How Abbott and Its Sales Reps Quietly Played a Role in the OxyContin Epidemic

September 22, 2016 (Last Updated: 11:30am PT)
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

ABBOTT Park, Ill. – It’s no secret that pharmaceutical sales representatives are willing to go extra miles in order to convince a physician to switch patients to a drug they are selling. A new shocking story from Stat News lays out how sales representatives from Abbott Laboratories may have played a key role in the opioid epidemic in America due to the aggressive tactics reps used when it marketed OxyContin from 1996 to 2002.

The tactics of Abbot sales reps were brought to light by a 2004 lawsuit the state of West Virginia brought against Abbot and Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin. Documents from the case, including internal and external memos, allege the companies inappropriately marketed the drug, which caused users to become addictive to the pain killer. The documents had been sealed, but Stat was able to secure access after a court hearing.

According to the information, Abbott devoted at least 300 sales reps to OxyContin sales, as did Purdue. Abbott benefitted from multiple relationships with doctors, surgeons and pain management teams across the country, Stat reported.

Stat reported that Abbott was in a superior position to market the drug not only due to its connections, but also to an agreement with Purdue that indemnified Abbott from any legal costs that could arise from the sales of the drug. That was something that certainly benefitted Abbott.

“It was a provision that ended up saving Abbott millions of dollars, and also kept the company out of the headlines as Purdue was forced to pay huge fines and settlements from the illegal marketing of OxyContin,” Stat News said in its article.

With that in hand, Stat said Abbott “heavily incentivized” its sales team with luxury vacations and cash bonuses of up to $20,000 to push OxyContin—a drug that has become one of the most abused pain treatments in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 78 Americans die daily from opioid overdoses.

Some sales reps though touted misleading data about the drug, including that there was less potential for abuse of the drug. As a result, Purdue Pharma was forced to pay more than $600 million in fines after the company pleaded guilty in 2007 to a criminal charge of misbranding OxyContin in an effort to mislead doctors and consumers, Stat News said. In one of the uncovered memos, Abbott told reps to highlight the “less abuse/addiction potential” of the drug, Stat News said.

Jerry Eichhorn, Abbott’s sales director overseeing the team assigned to OxyContin, is now the national director of sales for AbbVie , Abbott’s spinoff company that develops pharmaceuticals. While he was in charge of OxyContin sales, Eichhorn had the nickname the “king of pain,” Stat reported. Eichhorn did not respond to Stat’s request for comment.

During the period Abbott was involved, sales of OxyContin grew from $49 million in its first year to $1.6 billion by 2002. Abbott did not respond to Stat News’ request for comment, other than to say the company was “indemnified by Purdue in the lawsuit.” BioSpace reached out to Abbott to see if the company had any additional comment. An Abbott spokesperson responded to BioSpace’s request, but said the company had no additional comment on something that happened nearly two decades ago. The spokesperson did say Abbott no longer markets pharmaceuticals in the United States, as that division was spun out into its own company, AbbVie.

Abbott sales tactics were most recently highlighted by a dramatic suicide in India. In July Ashish Awasthi, a top-performing Abbot sales representative in Mumbai, blamed unreasonable sales expectation in a suicide note. A New York Times investigation revealed that “some” Abbott managers demanded an “at any cost” approach to meeting sales goals.