Pharmanomics by Nick Dearden EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
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- Author: Nick Dearden
- Language: English
- Genre:Pharmacology Pain Medicine
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A History of Scandal
Legendary American artist Nan Goldin made her name documenting the
queer subculture of which she was a part in 1980s New York. Her
photographs offer a shockingly honest portrayal of life outside the
mainstream; she refused to gloss over the sex, violence and drug use that
were a routine part of the life of her and her friends. But the real low of
Goldin’s life, the experience that prompted her to become a nearly full-time
activist, came nearly thirty years later, in the form of a prescription
painkiller called OxyContin
.1
In a 2018 article in Art Forum, Goldin revealed how an OxyContin
prescription she had be given for tendonitis in her left wrist sent her
overnight into a dark spiral of addiction.
.2 She described the black market in
‘Oxy’ when she returned to New York City, the gateway that Oxy provided
into other drugs, the overdose and the pain of withdrawal: ‘I survived the
opioid crisis. I narrowly escaped. I went from the darkness and ran full
speed into The World. I was isolated, but I realized I wasn’t alone. When I
got out of treatment I became absorbed in reports of addicts dropping dead
from my drug, OxyContin.
.3 Goldin went on to describe finding out that
she was not alone. In fact, OxyContin had become an epidemic in the
United States by 2017, one which had already killed hundreds of thousands.
By 2017, of the ninety-one people dying every day from drug overdoses in
the United States, 60 per cent involved opioids like Oxy.
.4 But Goldin learned something else too. As an artist, she knew the name
Sackler very well. The Sackler family were a major source of philanthropic
funds for art galleries and museums across the world. But what she now
realised was that their money came from the very drug that nearly killed
her:
I learned that the Sackler family, whose name I knew from museums and galleries, were
responsible for the epidemic. This family formulated, marketed, and distributed OxyContin
… The Sackler family and their private company, Purdue Pharma, built their empire with the
lives of hundreds of thousands … They have washed their blood money through the halls of
museums and universities around the world.
As part of a new activist group called Prescription Addiction Intervention
Now, or PAIN, she set out to expose them.
The Sackler family has been in pharmaceuticals since the 1950s, when
Arthur Sackler and his two brothers bought a small company called
Purdue.
5. But Arthur Sackler’s real talent was in selling drugs, and he is
credited with inventing modern forms of pharmaceutical marketing in the
United States. In particular, he was expert at marketing to doctors directly,
understanding the role that doctors played not only in the prescription
process, but as symbols of trust in society.
Sackler helped Pfizer – before then mostly a chemical company – to
become a profitable drug company with a particularly successful marketing
campaign on antibiotics.
6. But his real triumph came in marketing a new
drug, Valium, in a way that turned it into a blockbuster for pharma giant
Roche in the 1960s and ’70s.
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