Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,36

Holocaust, and contact that group and say to them that Friedman is no better than Adolf Hitler, who killed and destroyed countless lives; Hitler through death and torture, Friedman through death and addiction,” said Marianne Skolek, who lost her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Jill. Skolek brought along her grandson, Brian, who was six years old when his mother died of an overdose of prescribed OxyContin in 2002.

“Brian is here in the courtroom with me today because he needed to see that bad things do happen to bad people,” Skolek said.

But not bad enough, the parents told the judge. The plea agreement called for no jail time, and many beseeched Judge Jones to reconsider incarceration for the three.

“I think jail is too good for you guys,” said Lynn Locascio from Palm Harbor, Florida. Her son was still struggling with addiction, having been prescribed OxyContin after surgery resulting from a car accident. “I think you should go spend some time in a rehab facility like my son did and watch that. Maybe you’ll change your minds.”

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Lawyers for the executives argued that the shame of criminal charges was punishment enough. They reiterated, over and over, that the men—the top corporate executives who had directed the company’s legal, financial, and pharmaceutical divisions—had personally done nothing wrong. Representing Udell, attorney Mary Jo White called the company’s head lawyer “the moral compass of the company,” pointing out that Purdue, at Udell’s urging, had voluntarily taken the 160-milligram pill off the market after safety concerns became known. Udell had championed prescription monitoring programs when most others in the industry were opposed, and he was behind the suspension of shipments of OxyContin to Mexico when it became clear Americans were traveling there to bring back the drug.

Calling the case “a personal tragedy for Mr. Udell,” White said most people would wrongly equate the strict liability misdemeanor he pleaded guilty to with criminal wrongdoing. Jail time, she added, “would unjustifiably and needlessly compound the stigma and punishment for an offense and facts that are without personal wrongdoing.”

Likewise, Goldenheim, the firm’s former chief scientist and medical director, was in “agony” about the charge, his lawyer said. He’d been labeled “a criminal, and that is horrendously harsh punishment for someone who has done so much good, and under the agreed statement of facts has done nothing wrong.”

Friedman’s lawyer pointed out that the company distributed antidiversion brochures and antifraud prescription pads; created a law enforcement liaison unit within Purdue; funded local law enforcement programs; and, eventually, altered sales-representative compensation so the system would not lend itself to abuse. While other Purdue employees “made statements about OxyContin that were inconsistent with company policy and that should not have been made…Michael Friedman did not participate in that misconduct.” Without proof that he committed a criminal act, to jail him would be virtually unprecedented under American law, his lawyer said.

In other words, the lawyers did exactly what Ramseyer predicted they would do in his remarks: They refused to take responsibility for the death and destruction caused by the drug—to the point of reiterating, again in court, that “the enormous benefits of OxyContin far outweigh its risks, even taking into account the grief from those we’ve heard about today.”

Calling it “unprecedented” to hold pharmaceutical corporate officers criminally liable in such a case, Ramseyer noted that Udell, Friedman, and Goldenheim, in accepting the plea, were conceding that they had not been “powerless to prevent the crime. As corporate officers, these men had a duty to ensure that misbranding did not occur.” He predicted that Purdue’s next public-relations campaign would begin the moment he sat down from making his remarks: “They will attempt to minimize the crimes to which they pled guilty.”

And while that is exactly what their lawyers did, Ramseyer later said the men seemed distressed throughout the proceedings. “They were very unhappy,” he told me. “We do cases in court where people get sentenced to twenty or thirty years in prison, and they didn’t seem as unhappy as those three guys.”

Ramseyer remained loath to say much more about the case, although the fact that he’d been diagnosed with cancer while working on it—and had to take a break midway through the case for treatment—seemed to sear it in his mind as both a personal challenge and a professional high mark. He hoped the case had a chilling effect on pharmaceutical companies and overprescribing doctors alike, but he wasn’t sure. He’d read recently that enough opioid painkillers had been prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult around the