 Hey there, friend. It's your friend, Joe. Did you know that if your doctor prescribes you at Okoway's, there's less than a 1% chance that you'll become addicted? Sounds pretty harmless, right? Did you know that that statistic is entirely falls and misleading, but was heavily marketed to doctors and to our entire nation? For years, thanks to this guy, his billionaire clan, their money, and the sleaziest company in America? That statistic, in particular, was heavily marketed by Purdue Pharma and in a video called, From One Pain Patient to Another, was told to the audience. Side note that educational film was produced by Purdue Pharma. So let's dive into the sleazy story of this billionaire clan and their company, but first, let me talk about why this matters to me. Since the age of 18, I have been on pain management drugs and since I was 20, I've had access to pretty much unlimited opioids whenever I needed them. And as I was researching this video, I realized that I have literally been fed some of the lies that they told the public, that they probably told the doctors that I had seen, that I'm hoping the doctors believed innocently and didn't actually know the truth behind. God, that is the smell of some terrible, terrible people in the quotes that they have said. But before we get into that, let me give you a little bit of backstory. I'm honestly not sure how the dialogue around the rest of the world goes, but I live in America. And if you live in America, I can pretty much guarantee that if you've ever turned on the news, you have heard about the opioid crisis, the opioid epidemic, about drug users, drug abusers, drug deaths. Side note, if you are confused at all on what specifically opioids are, I'm going to put a link in the description that will give you a much clearer explanation of what that is than I can. But I'm going to assume that people generally have an idea of what it is and we're going to continue with this video. Humanity has known for a very long time about the addictive properties of opioids. Specifically, here in America after the Civil War, a lot of soldiers were giving morphine, which is an opioid for war wounds. It was administered pretty liberally and we pretty quickly had a problem with a lot, a lot, a lot, as in hundreds of thousands of soldiers becoming addicted. For a long time throughout history, doctors generally agreed that heavy prescription painkillers should only be prescribed to terminal patients, to people who were unfortunately going to die, they just needed their pain eased, or to people who were heavily supervised in a hospital environment. And that's it. Let's flash forward to the early 1990s when I was born, by the way. And it reduced you to Purdue Pharma and how they really changed the way that the medical community looked at pain. They did a very effective job at changing the narrative, the story about pain. A lot of doctors were already thinking maybe we don't actually take pain seriously enough. Let's paraphrase out of one of my favorite books, American Pain. By the early 1990s, some doctors were reconsidering their approach to pain. A small family-owned pharmaceutical company called Purdue Pharma was looking for ways to grow its customer base. Keep that in mind, looking for ways to grow its customer base. Purdue was best known for an extended release morphine drug called MS-cotton. Now, this was mostly used to treat terminal cancer patients, but their patent was about to expire. The company has a patent of something they make bank. That patent expires and generics are available. The amount of bank that they make goes down significantly. So they were working on developing a new drug called oxycontin, made out of oxycodone. Purdue didn't simply want to provide an alternative to MS-cotton. Purdue won an oxycontin to be prescribed to a much broader array of patients for a longer period of time. The untapped marketplace was chronic pain, which could mean anything from back eggs, arthritis, to the crippling agony of trigeminal neuralgia. If Purdue could persuade a portion of that vast and varied market to take oxycontin, the drug would be a blockbuster. We're just going to call this my sarcasm and anger hat. Also, it's not actually a hat. It's a cleaning box holder, but I like the hat option a little bit better. Here's the thing about Purdue, and yes, we will get back to the worst family in America, but the setup is pretty important. They were genius at marketing. One of the things that they did is they found opinion leaders. Essentially, they knew that doctors responded to the opinions of doctors more than sales reps. For instance, Dr. David Haddox, they hired and made a top executive. David Haddox essentially made up a term called pseudo-addiction. Pseudo-addicts were pain patients who exhibited drug-seeking behaviors, things like hoarding drugs, refilling drugs too early, reporting prescriptions of stolen more than once, taking higher and higher doses and higher doses than prescribed. He said these people looked like they were addicted, but they weren't addicted. They just needed more medication. This idea was based on a single case study of a single patient that doesn't even constitute a real study. This was basically just like an idea that he had. But Purdue Pharma and their board, who was made up of a number of the Sackler family members who were very involved and really liked the way that they sounded, and they gave them a lot of money to keep saying it. Back to how I started this video, Purdue actually funded a study. This study that was widely distributed cited an article from the New England Journal of Medicine. What it said is that the psychological addiction or dependence to narcotics is low for chronic pain patients. The citation for this wasn't an actual study. It was actually a letter to the editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Written in 1980, the conclusions of this letter were not some big national study or anything like that. They were just based on some guy reviewing hospital charts and making a statement. But the idea was out there, published in a scientific journal. Fewer than 1% of pain patients would develop on addiction. This seriously makes me sick. Here's the other thing that they did really effectively. In the early 1990s, a bunch