SELLING DRUGS LEGALLY, BUT NOT ALWAYS SAFELY

Drugs, whether illegal or legal, have their dangers.

Legitimate manufacturers sell drugs, of course - but they should not
push them.

PUSHING DRUGS is a dangerous business.

Pharmaceutical companies should acknowledge the pitfalls, and tread
gingerly through territory that can appear so deceptively benign -
that they can make appear so deceptively benign with sophisticated
marketing. Americans are wearily familiar with the illegal drug trade,
the street sales in which the potential for violence is a constant,
the quality of the product a possibly fatal unknown.

But pushing drugs has gone legit on a major scale - directly to
consumers in bald commercial appeals, or in more circumspect ways as
manufacturers pitch their wares to doctors using techniques that mix
the educational and the promotional.

The awful risks of promoting powerful prescription drugs are becoming
apparent only gradually.

And OxyContin illustrates the danger dramatically.

Addiction to that potent painkiller has become a scourge in Southwest
Virginia and up and down the Appalachians, in coal-mining communities
where high rates of injury create a legitimate market - and an
opportunity for the unscrupulous to build up a highly profitable,
illegal trade.

Reporter Laurence Hammack's in-depth series on OxyContin, published
this week, chronicled both the drug's benefits for chronic
pain-sufferers and its disastrous side-effects for communities where
use has led to widespread abuse - and deaths, thefts and ruined lives.

Purdue Pharma, the drug's manufacturer, insists it has been
responsible - even conservative - in marketing the drug. Its
promotional beach hats, pedometers and swing-music CDs ("Swing in the
right direction with OxyContin"), all plastered with the name of the
potent narcotic, suggest otherwise.

Both the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement
Administration have criticized Purdue's promotion of the drug.

Americans need no advertising images of folks having nonstop fun to
encourage them to take drugs.

The public is comfortable with the concept.

American doctors, on the other hand, are criticized as being too
reluctant to treat pain. Many could use some re-education.

The task should be taken up by medical schools, though, not
drug-makers whose lifeblood is sales.

Modern drugs are miraculous, yes - and too dangerous to be subject to
marketing principles. Handle with care. Drugs kill.