*
The Purdue executives had flown in on a private jet from Connecticut the night before for the sentencing hearing, staying at the elegant, historic Martha Washington Inn, conveniently located next to the courthouse. To avoid the protesters, their attorneys had asked the judge for permission to enter the two-story courthouse by a back door.
But Judge James Jones, a straight shooter with a booming voice, had watched his docket be overtaken by OxyContin-related crime.
No, Judge Jones ordered, the executives would enter through the front door of the courthouse just like everyone else.
Barry Meier stood off to the side, taking it all in. He’d been to Abingdon once before, in May, when Udell, Goldenheim, and Friedman made their first visit, to deliver their guilty pleas. Meier wanted to witness that occasion so badly that he’d arrived the night before, staying in a motel on the outskirts of Abingdon. And he wanted his appearance to be a surprise. He and a freelance photographer the New York Times hired from Roanoke would hide out near the front of the hotel, ducked between parked cars, staking out the executives.
Meier had interviewed the men many times before in their corporate offices and on the phone, but he wanted to witness their Appalachian reckoning firsthand.
It was his fifty-eighth birthday, and the veteran journalist could not have been happier with his gift.
“Everything I’d written was now justified,” he told me.
As he and the photographer stood up, Udell, Goldenheim, and Friedman seemed stunned to see them, Meier recalled. Goldenheim, the scientist, stared steely-eyed toward the camera while Udell and Friedman glanced quickly away.
*
In a rally before the sentencing hearing, the parents took turns reading the names of the dead. Bisch had printed them out from his message board memorials, now so numerous that the document was more than fifty pages long. Their voices broke periodically as they choked out the names.
Bobby Lee Ashcraft Jr., aged nineteen
Paul Aboata, twenty-two
Heather Marie Goslinowski, fifteen
Nicole Notaro, nineteen
They got through only ten pages before the hearing began.
In a photograph that ran in the next day’s New York Times, two moms in matching rain scarves held each other, one clutching a poster of her seventeen-year-old daughter: in loving memory of sarah nicole. her life was a life worth living. Behind them stood Van Rooyan in her sundress—blue, for her son’s favorite color—holding her prepared remarks.
Before the day was over, the executives would hear themselves described as corporate drug lords and marketing tricksters, on a par with Colombian cartels and P. T. Barnum. They would be asked to imagine themselves in the shoes of a parent of a college junior: “What if it was your son or daughter you saw in the morgue when we went there, and he was autopsied, sliced and diced?”
The executives would have their integrity questioned and their futures threatened. “I will reach out to any organization that Mr. Friedman speaks to about having a member of his family survive the Holocaust, and contact that group and say to them that Friedman is no better than Adolf Hitler, who killed and destroyed countless lives; Hitler through death and torture, Friedman through death and addiction,” said Marianne Skolek, who lost her twenty-nine-year-old daughter, Jill. Skolek brought along her grandson, Brian, who was six years old when his mother died of an overdose of prescribed OxyContin in 2002.
“Brian is here in the courtroom with me today because he needed to see that bad things do happen to bad people,” Skolek said.
But not bad enough, the parents told the judge. The plea agreement called for no jail time, and many beseeched Judge Jones to reconsider incarceration for the three.
“I think jail is too good for you guys,” said Lynn Locascio from Palm Harbor, Florida. Her son was still struggling with addiction, having been prescribed OxyContin after surgery resulting from a car accident. “I think you should go spend some time in a rehab facility like my son did and watch that. Maybe you’ll change your minds.”
*
Lawyers for the executives argued that the shame of criminal charges was punishment enough. They reiterated, over and over, that the men—the top corporate executives who had directed the company’s legal, financial, and pharmaceutical divisions—had personally done nothing wrong. Representing Udell, attorney Mary Jo White called the company’s head lawyer “the moral compass of the company,” pointing out that Purdue, at Udell’s urging, had voluntarily taken the 160-milligram pill off the market after safety concerns became known. Udell had championed prescription monitoring programs when most others in the industry were opposed, and he was behind the suspension of shipments of OxyContin to Mexico when it became clear Americans were traveling there to bring back the drug.
Calling the case “a personal tragedy for Mr. Udell,” White said most people would wrongly equate the strict liability misdemeanor he pleaded guilty to with criminal wrongdoing. Jail time, she added, “would unjustifiably and needlessly compound the stigma and punishment for an offense and facts that are without personal wrongdoing.”
Likewise, Goldenheim, the firm’s former chief scientist and medical director, was in “agony” about the charge, his lawyer said. He’d been labeled “a criminal, and that is horrendously harsh punishment for someone who has done so much good, and under the agreed statement of facts has done nothing wrong.”
Friedman’s lawyer pointed out that the company distributed antidiversion brochures and antifraud prescription pads; created a law enforcement liaison unit within Purdue; funded local law enforcement programs; and, eventually, altered sales-representative compensation so the system would not lend itself to abuse. While other Purdue employees “made statements about OxyContin that were inconsistent with company policy and that should not have been made…Michael Friedman did not participate in that misconduct.” Without proof that he committed a criminal act, to jail him would be virtually unprecedented under American law, his lawyer said.
In other words, the lawyers did exactly what Ramseyer predicted they would do in his remarks: They refused to take responsibility for the death and destruction caused by the drug—to the point of reiterating, again in court, that “the enormous benefits of OxyContin far outweigh its risks, even taking into account the grief from those we’ve heard about today.”
Calling it “unprecedented” to hold pharmaceutical corporate officers criminally liable in such a case, Ramseyer noted that Udell, Friedman, and Goldenheim, in accepting the plea, were conceding that they had not been “powerless to prevent the crime. As corporate officers, these men had a duty to ensure that misbranding did not occur.” He predicted that Purdue’s next public-relations campaign would begin the moment he sat down from making his remarks: “They will attempt to minimize the crimes to which they pled guilty.”
And while that is exactly what their lawyers did, Ramseyer later said the men seemed distressed throughout the proceedings. “They were very unhappy,” he told me. “We do cases in court where people get sentenced to twenty or thirty years in prison, and they didn’t seem as unhappy as those three guys.”
Ramseyer remained loath to say much more about the case, although the fact that he’d been diagnosed with cancer while working on it—and had to take a break midway through the case for treatment—seemed to sear it in his mind as both a personal challenge and a professional high mark. He hoped the case had a chilling effect on pharmaceutical companies and overprescribing doctors alike, but he wasn’t sure. He’d read recently that enough opioid painkillers had been prescribed in 2010 to medicate every American adult around the clock for a month. “And it’s worse now,” he told me in 2016.