Down East focus of probe OxyContin maker aims to fight abuse

CALAIS – Two private investigators who said they represented a multimillion dollar pharmaceutical company that has come under attack for a prescription drug it manufactures have been sniffing around the city.

The investigators for the Connecticut-based Purdue Pharma LP questioned local health care providers, addicts and law enforcement agents about the OxyContin problem Down East.

Nancy Green, a nurse-midwife, said Friday she spent about two hours talking with two Washington, D.C., private investigators. She said former U.S. Attorney Jay McCloskey, who now represents the pharmaceutical giant, referred the detectives to her.

Robin Hogen, executive director of public affairs for the company, confirmed the pharmaceutical giant had not only hired the two private investigators, but McCloskey’s law firm.

Hogen said McCloskey is now working for the company, “partly because he helped us understand this issue a year ago. When he left public service, he said, ‘One thing I have been passionate about for 15 years is fighting drug abuse in Maine and I would like to continue to do that.’ So we’ve actually paid him to critique some of the curriculum we are developing. We are developing a whole curriculum on prescription drug abuse,” Hogen said.

Once the curriculum is developed, McCloskey will be responsible for getting the information to the appropriate schools and health care providers.

“I have not changed my perspective on the problem in terms of prescription drug abuse nor have I changed my interest in doing something about the prescription drug problem,” McCloskey said when reached late Friday.

Green, who is president of Neighbors Against Drug Abuse, a grass-roots group that is fighting the prescription drug abuse problem here, said the private investigators were retired drug enforcement agents who told her they were in the city to gather information about the impact the drug has had on U. S. communities.

Hogen confirmed the investigators had been hired to help the company understand the problem in Maine. “We are still trying to figure out why it started where it started,” he said. “Was it a bad [doctor], two bad docs? Was it a bad pharmacy? Was it smuggling across the border? Was it lax law enforcement? There are many causes. Was it prescription fraud? Did someone steal a lot of prescription pads? Like anything, it starts somewhere, and then it starts to snowball. We are anxious to understand the epidemiology of this crisis. How did it start, where did it start, and what were the causative factors?”

During the past few months, the pharmaceutical company has been the subject of several lawsuits involving OxyContin, which is used in the treatment of severe pain. Addicts crush the tablets and either snort the powder or inject themselves with it. Users report that the drug is the “ultimate high.”

Hogen denied that the company was gathering the information to bolster their defense. “It’s not so much a defense tactic as it is to understand the root cause,” he said. Hogen said the company takes prescription drug abuse very seriously. But, he admitted, the company also was looking at drug patterns. “When we go into Calais or any part of Washington County certainly one of the things we will be looking for are past patterns,” he said.

The two investigators told Green that before their arrival in Calais, they had visited other communities across the country. “They want to find out how these communities are being affected. They are calling it ‘pockets.’ There are pockets of communities that have been affected [by the drug], and I think [the company] is trying to come up with a commonality between these communities about what the cause is,” she said.

Green said she did not leave the interview believing that the investigators were attempting to build a case against the community.

“They were very sympathetic to the problem,” she said. Green said they told her that they had been in a community in Virginia that they identified as one of the pockets where the problem exists. She said they described the community as a depressed area, which seemed to be doing nothing about the problem. They told her that contrasted sharply with Calais, where gropus of people are working to combat the problem.

The investigators seemed to suggest, Green said, that the common link between the various communities across the country was poverty.

Green said she also sat in on interviews the men had with local recovering addicts. She said they asked them if they had prior addiction problems. The investigators also asked the addicts how easy it was to get the drugs.

She said the three recovering addicts told the investigators that although they had used other substances before, OxyContin was the most potent. “Everybody they interviewed said the same thing. They were abusers of other substances, but as soon as they were introduced to OxyContin, nothing else compared. It was the most mind-blowing experience,” she said.

Before the investigators left, Green said, she gave them a message for Purdue Pharma. She said she did not recommend that the product be taken off the market, because if used properly it is effective in managing pain. She said she would like to see the pill modified to render it inert if crushed. Purdue researchers have been working on such a modification, but are two to three years away from market, according to published reports.

Green said she also asked the company to provide funding to educate local health care providers as well as help develop the drug treatment center Neighbors Against Drug Abuse is attempting to establish Down East.