![]() When they launched Ox圜ontin in 1996, Mortimer, Raymond and Raymond's son Richard Sackler unleashed an unprecedented marketing blitz. The company has a history of combining aggressive marketing and sales with addictive drugs, a combination that has had predictably tragic results. "Talking to parents or grandparents that were dealing with it in their families, and it really became a virtual tsunami of opioid addiction, and there were so many people affected, so many families that were being uprooted and torn apart by this," Dr Van Zee told Foreign Correspondent.įounded in 1892, Purdue Pharmaceutical was bought by three Brooklyn general practitioner doctor brothers, Arthur, Mortimer and Raymond Sackler, in the 1950s. In those early days of the internet, it was only when a friend brought back a copy of the Boston Globe newspaper in 2000 that Dr Van Zee realised that the growing numbers of Ox圜ontin addicts he was seeing was happening in communities right across America. Coal miners funded and built the local medical centre that Dr Van Zee has worked out of since the 1970s. It could be the biggest class action America has ever seen. The class action alleges Purdue and the Sackler family knew how addictive Ox圜ontin would be. ![]() Purdue is owned by one of the richest families in America, the Sacklers, who have a combined net worth of $US13 billion ($18.3 billion). Now, the town's humble community medical centre has become an unlikely rallying point for an enormous class action against Purdue Pharmaceutical, Ox圜ontin's manufacturer. St Charles is a community built on coal, and would be the unfortunate canary in the mine warning of hundreds of thousands of deaths in the opioid crisis that would follow.
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