The big push: opioid epidemic is killing OxyContin’s US market, so makers target developing world

OxyContin is a dying business in America.

With the US in the grip of an opioid epidemic that has claimed more than 200,000 lives, the American medical establishment is turning away from painkillers. Top health officials are discouraging primary-care doctors from prescribing them for chronic pain, saying there is no proof that they work long-term and substantial evidence that they put patients at risk.

Prescriptions for OxyContin have fallen nearly 40 per cent since 2010, meaning billions of dollars in lost revenue for its Connecticut manufacturer, Purdue Pharma.

So the company’s owners, the Sackler family, adopted a new strategy: put the painkiller that set off the US opioid crisis into medicine cabinets around the world.

A network of international companies owned by the family is moving rapidly into Latin America, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and other regions, and pushing for broad use of painkillers in places ill-prepared to deal with opioid abuse and addiction.

In the global drive, the companies, known as Mundipharma, are using some of the controversial marketing practices that made OxyContin a pharmaceutical blockbuster in the US.