of articles started appearing. News stories, trend pieces, journal articles about how pain sufferers were suffering. They weren't getting prescribed the medicine. They needed doctors were essentially violating their Hippocratic oath to take care of people by withholding medicine. That was the line that was fed the public. That was absolutely in part funded by Purdue Pharma and the people running it. Purdue sales reps for OxyContin were paid very well. And they took doctors to very nice places to convince them about these things. For instance, the budget for steak dinners, food in general, alone for doctors was $9 million a year. They had $9 million a year set aside allocated for nice meals for doctors, for surgeons, for family practice doctors, for doctors in general, as they were convincing them and spreading lies about how these heavy opioids and narcotics needed to be prescribed to more and more and more and more people. Here's the thing that is so messed up about it. There are people who legitimately need heavy medication to exist, to make it through days who are in real chronic pain that does not have any better solution right now. So yes, absolutely. Chronic pain patients need good solutions. Part of that can sometimes include medications, opioids, but not for everybody. Not for people who have short-term back aches. Not for people who have toothaches. You shouldn't be giving people who have OxyToothaches. I'm not a doctor. I shouldn't make that statement. That's just my opinion. All of these articles had one basic message that millions and millions of Americans were suffering in needless pain. So you take that storyline and you combine that with, hey, less than 1% of people who are in chronic pain ever have any issue abusing the medication, ever mistake it, ever become dependent or addicted or anything like that. And you have a very effective marketing scene to get your drugs into the hands of millions. That is exactly what they did. Between 1996 and 2002, Purdue funded over 20,000 pain-related educational programs. I'll leave it up to your imagination what their bias was. Do you think it was to search for alternative therapies to get people active, to, you know, physical therapy, acupuncture, all different kinds of things, or do you think it was to get them to take drugs? It was to get them to take drugs. The educational seminars made the most of the unfounded statistic that fewer than 1% of patients would develop addictions. So they were filling doctors' heads with lies saying, hey, it's perfectly safe, basically, to prescribe this medication. When taken as prescribed, it's just fine. And here's the problem. When you have a patient that becomes addicted or overdoses and heart-breakingly dies, then they stuck to the narrative that, hey, when taken as prescribed, it's safe. Because those patients weren't taking it as prescribed. In one role-playing exercise, a patient comes in and admits to his doctor that he's been taking twice as much as you should be. He's essentially been abusing his medication. And the role-playing situation ends with his doctor prescribing twice as much medication, even more. Because that person shouldn't be flagged for help, for counseling, for, you know, anything else. No, just give them more drugs and let them keep taking more and more and more and more and more. Until what? They die? Again, I'm not against prescribing medication when it's necessary. But just shoving more pills down people's throat until they are physically dependent and or die is a real problem. During some of these years, another one of their tools was to give away oxycontin coupons. They couldn't give away free samples of narcotic medications, according to the FDA. But you could give away coupons for a 30-day free supply of this drug and then it eventually became a 7-day free supply. But these are honestly dangerous medications that they were giving doctors coupons to just give to people. And it worked. It worked really well. By 2002, which was 6 years after the drug's release, they were bringing in $1.5 billion a year just from this medication alone. And then the death started happening. Enter one of the characters, Richard Sackler. He is the son of one of the founders of Purdue Pharmacy. He was the president of the company and a board member for a very long time. He had a very, very controlling micro-managing, according to some people, hand in the company. The news came out that recently 59 people had died in one state, all related to oxycontin. His response was, that's not too bad. Could have been worse. 59 people dead. That's not too bad. Could have been worse. We could have killed more people. Flashing forward a few years in 2017, the National Institute on Drug Abuse issued a statement that 47,000 people in 2017 died from drug-related overdoses, specifically to prescription opioids. That is 130 Americans a day, and this is just an America to re-clarify. They are working internationally. I just don't have those statistics. When more and more and more and more people died from his drug, Richard Sackler's response was, we have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible. They are the culprits. They are their problems. Reckless criminals is what he called people dealing with addiction to a drug that they knew was highly addictive, was highly dangerous, and that they had marketed and peddled to the masses with lies for years. Let's talk about the Sackler clan a little bit, shall we? They are billionaires. I would say good for them because I'm all for people making money, but the way they made this money is so appalling that I can't. I can't. Terrible for them. Bad for them. Shame on them. Their company has been sued and sued and sued, and most of the time they settled, nothing ever went through until 2007, when they actually admitted to lying and advertising that they had to pay $600 million in fines and three executives also additionally had to pay over $30 million each. This company was making billions, hundreds of thousands of people have died from it. I don't think that's just punishment, but who am I to say? If you know how companies and boards were, you know that sometimes board members can be, you know, pretty hands-off. They might not know what really is happening in the company, but Richard