Author: Patrick Radden Keefe
Sophie Greenberg had emigrated from Poland just a few years earlier.
Rather than accept a standard pay arrangement, Arthur proposed that he receive a small commission on any ad sale he made. The administration agreed, and soon Arthur was making money.
When you were with Arthur, Marietta came to feel, it seemed as if anything were possible.
If you lose a fortune, you can always earn another, he pointed out.
in a way that no drug ever had been. It was Arthur Sackler who would be credited not just with this campaign but with revolutionizing the whole field of medical advertising.
Not everyone was thrilled about this new synergy between medicine and commerce.
Roche and Arthur didn’t need to fight off regulation forever; they just needed to hold it off until the patents had run out.
Richard’s most distinctive trait, Kapit discovered, was a headlong enthusiasm for life. He was only intermittently engaged by his classwork and preferred to devote himself to more epicurean pursuits.
Shakespearean vulgarity: “gaping ass-hole. Who in Hell does he think he is?” he wrote in one letter, of some peer who had apparently given offense. “I hope you ram his overblown membrum
Arthur’s heirs ended up selling their one-third stock interest in Purdue Frederick to Mortimer and Raymond for $22 million. In light of what the company was about to become, this was, for Arthur’s heirs, a spectacularly foolish transaction.
The consumer is paying not just for the costs of producing a bottle of pills but for all of the trial and error that went into creating the drug in the first place.
According to a subsequent investigation by The New York Times, the FDA examined this incident and found the story in the Medical Tribune to be completely bogus. The
They call it “the patent cliff,”
An OxyContin Project Team memo in December 1993 noted that the new pills would be marketed “against Percocet” and might ultimately “replace our MS Contin line” if the generic competition became unsustainable.
They would suggest OxyContin for “the broadest range of use.”
a team of chemists in Germany had recently managed to refine morphine into a new drug, heroin, which the German pharmaceutical company Bayer began to mass market as a wonder drug
None of this had any basis in fact. In reality, heroin was roughly six times more powerful than morphine and just as habit forming.
The contours of this experience are sometimes described, by doctors, as resembling “peaks and troughs,” a sensation of unparalleled bliss at the moment the drug hits your system, followed, as it dissipates in your bloodstream, by despondence and an overpowering, almost animal sense of need.