Dopesick - Beth Macy Page 0,31
to buy a four-wheeler that he sold for money to buy drugs. “He would say my mom was trying to kill him when my mom doesn’t have a mean bone in her body,” Green added. “That drug took over his brain.”
Two years before her father’s death, Green would drive to her parents’ home to rescue her mom, bringing her back to Texas to live with her. Together they waited, cringing every time the phone rang late at night. Around dawn on October 22, 2009, it finally did.
When McCauley, seventy-five, died four years after his case was tried, police found him in his lime-hauling truck at 4 a.m. in the middle of a pasture—he’d crashed through a fence. Several near-empty bottles of pills, prescribed just two days earlier, were strewn on the seat next to him. A state trooper told McCauley’s daughter and wife that he died of a heart attack, but his daughter believes he was murdered over a bad drug deal.
His head was blown apart, she said, as if from a gun.
*
The boxes of juicy sales-rep call notes and depositions that represented Fayne McCauley’s case files did not molder in Yeary’s law office attic. They were folded into Wood and Brownlee’s trove of ammo for their case against Purdue. By the time Yeary lost the case, Brownlee’s office was in the process of secretly logging millions of records on spreadsheets. The Wood Reports were coming out at a rate of four or five a week, and one employee was assigned to do nothing but catalog documents for the investigation—all of them buttressing Brownlee’s belief that Purdue had knowingly concealed the drug’s addictiveness.
When a New York Post reporter broke the news in 2005 that a federal grand jury was investigating Purdue, Van Rooyan told Bisch and the other RAPP parents, “They think they’re going to run roughshod over a bunch of hillbilly lawyers.” She recalled how Udell had gloated over the scores of legal wins against people like McCauley, and his pledge that the company would never settle such “absurd lawsuits.”
But the company and its executives underestimated the U.S. attorney from Roanoke, who brought in prosecutors from neighboring jurisdictions and deputized them as special assistants to pick up the non-Purdue-case slack. To lead the Purdue investigation, he appointed assistant U.S. attorneys Randy Ramseyer and Rick Mountcastle, career government lawyers who were not given to drama and worked three hours west of Brownlee in the district’s satellite office in Abingdon, closer to the coalfields.
It would never occur to either of them to tote around a podium—or to voluntarily talk to the press. When I interviewed Ramseyer almost a decade later, he deflected questions with a combination of press paranoia and aw-shucks humility: “Sometimes people get intimidated by big companies and high-dollar lawyers. You just have to avoid that.” And: “It’s not rocket science; it’s just hard work.”
But Ramseyer and Mountcastle had watched their caseloads shift dramatically since OxyContin’s introduction. And they were well aware that the few federal prosecutors who’d earlier tried to bring Purdue to account for rising Oxy-related crime had fallen short, with only a handful of exceptions. Jay McCloskey, the U.S. attorney in Maine, had challenged the company’s promotional techniques early on, with some success. He had pushed the company to drop the doctor junkets and the 160-milligram version of its pill, only to leave his post in 2001 to work as a consultant for—wait for it—Purdue Pharma.
But the Abingdon prosecutors were content doing government work. Ramseyer and Mountcastle had sent a host of pill-mill doctors to jail over the years—one of whom had been doling out prescriptions from the back seat of his car. Since OxyContin’s introduction, the tiny Abingdon office had successfully prosecuted ten doctors, pharmacists, and dentists for overprescribing the drugs, including to nine-year-old kids. By the time their investigation was over, nine state and federal agencies would spend five years helping the stone-faced prosecutors build the case. Unlike the civil lawsuits that preceded them, Brownlee’s team had to prove only that the company had “misbranded” the drug, a broad and somewhat technical charge that makes it a crime to mislabel a drug or fraudulently promote it, or market it for an unapproved use. The federal prosecutors didn’t have to prove the misbranding was actually responsible for the overdoses and the addiction and misuse, just that Purdue Pharma had criminally misbranded the drug, according to Hammack, the Roanoke Times courts reporter. “So it was a very murky legal line, but Randy and Rick figured it