25 Years On, OxyContin Marketing Push Still Exacting a Deadly Toll
25 Years On, OxyContin Marketing Push Still Exacting a Deadly Toll
Aggressive marketing of OxyContin in the mid-1990s not only fueled the opioid crisis but also the spread of infectious diseases associated with injection drug use, a new analysis shows.
The uptick in rates of infectious diseases, namely, hepatitis and infective endocarditis, occurred after 2010, when OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma reformulated OxyContin to make it harder to crush and snort. This led many people who were already addicted to the powerful pain pills to move on to injecting heroin or fentanyl, which fueled the spread of infectious disease.
"Our results suggest that the mortality and morbidity consequences of OxyContin marketing continue to be salient more than 25 years later," write Julia Dennett, PhD, and Gregg Gonsalves, PhD, with Yale University School of Public Health, New Haven, Connecticut. (Medscape, USA, 04.08.2023)