Devil Incarnate –
Sept. 7, 2018 – Richard Sackler is part of the family that owns Purdue Pharma, the company that is widely blamed for helping cause the opioid epidemic through its marketing of the opioid painkiller OxyContin. But now Sackler, who was previously the president of Purdue, is poised to profit from one of the solutions to the crisis. According to the Financial Times and STAT, Sackler is listed as one of six inventors on the patent for a new formulation of buprenorphine, a highly effective medication for treating opioid addiction. Buprenorphine is already available as a pill and film, but the new version would be a wafer that may dissolve even faster. The hope is that this will make it harder for people in, say, prison to smuggle buprenorphine when they take it in a clinical setting, since it will quickly dissolve in their mouths. (Since it’s an opioid, buprenorphine can be diverted for misuse.)
