CORRECTION: The original version of this story failed to mention the role of ConvergenceRI in reporting the link between Rhodes Pharmaceuticals and Purdue Pharma.

COVENTRY — Rhodes Pharmaceuticals is a sinister drugmaker that most Rhode Islanders have never heard of, contends Domenic Esposito. On Thursday, the sculptor from Westwood, Massachusetts, set off to change that with a spoonful of public shaming.

But it was no ordinary spoon.

Shortly after 8 a.m., he and a partner hauled his 10-foot long, 800-pound aluminum spoon — like the kind drug addicts use to melt heroin before injecting it — to the front gate of Rhodes Pharma’s sprawling industrial complex off Washington Street.

“There hasn’t been much education about who is accountable for this opioid epidemic,” Esposito, 48, said. “This was a huge marketing business plan established by a handful of corporations who wanted to profit at the expense of lives. So it’s really about exposing this web of influence that big pharma has had on us.”

The website ConvergenceRI first reported the link between Rhodes Pharmaceuticals and Purdue Pharma, manufacturer of the controversial painkiller OxyContin, and in September, The Financial Times wrote about it in a more widely disseminated piece.

In 2007, four months after executives of Purdue pleaded guilty to federal charges of misleading the public about OxyContin’s addiction risk, the Stamford, Connecticut-based company set up Rhodes Pharmaceuticals, reported The Financial Times.

Today Rhodes Pharma is among the largest producers of generic opioids in the country, the newspaper reported, stamping out millions of addictive painkiller pills every year.

Coventry Police Chief John MacDonald says Rhodes Pharma “has been a very low key, a very good neighbor. You don’t see much about them in the news.”

Indeed, even the company’s sign on Washington Street is easy for passing motorists to miss, with the word “Pharmaceuticals” painted faintly onto a white backdrop.

The company, along with fellow Purdue subsidiary Rhodes Technologies, takes up acres of fenced lowland running south along the Pawtuxet River, with security booths and cameras spread throughout the campus.

In 2018, the two companies paid $603,070 in taxes to Coventry, with the tax assessor's bills mailed to Purdue’s corporate headquarters on Tresser Boulevard in Stamford.

A spokesman for the company could not be immediately reached Thursday morning.

Esposito said his artwork was inspired by his family’s painful struggle dealing with a younger brother’s 12-year addiction to opioids.

“It started with my mom calling me and screaming, saying she had found another spoon in the house,” he said.

“My brother was going through recovery at the time and everything seemed to be going well. And then we find another spoon and it all starts over again.”

In June, Esposito took the first of his sculpted spoons — with curled handle and burned bowl — to the front steps of Purdue’s Stamford office.

A Purdue spokesman said at the time that the company was committed to working on preventing deaths by opioid overdoses.

Stamford police seized that spoon and hauled it off. Months later Esposito retrieved it and in October placed it outside the Massachusetts State House as a gift to Attorney General Maura T. Healey.

Healey, like counterparts in some 35 other states, is suing Purdue and members of the billionaire Sackler family who started the company, alleging they promoted the use of high doses of OxyContin despite knowing the risk of addiction.

Purdue has denied all allegations.

According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, overdose deaths involving any prescription opioids (including methadone), synthetic opioids and heroin rose from 18,515 in 2007 to 47,600 in 2017.

For more than an hour Tuesday morning, Esposito stood in the cold drizzle behind his spoon, on the public sidewalk, drawing the attention of passersby.

Several were compelled to stop, including tow-truck operator Andrew Maher and his partner Sonik Achee.

"We lost my sister-in-law to heroin and opioids last year," Achee told Esposito. Her name was Michele Melia. She was in her 30s.

Esposito said he was considering engraving the names of those like Michele onto future spoons and dropping them at other locations as well.

"We're here to raise awareness of the accountable parties of the opioid epidemic and to make the connection that Purdue Pharma owns Rhodes, but it's not just them," Esposito said. "It's doctors and politicians and universities that have all taken money from big pharma. They are all part of the problem — not technically illegally, but morally."

"Keep doing what you're doing," encouraged Achee. "Your message will get through."

— tmooney@providencejournal.com

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On Twitter: @mooneyprojo