Best of all for people like Bisch, Van Rooyan, and Nuss: An Abingdon sentencing hearing was planned for mid-July that would bring the Connecticut executives face-to-face with grieving parents, who were invited to discuss—on record, in court—the damage OxyContin had wrought. The executives would not serve any jail time, per the plea agreement, though it was ultimately up to the judge, at their court appearance, to sign off on the deal and outline the exact terms of their probation and community service.
Brownlee enjoyed presenting his evidence at the press conference, unfolding his podium against a staggering backdrop of documents amassed by Gregg Wood, the stoic prosecutors Randy Ramseyer and Rick Mountcastle, and scores of others recruited to the team—all of whom stood to his right. To his left sat an assortment of evidence culled from the two thousand cardboard containers they’d filled with documents, depositions, and data. The boxes were lined up in columns four to five feet high.
For added visual effect, Brownlee displayed falsified charts created by Purdue that had claimed “smooth and sustained blood levels” and “fewer peaks and valleys” for patients on OxyContin. The ginned-up graphs were meant to buttress the drugmaker’s claim that OxyContin had less potential for abuse. An adjacent easel featured actual clinical data that the prosecutors had culled from Purdue’s own studies. The real data looked like a map of steep mountains, the faked data like a single gentle slope.
The fluctuations measured, in hours and milligrams, the difference between truth and lies. These charts represented two of forty-six assertions in a “statement of facts” drawn up by Brownlee’s team and agreed to by Purdue, underscoring that the company had knowingly falsified several claims about the drug. Among them were numerous instances of Purdue quashing data critical of the drug, such as early reports of patients complaining of withdrawal symptoms (“I would not write it up at this point,” one supervisor advised an employee, saying it might “add to the negative press”). Another fact highlighted the claim sales reps made to some doctors that oxycodone was harder to extract from OxyContin for IV use than other pain medications—when Purdue’s own study showed that a drug abuser could recover 68 percent of the drug from a single pill. Likewise, the company conceded that some reps falsely claimed OxyContin caused less euphoria and was less likely to be diverted than Percocet and other immediate-release opioids and could therefore be used to “weed out” addicts and drug seekers.
It had all come from the Shadow Company’s “Warehouse,” as the prosecutors called it. The hillbilly lawyers had filled so many boxes with evidence that Brownlee had to rent extra space in an Abingdon strip mall to hold them all.
The Pennington Pharmacy, Pennington Gap, Virginia
Chapter Four
“The Corporation Feels No Pain”
Abingdon is the legal and artistic hub of far southwest Virginia, a quaint town full of restored colonial-era brick buildings. By the time Purdue executives turned up there to be sentenced in 2007, it was better known for upscale boutiques, arts, and crafts than for its twentieth-century role as a way station for coal trains hauling the prosperity out of places like St. Charles, some eighty miles west. That summer, the novelist Barbara Kingsolver was about to launch a trendy farm-to-table restaurant, the Harvest Table, in nearby Meadowview, an outgrowth of her memoir, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, then on the bestseller list.
Abingdon had nurtured the early acting talents of Ernest Borgnine and Gregory Peck in its storied Barter Theatre, named for Depression-era theatergoers’ practice of trading a live chicken for the privilege of watching a play. Just a few months before the Purdue sentencing, in the spring of 2007, the Barter stage featured a homegrown comedy about the widow of a moonshiner who, fallen on destitute times, goes into the business of selling OxyContin, supplying her enterprise with stolen pills and those from her own prescribed stash.
When Sister Beth Davies saw the play, she alternately cried at the ruined lives, marveled at the Appalachian resourcefulness, and laughed at the snappy dialogue. “If you don’t laugh sometimes, you’ll go crazy,” she said.
For a town with a population of just eight thousand, Abingdon had also nurtured a surplus of lawyers over the years, who were able to walk from their historic homes to both the federal and the state courthouse, passing statues of Confederate soldiers and historical Daniel Boone markers along the way.
The lawyers and coal-mine operators who lived here were more accustomed to fine dining and theater than rallies or protests. But in a steady rain that fell over the small mountain town, families who’d lost relatives to OxyContin converged on July 20, 2007, to speak their piece and to watch Udell, Friedman, and Goldenheim squirm in their federal courthouse seats.
*
Barbara Van Rooyan had flown in from her home in California. She wore the same blue floral sundress and white sandals that she’d worn to her son’s celebration of life and carried a sign she’d made that read one pill kills.
Sister Beth Davies had driven in from Pennington Gap and marched, in her raincoat, with a sign of her own. It featured a picture of Ed Bisch’s ruddy-cheeked son, Eddie, in his prom tux.
Van Zee had an out-of-state family commitment (his octogenarian father’s birthday) and couldn’t make it to Abingdon. But he left behind detailed notes for Sister Beth about everything from the sound system for the rally to bottled water for participants, plus talking points for follow-up letters to the editor.
He and Sue Ella were now attending funerals weekly, many of them his former patients’, sometimes at a rate of two a day. He had even written a poem about one, titled “OxyContin,” published in Annals of Internal Medicine:
It might have been easier
If OxyContin swallowed the mountains,
and took
The promises of tens of thousands
of young lives
Slowly, like ever-encroaching kudzu.
Instead,
It engulfed us,
Gently as napalm
Would a school-yard.
Mama said
As hard as it was to bury Papa
after the top fell
in the mine up Caney Creek,
it was harder yet
to find Sis that morning
cold and blue,
with a needle stuck up her arm.
Top of her class,
with nothing but promise ahead
until hi-jacked by
the torment of needle and spoon.
*
Ed Bisch and Lee Nuss had driven up together from her home in Florida, recycling the same signs they’d carried to the Orlando protest, only a little rumpled from the Caribe Royale sprinkler assault.
It fell to Bisch to lead the parade of fifty grieving relatives from a small park to the courthouse. His sign read oxy kill$ in big block letters.
Nuss, a tiny redhead, was dwarfed by a larger-than-life photograph of her son, Randy, handsome and olive-skinned. It matched the giant magnet she’d plastered on her car—at the suggestion of her grief counselor—meant to warn other families wherever she drove: in love and memory of randall nuss and others.
More than a decade later, as journalists and policy makers tried to pinpoint where and how the opioid crisis began, images from the rainy rally in Abingdon would get recycled in news accounts, the prescient parents marching with their signs, and next to them Sister Beth standing defiant, a look on her face that projected equal parts anger for what had happened and worry for what was coming next.