OXYCONTIN MARKETING TACTICS GO ON TRIAL TODAY

WELCH - Today, lawyers working for the state and a massive drug maker will
begin picking the jurors who may determine the future of the painkiller
OxyContin in West Virginia.

The state's lawyers come to McDowell County's old stone courthouse seeking
tens of millions of dollars they say OxyContin's maker, Purdue Pharma, owes
West Virginia for dishonestly marketing the pain pill.

When the trial begins, the state's lawyers plan to tell jurors that the
company kept doctors, pharmacists and patients in the dark about the
morphinelike drug's addictive qualities because it wanted to sell more
pills, according to court filings and hearing transcripts.

The company's lawyers say cancer patients and other chronic pain sufferers
have found relief after using the pill.

If the jurors in this trial side with the state, the company may stop
selling the drug in West Virginia, lawyer Timbera Wilcox told McDowell
Circuit Judge Booker Stephens in a memorandum filed last month.

"Truly, at the end of the day this case is really about West Virginians
continuing to get state-of-the-art" pain medication, Wilcox said in a
recent telephone interview.

OxyContin is the world's best-selling painkiller. Purdue Pharma sold $1.9
billion worth of the drug last year,

West Virginia Attorney General Darrell McGraw started this courtroom fight
in 2001, about five years after Purdue Pharma began shipping OxyContin to
West Virginia pharmacies.

By then, Purdue Pharma had turned the powerful opiate into a moneymaker. In
2001 alone, it sold $1 billion worth of OxyContin pills. West Virginia
state agencies bought about $7.1 million worth of pills that year,
according to state records.

Although the company put more oxycodone in OxyContin than other commonly
abused painkillers, it said drug users were unlikely to pop them to get
high because the pills released the oxycodone slowly over a 12-hour period.

The company was wrong. Drug users figured out that by crushing the pills,
they could ingest a tablet's entire oxycodone content at once. By the time
McGraw filed his lawsuits, nearly half of the West Virginians in
rehabilitation trying to beat an addiction to prescription pills named
OxyContin as their drug of choice, according to state records.

For years, Purdue Pharma has maintained that it is not responsible for the
problems caused by OxyContin abuse.

"It is safe and effective when used as intended, and that is what is
intended by Purdue," said Wilcox, one of the company's lawyers.

The state's lawyers say the company could have actually prevented some of
the problems caused by OxyContin abuse by telling doctors, pharmacists and
patients more about the drug.

For instance, the company did not mention some of the drug's potentially
fatal side effects in a handful of advertisements it ran in medical
journals in recent years, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
The FDA forced the company to pull the ads.

The company also told its sales force in West Virginia to downplay the
drug' s addictive qualities, according to William Gergley. He was the
company's district manager for West Virginia and western Pennsylvania for
more than two decades. Purdue Pharma fired him in 2000.

"They told us to say things like it is 'virtually' nonaddicting," Gergely
told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel last year. "That's what we were
instructed to do. It's not right, but that's what they told us to say."

The state's lawyers say that Purdue Pharma should pay for these and other
misleading marketing practices. They have not said how much they will ask
the jury to award the state, but have said that their request could equal
or exceed the $30.5 million various state agencies have spent on OxyContin
between 1996 and 2003.