Sunday, July 15, 2007


Jul. 15, 2007 (McClatchy-Tribune Regional News delivered by Newstex) --
They will come from Columbus, Ga., where Ed Vanicky woke up one morning to find his wife lying dead next to him, the victim of too many pain pills prescribed for a bad back.

And from Bridgewater, Mass., where June Saba's teenage son was once so addicted to OxyContin that he stole money from her purse and pawned the family's TV set to buy his next high.

And from South Kingstown, R.I., where Vic Del Regno answered the door four years ago and found a state trooper waiting to tell him that his son, a college student who took OxyContin as a party drug, was dead from an overdose.

Vanicky, Saba and Del Regno will come to Southwest Virginia this week and stand next to a federal courthouse, where they will be joined by others from across the country with similar stories to tell.

They want to be seen -- and heard -- by the three men who will walk past them and into the courthouse.

Michael Friedman, Howard Udell and Paul Goldenheim, top executives for the company that makes and sells OxyContin, are scheduled to be sentenced at 1 p.m. Friday in U.S. District Court in Abingdon.

The officials and their company, Purdue Pharma of Stamford, Conn., pleaded guilty in May to overseeing an aggressive marketing campaign that touted the wonders of OxyContin while failing to warn physicians about the dangers of a prescription painkiller so potent it has been called 'heroin in a pill.'

Friedman, Udell and Goldenheim face huge fines, but no jail time, under a proposed plea agreement.

As plans take shape for a rally outside the courthouse, it appears they will also be facing dozens, perhaps hundreds, of victims -- victims who Purdue Pharma says do not exist.

'Without minimizing the enormous harm suffered by many individuals as a result of the use, abuse or misuse of OxyContin, the defendants respectfully submit that none of these individuals qualify as 'victims' of the misbranding crime at issue, as that term is defined by Congress,' the company recently stated in court filings.

In other words, the case against Purdue did not require proof that misbranding, or false statements made about the drug to physicians by company sales representatives, was the cause of rampant OxyContin abuse.

Purdue never promoted its drug directly to consumers. Therefore, the company argues, no one who suffered harm from OxyContin can technically be called a victim of its misbranding.

It is a carefully crafted legal argument, and it galls people such as Ed Vanicky.

'If they come to Park Hill cemetery in Columbus, Ga., and stand at my wife's grave, I'd like to hear them say she wasn't a victim,' Vanicky said last week in a telephone interview from his home.

Vanicky said his wife, Mary Jo, was prescribed OxyContin for a herniated disc from a car accident. After six months on the drug, she often became drowsy. She went to bed early the night of July 26, 2000.

'I kissed her good night, shut the light off, and I woke up the next morning, and she was dead,' Vanicky said.

Vanicky believes his wife's medicine was worse than her ailment, and that the doctor who needlessly prescribed her OxyContin was influenced by a company more interested in profits than patients.

After the Food and Drug Administration approved OxyContin in 1995, Purdue Pharma began a massive marketing campaign. Sales representatives fanned out to hospitals and doctors' offices with a message: An opium-based drug, the kind that used to be reserved for patients dying of cancer, was now safe enough to be prescribed for moderate to severe pain.

The reason, they explained, was a new time-release formula that harnessed a high dose of oxycodone and slowly released it into the patient's bloodstream over 12 hours.

What many doctors didn't know, however, was that abusers could easily bypass the time-release mechanism by crushing the OxyContin tablets and snorting or injecting the powder for a heroin-like high.

So while Purdue racked up sales of more than $1 billion a year from its top-selling product, OxyContin wreaked havoc in communities where it became the street drug of choice.

In Southwest Virginia alone, more than 200 people have died over the past decade from overdoses of oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin. Some counties reported 75 percent crime increases as desperate addicts turned to fraud, theft and robbery.

As OxyContin abuse made headlines in 2001, federal prosecutors in Roanoke began to investigate. Six years later, the government charged Purdue with misleading doctors about the dangers that OxyContin posed -- both to legitimate users and abusers.

'I was walking on cloud nine when I heard the news,' Vanicky said.

Later this week, Vanicky will drive seven hours to Abingdon to see what happens to Friedman, who retired in June as Purdue's president; Udell, the company's chief counsel; and Goldenheim, its former medical director.

'It's just unfortunate that people had to die for their arrogance and greed,' Vanicky said. 'We're going up there with the message that we know you did it, and we want you to know that we know.'

Vanicky will join a rally that local organizers have been planning for a month.

'It's hard to say how many people will be there. It could be 50, it could be 250,' said Dr. Art Van Zee, a Lee County physician and ardent critic of Purdue Pharma. 'If all of the affected people were there, there wouldn't be a parking space between here and Richmond.'

The rally, scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday in a parking lot next to the courthouse, will include speeches, a vigil and the reading of the names of the dead.

Organizers say they expect an orderly event. But an attorney for Purdue Pharma wrote in a letter to Judge James Jones last week that some of the company's witnesses 'are worried about their physical safety given the potentially hostile environment.'

Those witnesses are patients who have benefited from OxyContin. Purdue Pharma says their testimony is needed to counter statements from people who consider themselves victims of the drug.

Many people who plan to attend the rally have asked to speak at the sentencing hearing.

Some will ask Jones to reject a proposed plea agreement that imposes $634.5 million in fines and penalties, one of the stiffest financial punishments to be imposed against a pharmaceutical company.

Friedman, Udell and Goldenheim, who had faced up to a year in prison, will instead pay a combined fine of $34.5 million.

That's not enough for those who say their personal losses cannot be measured in dollars.

'Why should they not go to jail?' asked June Saba, who said she saw addiction lead her son Nick to crime.

'My son went to jail for possessing OxyContin. How come the drugmakers who marketed the drug to the entire country, and admit they did it in a fraudulent way, aren't being held responsible for their actions and facing jail time as well?'

Unlike Mary Jo Vanicky, who had a prescription for OxyContin, Nick Saba obtained his from the black market. So did Andrew Del Regno, who died of an overdose just two weeks after starting his junior year at St. Michael's College in Vermont, a place where many students come from affluent families and stable homes.

June Saba and Vic Del Regno admit their children made mistakes. But young people had no way of knowing how dangerous OxyContin was because of Purdue's deceptive marketing plan, they said.

A Purdue spokesman declined to comment on statements by June Saba, Vic Del Regno and Ed Vanicky. 'They have suffered terrible personal losses,' Jim Heins said. 'We respect their grief, and we respect their right to express their feelings, whether to the court or elsewhere.'

Heins did note that Purdue was dismissed from a lawsuit Vanicky filed against the company and his wife's doctor.

Saba also blames corporate greed for her son's plight. OxyContin prescriptions shot up from 300,000 in 1996 to nearly 6 million in 2001, and critics say Purdue's push for profits flooded the market with OxyContin and made it easier for the drug to find its way to the streets.

'I believe in my heart of hearts that if OxyContin didn't exist, my son would be alive today,' Del Regno said.

'This came at me and my family like a nuclear-tipped missile, and we are forever changed,' he said. 'This imploded my family. It shattered my heart.'

And that, he said, is why it's so important for him to be in an Abingdon courtroom on Friday.

'I want to look them in the eye and say to them: 'What if it was your child?' '

Newstex ID: KRTB-0175-18141917


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