During the first decade of the drug’s existence, the legal system could not prove the makers of OxyContin had broken the law.
*
Back in western Virginia, a young U.S. attorney with political aspirations was secretly working on his own attempt to defeat Purdue in court as early as 2003. John L. Brownlee was brash, a little bit of a cowboy, and as a former paratrooper and Army Reserve JAG Corps captain, the thirty-six-year-old was not afraid of high-stakes drama.
Or the press. He was married to a local news anchor, Lee Ann Necessary, whom he’d met on the job a decade earlier. With a ruddy complexion and a mop of reddish-brown hair, he had a boyish appearance that belied his hard-charging demeanor. If Law & Order sold action figures, they would look like John Brownlee, down to the crisp creases in his trousers and his American-flag lapel pin.
Brownlee became so fond of calling press conferences that he traveled with a portable podium with fold-out legs. His prosecuting philosophy: If you’re not losing sometimes, you’re not going after the hard cases. By the time Karen White’s case was dismissed, in 2003, Brownlee was still smarting over his own trial loss, via an acquittal, hung jury, and dismissal, in a multiple wrongful-death suit against Roanoke pain specialist Dr. Cecil Knox, whose office had been raided by federal agents, storm trooper–style. Knox and several of his office workers had been handcuffed and carted away—one of the women was carrying her groceries out of a store—even though defense attorneys had already arranged with federal authorities for their clients to turn themselves in. The showboating earned Brownlee a reputation as aggressive and, at times, overreaching.
On the heels of the Knox case and another high-profile case that generated equally fierce public criticism and ended similarly—with two hung juries—Brownlee needed a big legal win.
With plans to seek elected office—Brownlee would run for Virginia attorney general in 2008—he may have viewed prosecuting Purdue Pharma as “a vehicle for being in the national news,” recalled Laurence Hammack, a longtime Roanoke Times reporter (and my former colleague) who chronicled OxyContin’s spread.
“Yes, he had self-serving motivations. But on the other hand, [OxyContin abuse] was happening everywhere in the country, and no one else took them on.”
*
Brownlee did, almost immediately after being appointed U.S. attorney, though he didn’t go public with the investigation until 2005. He had read Meier’s Pain Killer and knew about Purdue’s attempt to bully the journalist after its publication.
Purdue lawyer Howard Udell complained to Meier’s New York Times editors, claiming that Meier had a conflict of interest in the story. His book, Purdue argued, gave him a financial stake in the newspaper’s continued coverage of OxyContin. Udell wanted Meier taken off the beat.
“Their agenda was to shut me down, and to suppress as much news coverage of the company as possible,” Meier recalled. “And he [the paper’s public editor, Daniel Okrent] bit on it, not realizing that what they weren’t telling him was that they were already under criminal investigation,” which Meier suspected. (With two minor exceptions, Meier would not write about Purdue Pharma for the newspaper again for four years.)
Meier may have been temporarily silenced from writing about the company, but nothing prevented John Brownlee from poring over the footnotes of his book. Brownlee also relied on an eager fraud investigator in his office, Gregg Wood, to communicate with Van Zee and the RAPP parents. Since the epidemic’s earliest days—long before Google Alerts—Wood had been sending out regular compilations of OxyContin-related news articles and overdose statistics via email to law enforcement agents, prosecutors, and other interested parties. Recipients who spotted any OxyContin news in their localities should “let me know,” Wood urged at the top of every update, which Van Zee nicknamed the Wood Reports.
“Never assume I already know!” Wood enthused.
*
“Gregg Wood was very high energy,” Van Zee recalled. “He would get up in the middle of the night checking for stories.”
As health fraud investigator for the U.S. attorney’s office in Roanoke, Wood was tasked with picking through the weeds of the civil cases against Purdue, most filed by small-town lawyers who were trying in vain to challenge the company for overpromoting the drug while ignoring its risks for addiction. Their clients ranged from miners and masonry workers who became addicted following work-related injuries to a factory worker so desperate to stop taking OxyContin that he’d flushed his pills down the toilet, telling his lawyer that trying to explain dopesickness to a nonaddict was “like describing an elephant to a blind man.” The lawyers, the parents, Van Zee, and Sister Beth—all were happy to pass along every piece of dirt they’d collected on Purdue, from sales-rep call notes and depositions to Van Zee’s Christmas gift from Sue Ella—the NDA.
“The Purdue lawyers were totally underestimating the work done by Wood,” recalled Abingdon lawyer Emmitt Yeary, who lost his own civil case against the company. Arnold Fayne McCauley, seventy-one when his suit was filed in 2004, had spent decades stooped over and crawling through thirty-six-inch-high Lee County coal seams. In coal-mining parlance, he worked “low coal,” the most strenuous of the coal-extracting jobs. “Now that’s working hard, working in low coal,” Van Zee said, pointing to a picture in one of his exam rooms of a miner crawling on his knees, in the dark, under a sagging mass of mountain. “Compared to that, all I do is move around a mouse.”
When he wasn’t working low coal, Fayne McCauley spent nights and weekends hauling and spreading lime from his truck for area farmers. Asked to describe the defining characteristic of her father, Lisa Nina McCauley Green said simply: “All I remember about him growing up is, he worked.” As the Virginia writer John C. Tucker described it in May God Have Mercy: “For a miner who avoids being crippled, burned or buried alive, the usual question is which will give out first—his lungs, his back, or his knees.”
In McCauley’s case, it happened to be his shoulder, from a late-1990s injury caused by the snapping of an underground cable that slammed into his shoulder and back. Building his product-liability case against Purdue, Yeary collected some twenty boxes of documents arguing that Purdue overpromoted the prescription painkiller while ignoring its risks—rendering people like McCauley addicts while reaping billions in sales.
Yeary had gotten the idea for the lawsuit in 2000 after hearing Van Zee give a community college lecture on OxyContin. Yeary hadn’t been particularly interested in the topic but went along to satisfy a schoolteacher he was dating at the time. As Van Zee went through his slides—ranging from overdose deaths to spikes in Oxy-related crime committed by addicted users, all of it meticulously sourced and footnoted—Yeary leaned over to a lawyer friend sitting on his other side and said, “Damn, they’re putting the wrong people in jail!”
He remembered thinking Van Zee was not the “kind of guy you raised hell with in college.” It occurred then to him that the country doctor was the perfect conduit for helping him identify plaintiffs to sue Purdue. In fact it was Van Zee who eventually connected Yeary to McCauley, a patient Van Zee was by then treating for OxyContin addiction.
But like most of the civil plaintiffs suing Purdue, Fayne McCauley was an imperfect client, because he admitted under oath that he had taken multiple drugs, gradually supplementing his original OxyContin prescriptions with OxyContin he’d bought on the streets. When his original doctor, Richard C. Norton, tried to wean him from the drug, cutting him back from 40 to 20 milligrams, it had made McCauley extremely nervous, crippling him with diarrhea, sweats, and a skin-crawling feeling he called gooseflesh. McCauley bought the black-market OxyContin, he told an opposing lawyer from Purdue in a series of depositions, for the same reason a century’s worth of heroin addicts had kept returning to their dealers for more dope: to stave off dopesickness.