Companies fought to keep the videos, which are evidence in a huge, multi-state lawsuit fought in Ohio, under seal

This article is more than 9 months old

This article is more than 9 months old

Opioid manufacturers made parody music videos in an effort to inspire salespeople to push doctors to prescribe more of their highly addictive products.

Newly released videos show opioid manufacturers produced music videos, sponsored local news segments and held dramatic new launches for products even after they were warned against aggressive marketing.

The music videos are evidence in a huge, multi-state lawsuit fought in Cleveland, Ohio. Opioid manufacturers fought to keep them under seal but the Washington Post and the Gazette-Mail of Charleston, West Virginia, sued to make them public.

From 1999 to 2017, more than 702,000 people died of drug overdoses in the US – more than 70,000 in 2017 alone. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 68% of such deaths involved a prescription opioid.

As a comparison, roughly 58,000 American soldiers died in battle in the Vietnam war, and about 40,000 Americans die each year in car accidents.

In statements to the Washington Post, manufacturers argued their marketing campaigns did not mislead doctors and provided patients with needed medications.

But the newly unearthed videos and documents show how aggressively the products were marketed.

In one example, the Post reported, drug manufacturers made a parody of hit sitcom The Office to sell the opioid Kadian, a morphine capsule usually used for cancer pain “severe enough to require daily, around-the-clock, long-term opioid treatment”.

“Kadian is an awesome drug, OK? It’s flat-out awesome, it’s eight-days-a-week awesome. It’s 380-days-a year awesome,” an actor in the video said. “So, I figure I’ve got to be a lean, mean selling machine to sell Kadian to all kinds of doctors.”

In an example from 2011, Purdue Pharma produced a music video for a sales conference for a new opioid called Butran, in which sales officials mimicked the melody to Dynamite by Taio Cruz, singing: “’Cause I sold you once, now I sold you twice.”

Dalton Bennett (@DDaltonBennett) At Purdue’s national sales conference in Phoenix in 2011 company reps made a music video to the Taio Cruz song ‘Dynamite’ for their new opioid called Butrans. pic.twitter.com/7mQSF24doc

Executives at Insys Therapeutics, one of the only pharmaceutical companies to face criminal charges in the opioid epidemic, also used music videos to inspire sales people. One video was used at a 2015 sales conference to launch the highly addictive Subsys, a fentanyl spray.

Subsys is so powerful it was meant only for cancer patients who already had a physical tolerance to opioids and who had extreme “breakthrough pain”. Doctors had to receive special training to prescribe it.

However, sales reps pushed doctors to prescribe the drug to patients in less severe situations. In one situation documented by STAT News, a New Jersey physician allowed a salesman to pitch his patient on the drug, even though her diagnosis was for fibromyalgia and chronic pain following two car accidents.