TRENTON -- State Attorney General Christopher Porrino on Tuesday will hit OxyContin manufacturer Purdue Pharma with a suit linking New Jersey's opioid addiction crisis to the company's deceptive marketing practices aimed at those suffering from chronic pain, NJ Advance Media has learned.

The move, which was expected, will charge the firm with fraud, making false claims and the creation of a public nuisance, according to sources familiar with the attorney general's plans who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The action will be taken just a week after maker of the company confirmed Thursday it is under investigation by federal prosecutors in Connecticut for misrepresenting the health risks of opioid painkillers.

UPDATE: The suit has since been filed in Essex County Superior Court. Click here



At the center of the forthcoming New Jersey suit is the allegation that Purdue promulgated the notion that chronic pain was "under-treated" by the medical community, a source familiar with the suit said.

This source also said the suit alleges Purdue duped doctors and the public into believing its opioid painkillers ought be the primary treatment option for chronic conditions like arthritis or even migraine headaches despite its lack of any studies examining treatment periods longer than 12 weeks.

2ND UPDATE: The A.G.'s office has now put out a press release touting its filed suit. In it, Porrino calls Purdue's marketing campaign for OxyContin one of "almost inconceivable callousness and irresponsibility" alleging Purdue spent hundreds of millions of dollars to spread false information about opioids, leading "to addiction, overdose, and death."

One source familiar with the planned filings said that hundreds of physicians had been interviewed for the suit, and state investigators found their answers "staggering."

Purdue sales representatives in New Jersey were required to visit 7-8 doctors per day, 5 days a week, to promote Purdue opioids like OxyContin, according to the filing. And Purdue drug reps were given hyper-aggressive prescription quotas of roughly 7,000 per year, but in some cases as many as 8,400 prescriptions a year.

A spokesman for Purdue Pharma issued this statement to NJ Advance Media on Tuesday morning:

"We are deeply troubled by the opioid crisis and we are dedicated to being part of the solution. As a company grounded in science, we must balance patient access to FDA-approved medicines, while working collaboratively to solve this public health challenge.

"Although our products account for approximately 2% of the total opioid prescriptions, as a company, we've distributed the CDC Guideline for Prescribing Opioids for Chronic Pain, developed three of the first four FDA-approved opioid medications with abuse-deterrent properties and partner with law enforcement to ensure access to naloxone. We vigorously deny these allegations and look forward to the opportunity to present our defense."

Purdue's alleged minimizing of addiction risk and exaggerating of opioids' benefits sounds familiar to former Mississippi attorney general Mike Moore, whose law firm is currently advising the Ohio and Mississippi attorneys general in their own suits against Purdue.

"Back in 2005, I actually had the general counsel and the Chief Marketing Officer of Purdue come down to Jackson (Mississippi) and they told me to my face that patients who were addicted to painkillers had pseudo-addiction -- that they really need to get more drugs for their pain," said Moore. "It's almost that they were telling people that the pain absorbs the drugs."

Since Purdue debuted OxyContin 21 years ago, it's generated sales of more than $35 billion, with current annual revenues estimated at approximately $3 billion, mostly from the sale of OxyContin, according to Forbes magazine's latest estimates.

Moore, who helped negotiate the multibillion dollar tobacco settlement with Philip Morris and RJ Reynolds in 1998, said that the result has been flood of pills in America's medicine cabinets fueled by a multi-billion dollar marketing campaign by Purdue and others.

"We have to take into account Purdue hiring all these drug detailers who went about telling doctors that there was a less than 1 percent chance of their patients getting addicted if they did so under a doctor's care," said Moore.

A source familiar with the planned suit noted that New Jersey's largest Medicaid managed care organization has paid $109 million for opioids through the Medicaid program since 2008.

This source noted that the State Employee and Retiree Health Plan has paid another $136 million for opioids since 2012.

"They end up in grandma's cabinet," said Moore. "And now she has 88 pills. It's a public nuisance that they're out there."

According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, 75 percent of all opioid misuse begins when people start using medication that wasn't prescribed for them, obtaining it either through friends or family.

For decades, opioids were largely restricted to use in post-surgical rehabilitation or for end-of-life care because they were believed to be too powerful and addictive for general use. Opioid overdose deaths were at exponentially lower levels during that time as well, according to CDC and NIH data.

A source said the planned suit alleges that Purdue knew of the addiction risks, but then sought to mislead physicians into looking for signs of abuse that were never likely to materialize.

The filing contends that Purdue even went so far as to fraudulently market an "abuse deterent" version of OxyContin in 2010 that described the signs of abuse as injection track marks on patient's skin and/or a perforated septum from snorting the drug, when the most common method of abuse was simply to swallow the drug in pill form.

Moore said his interviews with Purdue executives in 2005 were so troubling that he turned most of the material over to the U.S. Attorney's office in Virginia shortly after.

By 2007, the U.S. attorney' office in Virginia filed suit against Purdue, with three executives pleading guilty to federal charges related to the misbranding of OxyContin. Purdue agreed to pay a total of $634.5 million in fines to resolve the case.

Claude Brodesser-Akner may be reached at cbrodesser@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @ClaudeBrodesser. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.