the beauty in the Bloodshed um you know I I would hope that more people would kind of take from that example didn't really happen in the academy up to now but you know I'm hopeful that there'll be further movement there I want to go to another clip from Laura poitrus's remarkable documentary all the Beauty and the Bloodshed in this clip you hear a 9-1-1 call played during a court hearing where the sacklers were forced to listen to the families of the victims [Applause] oh my God [Applause] 4804 days Richard if you're still listening that's how many days since I have made that four plane call I have lived with the pain and heartache as a result the loss of my only child a pain you will never understand I can only Echo the pain and suffering that Christy feels that all of us that are here today feel I want to point out to the sacklers that by the time this two-hour hearing is over you can add 16 more people to your death list Christopher glasik if you could describe what we just watched and listened to we're talking about a court hearing where the sacklers had to listen to this with family members hearing their own 9-1-1 call of Hysteria losing a loved one the significance of this moment again that was from Laura Poitier's all the Beauty and the Bloodshed it's been this decades-long struggle for accountability to force the sacklers to appear in public to answer to the victims and this was a stipulation of one of the agreements that the sacklers had to send the representatives of the family and they had to hear the victims talking directly to their face something they had not done in 20 years as they built the largest pharmaceutical fortune in history from this deadly drug and in the last minute we have we give that minute to Ed Bish here we are in 2023 your final message to the world 2023 please a public citizen has a letter to the doj you can just sign your name send them an email I was also able to give testimony at that Richard Sackler would not show his face that's how much of a coward he is okay but he had to listen he had to watch us and I think it was 20 some 20 plus of us gave him hell did he care I doubt it but it felt good and I'm proud to say that lady who you just heard Christy Nelson she is now a member of rap Ed Bish founder of rap relatives against Purdue Pharma he formed the group after his 18 year old son Eddie died of an oxycontin related overdose in 2001. thanks also to investigative reporter Christopher glazick who spoke to us from Mexico City in 2017 he wrote a piece for Esquire headline The Secret of family making billions from the opioid crisis to see part one of our discussion go to democracynow.org I'm Amy Goodman thanks for joining us

Channel: Democracy Now!

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Length: 31min 41sec (1901 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 05 2023