Sackler knew what was happening in the company. For instance, some people reported that he demanded to go out into the field of the sales reps. He would coach them on what to say, and in a quote that is very revealing, he said, You won't believe how committed I am to making OxyCotton a huge success. I've dedicated my life to it. In a court case deposition, he has asked if Purdue Farmers ever made any effort to find out how many patients were addicted to Oxy. His response was just a flat, nope, he did not say nope. He said no. I should clarify that. Now in 2019, decades after this all began, the Sacklers are finally being named in lawsuits against their company. Over half of the states in the United States are suing Purdue Pharma, and Connecticut has specifically named the Sackler family in one of the lawsuits. The allegation is that they misinformed patients and doctors to get more and more people on Purdue's dangerous drugs, which looking at the information is very accurate. Allow me just a moment to get a little emotional and drop the sarcasm here for just a second. As I began researching all of this, like the first article I read was on money.com. I was aware of a number of like the figures and the stats and like what the Sacklers did and Purdue Pharma and the general overarching story, but I really wanted to get into some details. And this was the first thing I came across. And it honestly, like immediately brought tears to my eyes. I was sitting at the kitchen table with my husband, 10 a.m. on a Saturday, and I just started crying. And this number is actually half of how high I've seen the estimates go, but according to the CDC, between 1999 and 2017, nearly 218,000 people have died from opioid related deaths. I knew it was a lot, but I didn't know it was quite that many. Think about that for just a second. And the people behind making these medications available like in mass knew what they were doing. They knew that they were lying. They did not do their due diligence at a bare minimum. But as I think is pretty clear, it went far beyond that. They didn't care. In one exchange between Richard Sackler and the creator of OxyContin, Richard was proposing the idea and trying to make it available like over-the-counter like aspirin. Like you could just go over to Walgreens and buy a bottle of Oxy. And the guy responded essentially saying that would have disastrous consequences. And Richard responding to him saying, yeah, but what would it do for a bottom line? For that full story, I will link it down below. Eight members of the Sackler family have sat on Purdue Pharma's board. Quick side note again, not every member of the Sackler family is like totally on board with lying to everybody and killing people through their drugs. There are a number of family members who have distanced themselves from the people involved with this. And I will also link that down below just so we don't condemn everybody. We don't throw the baby out with the super dirty bathwater. But talking about the rest of the Sacklers, but talking about the rest of the Sacklers, they are well known for their philanthropy worldwide. For instance, their names are on Sackler Wings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Louvre in Paris, Royal Academy in London. They have their name on rooms at the Guggenheim, the American Museum of Natural History. They have a Sackler staircase at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Forbes.com estimates that the billionaire clan, like the bad Sackler people, that side of the family is worth a collective about $13 billion. Now, I'm curious how bad would someone have to be for you not to take $1.3 million from them? Well, that's what's happening right now with the National Portrait Gallery. The Sackler family and the National Portrait Gallery decided together, I'm going to put that in quotes, not to move forward with a project in which the Sacklers were donating $1.3 million to them. The Guggenheim has also stopped taking any donations from them. I believe this is happening with other organizations as well. If I can find those specific places, I'll put links again in the description. What this company and the people behind it have done is atrocious. At some point in the future, I'll do a video on what the opioid epidemic and crisis really is about. But I think what is really important to note and to come back to is what Richard Sackler said about blaming addicts. This does not happen worldwide, but we are really good here in America at shaming people who have addiction problems. Call them criminals, we take away their rights, we lock them up, we shame them, and we tell them that they're failures and they're horrible people. And that doesn't work. That does not work for helping people heal. That doesn't work for dealing with a very, very serious problem. But it is in the interest of Big Pharma to use a buzzword. It is in the interest of companies like Purdue Pharma. If all you do is shame and blame addicts and take no responsibility for miss marketing your drug for telling people it's not addictive, it's not a problem, it's going to be totally fine, it's just helping people. You know, Mr. Doctor, you'd really be breaking your Hippocratic Oath if you didn't help people with pain. Here, have some drug coupons. The things that they have said, the things that they have done are truly disgusting. You guys, I almost forgot a really important part of this whole story, which was one of the reasons I started making this video. Purdue Pharma recently announced as in in the last couple years that they were making a new drug to help wean addicts off of opioids. Now, on the surface, that's a good thing. Getting people off of drugs that are ruining their lives, that are hurting them is a good thing. Doesn't it turn your stomach just a little bit that the company that essentially manufactured this entire problem bare minimum was a huge part of it and lied to the entire American public about the risk of what they were taking is now standing to profit significantly off of fixing the problem that they made that is killing hundreds of thousands of people. If there is a drug out there that can help people get off of things safely, it should be out there. But the people who created the problem and lied to people