Thank you, Chair.
My question's for Dr. Landau.
Dr. Landau, in the late 1880s Bayer in Germany created a synthetic opioid that made people feel heroic. They marketed that drug to treat pain, and for those who were addicted to morphine or the liquid version, which is laudanum. They did it by telling doctors with no clear evidence that it was safer than other such drugs because it wasn't addictive.
That drug was heroin, one of the most addictive drugs in the world, which has caused immeasurable misery to addicts ever since. It has ruined tens of thousands of lives, caused thousands of deaths, and cost hundreds of millions to health care plans worldwide.
Flash forward to the late 1990s. Your company, Purdue Pharma, did the exact same thing with oxycodone/OxyContin, sending out an army of detail reps to persuade thousands of doctors with no clear evidence that it was safer than heroin or morphine, and it wasn't really addictive. Now you're here today doing the same thing for OxyNEO.
Your company financed and co-opted a professor at one of the finest medical schools in Canada for a compulsory week-long curriculum on how to treat pain. You provided him with false information for those lectures in the form of free textbooks paid by Purdue Pharma that indicated that oxycodone and OxyContin were not addictive in the absence of clear evidence. You provided free copies for his captive audience of medical students.
The text amended a WHO document, World Health Organization, that did not mention oxycodone, to add oxycodone and indicate that oxycodone was a weak opioid similar to codeine and tramadol—when the truth is that oxycodone is at least 1.5 times stronger than morphine—thus making oxycodone appear safer than it was.
You arranged for the CMAJ to print a review of a clinical trial that said there is now evidence opioids relieve chronic, neuropathic, and nociceptive pain.” Instead you added in three words “strong and consistent” evidence opioids relieve chronic, neuropathic, and nociceptive pain, thus grossly exaggerating the efficacy of oxycodone. All this to persuade a new generation of doctors that oxycodone is more effective and less powerful, and therefore safer for patients, and less likely to cause addiction.
Oxycodone/OxyContin is now well known as the most addictive drug in the world, which has created thousands of addicts whose lives have been disrupted or ruined, many of whom have turned to crime to pay for their oxycodone/OxyContin habit in some cases becoming addicts for life, hundreds of others turning to crime to pay for their Oxy, and in many others dying from overdose.
In May 2007 your company in the U.S. paid $634.5 million to the U.S. government in fines for illegally marketing oxycodone/OxyContin.
I'd like to ask you what are the total worldwide sales for these two drugs since you started selling them just in billions of dollars.