EXCUSING THE HOMEFOLKS

The tirade that U.S. Rep. Hal Rogers unleashed this week on Purdue Pharma,
maker of the painkiller OxyContin, was amazing, coming from the
representative of a region where misuse of prescription drugs is a
time-tested tradition.

Rep. Rogers heaped abuse on the Connecticut-based manufacturer, as if it
were responsible for the loose prescribing and illicit trafficking in this
valuable drug. More appropriate targets would have been the doctors and
druggists who supply OxyContin, and the patients who push for it, when
other treatment would be wiser. Or the law enforcement people who haven't
cracked down. Or government, which has not set up rehab clinics close
enough to the remote communities afflicted by drug abuse. Or states that
haven't created prescription-monitoring programs, as Kentucky has.

The congressman promised a General Accounting Office probe into Purdue
Pharma's marketing and promotion practices. But GAO will run into the fact
that the company has no power to intercede in such phenomena as the
dramatic jump in OxyContin use at a Myrtle Beach, S.C., clinic, which drew
Rep. Rogers' ire.

Certainly, drug firms must participate, responsibly, in the monitoring and
management of their products' distribution and use. But making a scapegoat
of Purdue Pharma in this instance is unfair and unwise.

OxyContin is an effective, government-approved drug. It is regulated by the
Food and Drug Administration and the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Doctors prescribe it for over a million patients each year.

As The New York Times Magazine noted, Purdue Pharma was first to advertise
an opoid pill for pain control, but its ads were directed at doctors, in
medical journals, not at vulnerable, ignorant consumers. The firm also
advanced the defensible notions (1) that chronic pain is more widespread
than generally thought, (2) that it is treatable, and (3) that opoids are
the treatment of choice in some cases. The company's field reps promoted
OxyContin to pharmacists and family physicians.

Yes, this was a typical hard sell, but when the firm learned of emerging
abuse in early 2000, it set up a response team, although not with the same
massive resources.

Rep. Rogers is not the first government official to sound off. And lawyers
for drug abusers allegedly victimized by the firm are getting in the act.
Pulling OxyContin from the market has been proposed. But that would deny
relief to millions who, without it, were disabled by chronic pain. They
shouldn't be doubly victimized while the search for a less abusable form of
the medication proceeds.