Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,28

and Nuss’s late son, Randy, who was tucked inside her mini urn. Nuss also brought her rosary beads, loaning an extra set to White to hold during the proceedings.

A few days into the trial, Nuss realized she’d accidentally left the beads behind in her car. Excusing herself to retrieve them, she handed White her son’s urn to hold during her absence at the plaintiff’s table.

“Really?” White said, tearing up, as Nuss recalled it. “You would let me do that?”

When Nuss returned with the beads, she was surprised to see White coming out of the courtroom so soon. A recess had already been called. “Where’s Ed?” she asked.

He had to leave the building, White told her, adding, “Lee, please, don’t get upset.”

“Why?” Nuss wanted to know.

“You’re not gonna believe this, but Ed had to take your son out of the courthouse.”

Purdue’s lawyers had heard about the urn and asked the judge to have it removed from the building.

Bisch and White expected the grieving mom to blow up, but Nuss surprised them by laughing instead. She told her friends, “My son is not here in body, but he is definitely here in spirit.

“He might have left the building, but he will be back!”

*

Bisch was due back at work in Philly before the jury’s decision came in—but he was not surprised when Nuss called with the verdict. “Ed, there’s just too much money involved,” she told him. “We really thought we were doing something, only to find out, nobody is gonna do anything.”

The jury ruled in favor of Purdue, whose lawyer called the case a “personal disagreement with promoting the drug in an entirely legal way.” While White believed calling on sleazy pill prescribers was illegal, her lawyer had not proved the illegality of the company’s sales strategies.

“The court basically said, ‘Don’t tell us what you believe. Tell us what you know,’” explained University of Kentucky legal scholar Richard Ausness, who has written about the difficulty of winning civil cases against Purdue, citing among other reasons the company’s hefty defense chest. At the request of a Purdue lawyer, the government’s highly critical 2003 Government Accountability Office study of Purdue’s marketing practices was ruled inadmissible in court.

During the first decade of the drug’s existence, the legal system could not prove the makers of OxyContin had broken the law.

*

Back in western Virginia, a young U.S. attorney with political aspirations was secretly working on his own attempt to defeat Purdue in court as early as 2003. John L. Brownlee was brash, a little bit of a cowboy, and as a former paratrooper and Army Reserve JAG Corps captain, the thirty-six-year-old was not afraid of high-stakes drama.

Or the press. He was married to a local news anchor, Lee Ann Necessary, whom he’d met on the job a decade earlier. With a ruddy complexion and a mop of reddish-brown hair, he had a boyish appearance that belied his hard-charging demeanor. If Law & Order sold action figures, they would look like John Brownlee, down to the crisp creases in his trousers and his American-flag lapel pin.

Brownlee became so fond of calling press conferences that he traveled with a portable podium with fold-out legs. His prosecuting philosophy: If you’re not losing sometimes, you’re not going after the hard cases. By the time Karen White’s case was dismissed, in 2003, Brownlee was still smarting over his own trial loss, via an acquittal, hung jury, and dismissal, in a multiple wrongful-death suit against Roanoke pain specialist Dr. Cecil Knox, whose office had been raided by federal agents, storm trooper–style. Knox and several of his office workers had been handcuffed and carted away—one of the women was carrying her groceries out of a store—even though defense attorneys had already arranged with federal authorities for their clients to turn themselves in. The showboating earned Brownlee a reputation as aggressive and, at times, overreaching.

On the heels of the Knox case and another high-profile case that generated equally fierce public criticism and ended similarly—with two hung juries—Brownlee needed a big legal win.

With plans to seek elected office—Brownlee would run for Virginia attorney general in 2008—he may have viewed prosecuting Purdue Pharma as “a vehicle for being in the national news,” recalled Laurence Hammack, a longtime Roanoke Times reporter (and my former colleague) who chronicled OxyContin’s spread.

“Yes, he had self-serving motivations. But on the other hand, [OxyContin abuse] was happening everywhere in the country, and no one else took them on.”

*

Brownlee did, almost immediately after being appointed U.S. attorney, though he didn’t go public with the