about it should not be the people benefitting from it. Am I like the only person who feels that way? I'm not, and that's actually one of the reasons that all of this is kind of coming to the forefront because a lot of people just feel like that's wrong. They need to be held accountable and I sincerely hope that in the cases that are ongoing, they are held accountable. I hope that organizations continue to stop taking their money or give it back. I hope that their name is taken off more and more museum walls and room walls because they don't deserve to be there. If we allow this billionaire Klan's line and Purdue Pharma's line of blame the addict, it's their fault if they take it incorrectly even though it's not a dangerous drug to perpetuate and we continue to just jail addicts and treat them like crap, nothing is ever going to get better. And I'll also link a book in the description that deals specifically with ways other countries have dealt with addiction and effectively started to actually heal the problem and compassionately help people and guess what? It's a lot more effective than shaming them, calling them reckless criminals, throwing them in prison or just cutting off all help. Is the opioid crisis a complex problem? Absolutely. Are there a lot of prongs and a lot of storylines and a lot of people involved? Absolutely. Are other people to blame? Absolutely. But these people in this company played an integral role of what we see happening here in America and they need to be held accountable. Because yes, absolutely, people are in real pain, real physical pain and these medications absolutely do help. But when you peddle the idea to doctors over expensive dinners and resorts in Florida that it's not addictive, that it's totally fine and that it should be prescribed in higher and higher doses, we have an issue. As I began taking pain medication, I remember very clearly being told by a number of different sources by friends and articles and doctors that if you take it the right way, you'll never become addicted. If you take it, if you're in actual physical pain, you'll never have a problem. I have honestly believed that for years and that's not true. You can take it when you're in physical pain and still use it in an abusive way. That is important for people to simply be aware of. Much more than 1% of chronic pain patients who are ever prescribed opioids do get addicted. That statistic is false and unfounded and yet they continue to spread it all around for quite some time. Another quick side note guys, if you are curious about my story with narcotics, prescription drugs, all of that, check out this story above or look in the description. Now, for those of you who stuck around to the end of this pretty serious video, I have a present for you. A giveaway. I am giving away two books. The first one is American Pain. American Pain, I referenced a lot of today but I referenced kind of like the statistics and the boring parts. This is actually a fascinating read. It's like a true crime, really well written account, kind of in story form about everything happened. I started listening to it on Audible about a year ago and that's how I really got interested in all of this. Secondly, I am giving away a copy of Chasing the Scream. Chasing the Scream is written by Johann Haare and it's a fantastic book. I am almost done with it. I haven't quite finished it but it talks about the drug war on an international scale and what some countries are doing that is really really helping people. Again, it's written in a very conversational story way. This isn't like dry reading. I promise I wouldn't recommend any books to you that were like gonna bore you out of your mind. It's like they've snuck in all these statistics and super educational content within a fascinating story that you just don't want to put down. So if you want to enter, all you have to do is comment below. I will be picking the winner on Friday and announcing it in Friday's video. And if you don't win or you don't want to wait until it arrives in the mail, check out either one of these books on Audible.com. Like I said, I actually listened to this book about a year ago on Audible.com. It was sitting in my audio library for a while and I was like, ah, that's gonna be boring and I eventually clicked to download and listen to it and I could not stop. Audible is the world's largest library of audiobooks and I love audiobooks for a lot of reasons. One, because I can listen to them while I'm doing other things. I can listen to them in the car. I can hear stories and learn things while my hands are free and I'm doing other things. And as someone who does deal with chronic pain, I love audiobooks because I don't have to have my eyes open to read them. They're very passive. I can get a great story while resting. If you use the link below, you get a 30-day free trial of Audible, which comes with a free book, which means you could read either one of these and tell me what you think about it. Or you could choose something totally different and light and happy and fluffy and tell me how you enjoy that as well. Like I said, if you click that link below, you'll get that 30-day free trial and a free book and it would definitely help me out too, so I appreciate it. Thank you guys so much for sticking with me through today's video, which was a pretty dark, pretty tough topic. I really appreciate it and I would love to hear your comments specifically on all of this. Have you had any experience with it? Have you heard of any of this stuff before? Is it your first time, you know, learning about it? Also, John Oliver, who is one of my favorite comedians and talk show hosts, did his episode on Last Week Tonight two days ago about all of this. Ironically, I'd been researching it for about a week and a half and I saw that his show popped up about it. I was like, ah, that's awesome. Good timing. Without, also, I referenced the description a couple of times, but like I said, there will be a lot of links down there and also if there's any updates, corrections, anything like that, I will be posting it down below, so make sure you check the description. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate you. I love you. I'll be thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Bye guys.