Everyone Was In On It –
Dec. 6, 2019 – As the marketing campaigns unfolded, representatives from industry-funded groups that advocate for pain patients fanned out across the country to speak on TV shows, at conferences and dinners and to doctors at continuing medical education seminars, the court documents show. The groups included the American Pain Foundation and the American Pain Society, which have since gone out of business. Drug manufacturers have rejected the plaintiffs’ arguments. They said that their sales and marketing teams did not misrepresent the safety of opioids. A spokesman for Johnson & Johnson, and its opioid-manufacturing subsidiary Janssen, said in a statement to The Post that its products had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration and that its sales representatives were properly trained.
“Janssen did what a responsible pharmaceutical company should do with medicines that play an important role in the lives of patients with severe pain,” the company said. “Janssen provided extensive compliance training for its salesforce so they could educate doctors based on the FDA-approved labels for its medications.” In August, a judge in a lawsuit in Oklahoma ruled that Johnson & Johnsonand Janssen had engaged in “false, misleading, and dangerous marketing campaigns” and caused “exponentially increasing rates of addiction, overdose deaths” and opioid-addicted babies.
